HCoder.org

In my recent trip to Copenhagen, I recorded a small video of the subway (it’s really cool, because it’s completely automatic, it doesn’t have drivers or anything). I wanted to edit the video to remove people that were reflected on the window, so I wondered if I could do that on Linux. I imagined it wouldn’t be trivial, but it was more frustrating than I thought. Maybe I’m too old for this.

The first thing I tried was looking in APT’s cache for “video editing”. The most promising was kino. I had tried that some time ago a couple of times, and I never made it to work, but I figured I would try again. Unfortunately, same result: I just can’t figure out how to import my videos. Maybe I’m just hitting the wrong button or whatever, but it’s really frustrating.

Second thing was having a look in the internet. I found the (dead and being rewritten?) Cinelerra, as always, and I didn’t feel like installing the old one from source, only to lose my time and not get it to work, so I just ignored it. Maybe they had it in debian-multimedia and wouldn’t have been a tough install after all. Anyway.

Next thing, I found some program called openmovieeditor. This one apparently worked, but I couldn’t figure out how to crop the image (or almost any other thing for that matter).

Next, some neat program written in Python, called pitivi. When I tried to run it though, it just said Error: Icon 'misc' not present in theme on the console and died. I later figured out that I had to install gnome-icon-theme for it to work (yeah, Debian maintainer’s fault). It’s funny, because on the webpage it says that it has some “advanced view” that you can access via the “View” menu… but I couldn’t find it. My menu only had one entry: “Fullscreen”. Great.

Oh, wait, there’s a gimp-gap. I could just import my animation in Gimp, crop the frames, and convert again to video. Easier said than done. I needed some programs that I didn’t have, and I wasn’t sure if they were so easy/quick/clean to install (sure, I could have exported to GIF animation and probably convert to video, I just didn’t want to lose so much color quality in the GIF step). Forget for now. At least I had the images, so if I could just turn them into a movie…

So, I started wondering if, given that I had decided to just crop, and especially now that I had a lot of images that were the frames, maybe I could just use some command line tool or something. So I found this tiny little program, images2mpg. Long story short, after installing some dependencies from source (that gave compilation errors, but luckily I could compile only the binaries I really needed) that program was completely retarded and didn’t even do what I wanted (it wanted at least one second between images, but I didn’t want a slideshow, just a normal movie from the frames). It looks some simple and it’s so buggy. Gah.

So I started wondering if I could just crop with mplayer... Hmmm… after a couple of problems (like documented switches that were not there and other crap), I ended up with this command line:

mencoder -vf crop=320:200:0:40 MVI_2160.AVI \
         -ovc lavc -nosound -o metro-crop.avi

That was reasonably quick and easy but it was so frustrating after all that lost time.

In any case, I ended up with the video I wanted, so I went to YouTube to upload it. When uploading, I realised that there was some option I had never seen: annotations.

YouTube annotations are really cool. They are like the notes on Flickr, but on a video :-D Actually I kind of wanted to make a note like that on this video, to show the automatic doors on the Metro station, so I was really happy to see that I could actually do it. And the interface is really easy to use and very clear. I really like it! You can see the result here:

EDIT: WTF? The annotations don’t appear on the embedded videos? You’ll have to go to the video page to see them, then…

I just read in Aaron Seigo’s blog a very nice message from a user that proves that free software is making a difference in many areas, even in some that we don’t usually think about. Some quote:

I cant tell you how much I appreciate the work you all have done. Its a work of art. If I could thank each and every one of you I would.

You have given her the world to learn and explore.

So if you get frustrated or tired in your work for Open Source/Free Software, just remember that somewhere in Missouri there is a 14 year-old girl named Hope, an A-student who runs on the track team, who is now your biggest fan and one of the newest users of Linux/Ubuntu.

Although I haven’t really participated in KDE or Ubuntu (not directly anyway), I too feel proud of what we, as a community, have created. Also, like that person, I feel very thankful for everything I have learned and got from the free software community.

Cheers guys, you all rock!

Some good news in the dhelp front: after talking to some people and a couple of messages in debian-i18n, dhelp has (hopefully) full support for UTF-8, and two more translations, the first two apart from the Spanish one: Russian and German. It’s really cool seeing some program you have written producing output in cyrillic ;-)

I haven’t uploaded yet, because I found two new strings that weren’t in dhelp.pot, but I’ll upload soon, when I receive the updates for the translation. The UTF-8 update is related to some improvements in doc-base, so things are looking good in the documentation tools side of Debian, yay! :-)

Today I have been one year working in Oslo! Yay! So far the experience has been quite good, so I’m staying here for some more time still.

I’ve also slowly becoming kind of active again in Debian (especially helping dhelp), although I admit not being very active in any other software project (Haberdasher feels kind of abandoned, because I don’t have any urge for new features). Hopefully that will change…

As I said earlier, now the fun stuff begins :-) I have been working with dhelp these days, and there are a couple of things I have changed already:

• I have dropped support for the dhelp-specific .dhelp files. Now I just use the doc-base information directly (until now, doc-base had to convert its own format to dhelp, which was a bad things for several reasons, one of them losing important information in the process).
• I have changed the indexing code so it now indexes the actual documentation content, instead of the documentation directory generated by dhelp.
• I have rewritten most of the HTML used in the searches and in the documentation directory so it’s nicer and easier to modify (e.g. no more <font> or similar obsolete tags).

While working on the indexing changes, I have been playing with swish+++, an indexing engine. Seems really useful, although some options are not that obvious, and I haven’t been able to use extract++ to extract the text according to the file format (e.g. skipping HTML tags in HTML). I’ll keep trying…

Hopefully, the package will be ready for release in a week or so…

I finally uploaded dhelp to unstable, and everything went almost surprinsingly good. The only bugs reported so far are #448211 and #447789. The first one was a silly mistake made by me, in some translation files that aren’t even being used now (that will change in the near future). The second was a bug exposed by dhelp, but actually in another package (libcommandline-ruby, which is funnily enough also maintained by me, and it’s already patched and pending upload).

So, now that the package is uploaded and we’re using a sane implementation for dhelp_parse, I can start doing fun stuff. Right now I’m mostly fixing more bugs, but I’m also implementing new features and talking to the doc-base maintainer, to improve the integration between both.

Dhelp’s new release is coming along nicely. In the last days I have fixed a couple of bugs in dhelp_parse’s rewrite, and I think it’s now ready for upload. The new package closes 28 bugs, which is more than half the current open bugs for the package.

I have warned the current maintainer and the debian-doc mailing list, so I hope to upload the new version in a couple of days…

In the last days I have gone back to working on dhelp, a Debian package for documentation indexing and search. Months ago I had started rewriting dhelp_parse, the only program in the suite written in C, in Ruby.

The rewrite was almost done, but the program wasn’t tested much (some modules had unit tests, but the program itself didn’t), so I found a couple of big bugs easily :-D Now it looks better, so hopefully I’ll be done soon, and I’ll upload the new package to Debian so people can start testing it.