My Fedora Core 1 machine at work had been up for 501 days. The kernel uptime counter rolled at 497 days, but trogdor happily ran for four more glorious days. The machine started acting very strangely this morning, so I rebooted it for the first time in nearly a year-and-a-half. The first person to mention that FreeBSD doesn’t have this problem gets a 24-Karat gold boot to the head.

Another thing you can do to use ffmpeg and maintain compatibility with Microsoft Media Player with transcode is to add these codec flags to the command-line: “-y ffmpeg -F msmpeg4v2″. See, getting in a flame war on their mailing list caused me to learn all kinds of stuff I wouldn’t have known otherwise. ;-)

OK, one thing I was wrong about was that the FMP4 DivX files appear to work with Microsoft Windows Media Player and with the DivX Player by default on XP. You can change the video codec in the transcode line to “-y ffmpeg,null -F mpeg4″ instread of “-y divx5,null” if you want to, but the file says are nearly identical, and I can’t tell a difference in the quality between the two. Doing this will make you Stallman-compliant though.

I was right about the fact that transcode doesn’t support the Canon SD500’s audio format though. Some geezer on the transcode list says 11024Hz is “invalid” for the MJPEG format. So, all the razzle-dazzle lav2wav/avimerge flim-flam _is_ necessary. *GROAN*

I spent a good many hours this weekend DETERMINED to find a way to convert the impossibly huge MJPEG videos from my Canon SD500 digital camera into an intraweb-friendly codec like DivX from a Linux command-line. I found that transcode, mencoder, and mjpegtools seemed to be what all the kids are using these days to accomplish this type of thing. Quickly, I found out that mencoder mostly only supports the ffmpeg encoder for mpeg4 conversion. I actually got this to work fairly quickly, however, neither Microsoft Windows Media Player nor the DivX player would handle the FMP4 mpeg4 avi file that was produced.

So, feeling slightly jilted, I started looking into using transcode. I discovered the command-line to do this actually was fairly simple, and the file auto-detection is AWESOME and even worked on the Canon SD500-produced MJPEG avi files. Transcode handled the video just fine, however, it wouldn’t put an audio with the video no matter how explicit I got with the command-line. Here’s the working transcode command that I used.

$ transcode -i MVI_0755.avi -y divx5,null -M0 -N0x55 -o /tmp/MVI_0755.noaudio.avi

After that, I started looking for a standalone tool to extract the audio from these bizarre Canon MJPEG files with 8-bit mono audio sampled at 11024 Hz. I found in the mjpegtools something called lav2wav. Trying it with no command-line arguments yielded the following.

$ lav2wav MVI_0755.avi > /tmp/blah.wav
**ERROR: [lav2wav] Input file(s) must have 16 bit audio!

Fortunately, there was a “-I” tag to ignore unsupported bit rates.

$ lav2wav -I MVI_0755.avi  > /tmp/MVI_0755.wav
   INFO: [lav2wav] WAV done
$

So, I then used lame to encode the audio like so.

$ lame /tmp/MVI_0755.wav /tmp/MVI_0755.mp3

Finally, I used avimerge, which shipped with transcode, to merge the audio and video with the following command:

$ avimerge -i /tmp/MVI_0755.noaudio.avi -p /tmp/MVI_0755.mp3 -o MVI_0755.divx.avi

Since, there’s absolutely no chance of me remembering all of this foo, I wrote this script that does it all. The script takes in a Canon .avi (or .AVI) file as input, and converts it to DivX with audio.

Some geezah managed to put up a Homestar Runner RSS Feed here . It’s pretty neat how it works by using perl to screen scrape the site periodically.

Hanji created some cool patches for Bitlbee that add AIM typing notification, HTML Escape, /notice Autoreply, and working AIM info commands to 0.92. I applied his all patch, and re-packaged my Bitlbee 0.92 Redhat 9 RPM with the patches included. You can download it here: http://involution.com/rpms/bitlbee-0.92-hoyhoy1-all-hanji-patches.i386.rpm