Back in the 1990s my family recorded some home videos using a VHS camera. It’s pretty hard to play these on modern equipment, so back in 2013 I digitised them all.
Of course when using an analogue source like tape it’s not really possible to do a lossless copy. However I wanted to do the highest quality capture with the equipment available to me, and I wanted to be able to redo post-processing in the future in case I have the time, motivation and technology to improve things further.
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About a year ago when I first bought my Bluray drive for Linux I had a simple requirement. I wanted to be able to put a disc in, then with some graphical tool select a track and have it start playing. It turns out nothing on Linux can do this.
So I wrote a simple Python/Qt app which uses MakeMKV to decrypt and VLC to play it.
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A small Python script to connect to the internet over Bluetooth DUN (dialup networking) using my Nokia Symbian phone and my Linux laptop.
This was written on Arch Linux but should work elsewhere too. It uses bluez5 to enable bluetooth, rfcomm to create the serial port and wvdial to create the PPP connection and manage routes/DNS. Many newer phones use Bluetooth PAN instead of DUN so this method won’t be applicable.
Once upon a time this all worked automagically with NetworkManager. Since bluez5 it fails with this error:
Method "Connect" with signature "s" on interface "org.bluez.Serial" doesn't exist
Apparently we’re supposed to use the new Serial.ConnectFD DBUS API instead.
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WebDL is a collection of Web TV downloader scripts with a consistent user interface. I’ve previously released these separately, but a while ago I refactored them to share common code and packaged them into a single utility. You can use this interactively or to download any shows matching a glob from a cronjob. Currently supported are ABC iView and SBS OnDemand. I’ll probably add more in the future.
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Update: See WebDL
Just wrote a simple downloader script for SBS’s website. The SBS Player interface is all in flash and is very hard to use on my TV, so this script lets me download the stuff I’m interested in and play it however/whenever I want.
It has a simple command line interface and requires that you already have rtmpdump on your path. Get the sbs-downloader script here.
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I just wrote a simple YouTube downloader. You can grab the code for it from here:
youtube.cgi
It’s a simple CGI script with a form to submit a YouTube URL. It then streams the video download to the user. If you run this on a machine in the USA then it provides an easy way to bypass YouTube’s region checking.
Ask me if you want the URL for an installed copy.
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I just discovered that Mercurial supports named shortcuts for repositories. This is great for when you want to be pushing and pulling from several repository URLs without typing their full locations.
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I’ve implemented IDLE support into OfflineIMAP. For the last day or two I’ve been using this and I’m loving the instant email notifications. I emailed the original author and plan to work with him to get the code included into an official OfflineIMAP release.
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