Video
Sun Nov 30, 2008 14:39 (UTC -5)While I’ve been home for the weekend, I realized that my webcam was here. Ah yes, my beloved webcam that I bought earlier this year to use with the video/phone program Ekiga. What happened to it?
When I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 in April, I encountered some changes the Ubuntu developers made to the way sound works. I couldn’t get sound working with Ekiga. My microphone wouldn’t work with any application. So that was that… until I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10.
All the sound issues seem to have been sorted out, so I’m taking out the old webcam and microphone again with the hopes that someone might call me. You don’t have to be using Ekiga; you should be able to use any SIP client. So hit up sip:jordon@ekiga.net if I’m on Ekiga. This status indicator will say “Call Me!” if I’m online and “Offline” if I’m offline.
I’ve also been having fun with my webcam because I can now use Cheese to record videos with it. And with that, I’ve been delving into the magic of ffmpeg. (We’re getting into some serious Linux stuff right now, so you can just skip ahead if you don’t care.) I was bored and I figured out how to crop a 640×480 video to the ever popular 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio.
ffmpeg -i input.ogv -sameq -aspect 4:3 -croptop 60 -cropbottom 60 -aspect 16:9 output.mpg
Explanations: input.ogv is the input file, -sameq indicates that the output file should be of the same quality, -aspect 4:3 forces the aspect ratio to be 4:3 (in case ffmpeg acts up, which I’ve noticed that it does), -croptop and -cropbottom take off that many pixels from the top and bottom (60 in this case), and -aspect 16:9 ensures that the new aspect ratio is indeed 16:9 if ffmpeg doesn’t understand that from the cropping (which it doesn’t). output.mpg is the output file. If you were using a different sized video, you would take off a different number of pixels from the top and bottom.
Turns out that ffmpeg can’t write to Ogg Theora video. But there is a similar tool called ffmpeg2theora that can. The equivalent command for ffmpeg2theora is:
ffmpeg2theora input.ogv –croptop 60 –cropbottom 60 -o output.ogv
This is simpler because ffmpeg2theora doesn’t screw up the aspect ratio while it’s working.
I’m going home soon, and I’ve got another busy week ahead. Let’s get to the links.
Too weird: Anti-Terror Law Requires God Be Acknowledged.
Maybe you’ve heard that “piracy” of “intellectual property” causes 750,000 lost jobs. Where did the number come from? Find out.
And finally, here are 10 Weird Psychology Studies.
3 comments
#1 by Keith: Tue Dec 02, 2008 20:37 (UTC -5)
Cheese is actually a pretty good program (if it weren’t for it, I wouldn’t have any face shots), but it gets slightly buggier in each release (I use 0.2.4, which is the best version I’ve tried).
About the anti-terror law, LOL.
#2 by Jordon: Wed Dec 03, 2008 00:08 (UTC -5)
In Ubuntu, at least, Cheese is numbered according to the GNOME release, so I’m apparently using Cheese 2.24.1. With this version, everything works fine for me. What problems have you had?
#3 by Keith: Tue Dec 09, 2008 09:40 (UTC -5)
What problems have you had?
General quirkiness, frequent crashes.