One of the initial purposes of this blog was to store small pieces of knowledge collected from the web and that I use in a day-to-day basis. I haven’t really used the blog to do that, but I have several posts drafted and ready to be published containing only small tips. So, this is the first of many (I hope).
It makes me mad, the fact that most movies I download from the internet come divided into CD size avi or mpeg files. Why not one big, unique, file with the complete movie? I don’t know, but my solution is to join (or concatenate) the parts back together.
This is how I do it (in linux, of course)
Step 1 : To join the several parts of the same movie I just:
cat part1.avi part2.avi > joined.avi |
The example is also applicable to MPEG video. The idea is create a big file just by joining the consecutive movie parts, so the order in the command is important.
After the previous step, you should be able to play MPEG videos although their index information might be screwed up. In general, you’ll see you ‘movies time’ be reset to 0 at the end of the first part. In the case of AVI video, you won’t be able to play the movie.
Step 2: Use mencoder* to ‘fix’ the joined video, by simply doing:
For AVI video:
mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy joined.avi -o full.avi |
For MPEG video:
mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy -of mpeg joined.mpg -o full.mpg |
This second step usually takes no more than one or two minutes.
And that’s it. You can download joinavi.sh and joinmpg.sh, and use it at your own risk. Use these scripts by just executing: joinX.sh part1.X part2.X, and you’ll get a full.X video in your current directory.
Note: Don’t forget you need to “sudo aptitude install mencoder” to able to use mencoder.
This was me during my last vacations. Sitting on the couch, watching tv, doing nothing at all… Well, I was sitting on the couch and watching tv!
It took some time but I managed to ‘kill’ most of what was waiting on my “to watch” list. The top three movies I watched were:
- Transporter 3, a good action movie with lots of… action, and also some shooting and some fast driving
- Quantum of Solace, nice Bond girls but didn’t quite understood what was actually the ‘quantum of solace’
- and Mamma Mia, the latest ABBA musical remake.
Now, about Mamma Mia, there is much to be said. First, let me start by stating that I usually hate musicals, but with Mamma Mia it was different. It is true that listening to a duet with Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep almost cost me an hear drum - Pierce Brosnan really needed a couple more music lessons, but the actual movie was quite good. A funny result from watching the movie is that my daughter is now a major fan of ABBA.
A white sheet of paper is hanging from my white board, right in from of me above my screen. The content of such sheet of paper is a list of places… places to visit, places to enjoy!
Some of them already had the pleasure of my presence, the others are still waiting. Some are already part of traveling plans for a near future, others are left for future arrangements.
Castelo de Almorol
Castelo de Guimarães
Castelo do Marvão
Castelo de Óbidos
Convento de Cristo (Tomar)
Convento e Basilica de Mafra
Fortaleza de Sagres
Fortificações de Monsaraz
Igreja de São Francisco (Porto)
Igreja e Torre dos Clérigos
Mosteiro da Batalha
Mosteiro de Alcobaça
Mosteiro dos Jerónimos
Paço Ducal de Vila Viçosa
Universidade de Coimbra
Palácio de Mateus
Palácio Nacional da Pena
Palácio Nacional de Queluz
Ruinas de Conimbriga
Templo Romano de Évora
Torre de Belém
Today was my first working day after almost a month vacation. The day started slow but the working rate increased to normal quite quickly, and before lunch my production rate was as strong as before leaving for vacations. It was a good start because usually it takes almost two full days to get the ‘engine’ started.
This conquest leads me to think about some new year resolutions that I made:
- fulfill only the strictly mandatory work hours
- take more time for myself, my family and my things
- enjoy all my vacation days
- travel more, during vacation but also by making regular weekend “escapades”
- relax and enjoy the little things
- support more, the people around me
oh, and a last one, write more…
