I’ve been processing a collection of product videos which came to me in a huge variety of sizes, aspect ratios, and qualities. I need to re-encode them to work in HTML 5, but, more importantly, I need to make them fit into a common player space on the web page.

It turns out that newer versions of ffmpeg support not only cropping, but also padding, and you can even do both operations at once!

For example, I had a source video that was originally 16:9, but had been letterboxed to 4:3, and then had two different sets of labels added. I needed to crop out the letterboxed portion and the top set of labels, and make the result fit nicely into 16:9. So I used VLC, a screen capture utility, and Photoshop to get the measurements. Then I used ffmpeg to crop the relevant section and pad it out to fit into my space (in this case, I’m left aligning the video in the padded output):


ffmpeg -i original/converted.wmv -vf crop=394:295:6:0,pad=524:295:0:0:0xFFFF00 -sameq converted.mov


That’s cropping a 394 x 295 piece out of the original video (with the origin at 6 pixels from the left, and 0 pixels from the top), and then padding it out to 524 x 295 filling the padded area with bright yellow. The 524 x 295 is really close to 16:9 — and in a later process, it gets resized to the more standard 480 x 272¹.

You can string together the padding and cropping in either order, depending on the effect you’re trying to achieve.

¹I’m sure some educated person out there could tell me why video standards are so confused/confusing, down to the non-square pixels. While a true 16:9 would dictate 480 x 270 pixels, everybody seems to use 480 x 272. Why? The only thing I can figure out is that 272 is evenly divisible by a power of 2, which probably made display hardware cheaper to manufacture. As you can see, my resizing adds a bit of distortion, but at these resolutions, it doesn’t really matter.

I’m accustomed to having a hot-key in my text editor for inserting a time-stamp. Now I have a plain-text note-taking application that I want to use for managing my time, but it has no bells or whistles. It doesn’t allow the creation of macros and it doesn’t have a time-stamp function.

All is not lost! Using Automator, I created a service which calls a shell script to generate a nicely formatted time-stamp. I haven’t found a way to assign the service to a hot-key, but in many text input areas, a contextual services menu can be brought up with a simple right-click of the mouse.

Simple, nice, and convenient.

Here’s how to do it:
Fire up the Automator application. Create a new “Service” workflow:
(click to enlarge)

For the operation, double-click on “Run Shell Script” and set it up as shown in the image below:
(click to enlarge)

You’re done! Now you can insert 2011-08-04 16:58:06 time-stamps 2011-08-04 16:58:13 everywhere 2011-08-04 16:58:20.

Note: this is under Snow Leopard / Mac OS X 10.6.8. It probably will work under anything from Leopard onward.

Well, the screen issues continue, but at least the missing pixel columns are in designer colors:



Resetting the graphics subsystem sometimes cures it, sometimes just changes the color. Thus far, it’s always cured itself eventually.

So, in the middle of working on something, the balance of luminiferous ether in the universe must have come unhinged, because every other column of pixels on my screen went black:

View at full resolution to see detail

I tried the usual tricks, to no avail. I figured it was a hardware connector issue, so got an appointment at the Apple store. However, to my annoyance and chagrin, the problem has proved intermittent. It “cures itself” and then recurs. This supported my theory that it was a connector issue, or so I thought.

The Apple Genius, however, taught me a trick to reset the graphics subsystem: shift + control + eject

The last time the problem arose, this trick *did* cure it.

So the question is – is my graphics card going south? Is this some bug in recently installed software (Snow Leopard, the new version of iStat Menus, or Final Cut Express)? Could it be entirely due to my attitude? Or was the reset cure also a coincidence? Only time will tell.

So. Millions of people use Apple’s Mail.app. Someone must have a solution to the problem of households … but I somehow have been left in the dark.

Stated more precisely:
I have numerous friends for whom I have multiple contacts. For example, Alice Code and Bob Crypto are what we now call pairbonded partners. They share a common home address, but separate cell phones, email, work addresses, work email, etc. So I end up keeping three records for the two of them: one for Alice, one for Bob, and one for Bob and Alice.

Now, three records for two people isn’t so onerous, particularly when there’s not a lot of redundant information. But then, if they happen to have a land-line, and change the number, I have to update three records (unless I only put home number for the common record, in which case I’d have to remember this protocol). And the fact is that there are a lot of redundant notes I try to keep, such as anniversaries, favorite charities, etc. This makes the system unwieldy, especially since my whole goal is to reduce the amount of stuff I have to remember and maintain.

So how do people in the real world manage this? Bonus points for solutions that will still work when I sync to my Palm-OS based phone!