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Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

October 27
Ah, an added twist to my movie quest: it looks like the server-side software is being discontinued. It's not a great piece of software in the first place; right now it's telling me that videos scattered across multiple directories are in fact all part of the same TV show, and for some reason it keeps logging out the web session. But it's a preinstalled thing that I was hoping not to have to muck around with while I worked on the transcoding puzzle. Ah well.

Somewhat surprised to discover, while looking for something else, that I'm acknowledged in an IETF draft.

The Ghost Writer was good enough right until the final moment of the movie, which was frankly daft. Now, I'll be honest, I did question some of the lead character's choices, but he didn't seem quite stupid enough for that. That aside, a nice little drama with no connection whatsoever to any persons, living, dead, or milking the post-political circuit.


October 26
A Most Wanted Man is another well-shot movie, but a good deal grimmer than last night's fare. It's John le Carré giving a fine two fingers to his old profession - and what's become of it.

October 25
Luna is a gorgeous piece of work, and also very thoughtful and layered. For some reason it made me think of The Big Chill despite the fact that it's been so long since I saw that that I can't remember much (or any) of it and I probably didn't appreciate it at the time... anyway. This is a lovely piece about loss, and relationships, and humour, and probably a bunch of other things, and if the doctor doesn't make you laugh go back and watch him again. Pomegranate!

October 21
Question 1, providing myself with a MPEG-TS file with functional DVB subtitles: so far no good. Even the official DVB website does not appear to provide same, although to be fair I haven't gone through all their sample files..

October 20
So close. I've got a build that gets to the linker stage and then there's a duplicate symbol definition that I need to figure out if it's intentional (if poor) coding or if I'm missing some flag that selects one or other definition.

...and with a little bit of editing I have a build. Now to see what the heck I was planning on doing with it. I had a web page I was referencing which I appear to have closed and can't find again. DAMMIT.

"5:46 restate my assumptions", as Max from Pi might say. The goal here is to make my DVD collection available on the somewhat underpowered DLNA player on my TV. There are better solutions: VLC on the Apple TV box plugged into the same TV, for example. However, the goal is the goal. The DLNA player is happy to play MPEG-TS files, possibly because there's a MPEG-TS decoder lying around the firmware somehwere for the satellite decoder, but who knows. I've been ripping DVDs to files using dvdbackup which seems to work fairly reliably as long as you tell it to ignore errors; this means your actually damaged DVDs won't rip, but it does work around DVDs using deliberatly-introduced errors as a means of copy-protection. Once I've got my copy of the bits, I try to get FFmpeg to turn it into a MPEG-TS file. This is mostly straightforward since a DVD file is, at the end of the day, a MPEG2 stream with a fancy dress and a hat, so it's possible to losslessly turn it into MPEG-TS. Now, this bit occasionally fails so I've got a fallback: use MPlayer to do the conversion (FFmpeg winds up with short files, which I am inclined to think is down to correctly parsing something that's intended as more copy-protection, and MPlayer either doesn't parse that thing or knows it's a trap). MPlayer manages to lose some metadata along the way which is why I don't use it for everything (and if my notes are up to date I've not yet gotten a fix working to restore the missing metadata, although I did spend some time figuring out where to get it). The problem I'm currently working with is subtitles. The DLNA player wants DVB subtitles, not DVD subtitles. So I'm asking FFmpeg to do that conversion (I don't recall if MPlayer can do this). FFmpeg does the conversion, but the resulting subtitles are a smear of noise across the bottom of the screen where the subtitle should be, as if the bit depth is incorrect. FFmpeg does not appear to allow me to do any sort of "downmixing" of the subtitles when it's converting, but even if it did I don't know quite what's supported on the TV, nor do I really know anything about how the subtitles (either format) are structured other than that they're effectively image overlays which the player combines into the video bitstream at the appropriate point if you've got subtitles turned on.

So where I'm at right now is that I've rebuilt an old tool called transcode which can extract raw subtitle data, something FFmpeg curiously seems unable to do (I have been searching for some time for, more or less, "how do I get ffmpeg to just dump the raw bits to a file" with no success) and now that I have the bits... I'm not actually sure what I was going to do.

And the funny part of this is that transcode builds against FFmpeg's libraries, but it's pretty much fallen off the Internet and hasn't been tracking changes to FFmpeg, so I had to go digging in FFmpeg's git history to get to a point where I could build transcode. Oh, and this is on a raspberry Pi as well, because why not make things more complicated for myself when I'm already knee-deep in yak fur?

Anyway. Having actually written this out, it seems like I have a number of questions to answer:

Time to fetch the shovel. Or the yak shears. Or both.


October 19
Through the awesome power of git bisect (first time ever using it, tbh) I managed to find where I probably need to backtrack the dependent library to.

Inside Man: apparently when I watched this back in February 2007 I wasn't too impressed with how smoothly the whole war crimes aspect tied into the plot (as in, I didn't think it did). Rewatching, I think it works ok, and to be honest even if it doesn't it's a small glitch in an otherwise excellent movie.

October 18
Wolfs felt kinda like George and Brad wanted to hang out together in a movie and weren't too pushed about the details. It's lightweight, and to be fair kept me guessing about how it would ultimately pan out, and it was fun. The ending wasn't bad, either - it felt a bit like "we're not sure how to wrap this up", but it worked ok.

October 15
Tried updating the OS on the shiny new Mac and got an error which is indicative of some sort of problem with the security enclave, possibly associated with using migration assistant from an old OS/MacBook (which is what I did). This is deeply annoying since the choice of solutions seem to be "boot your other modern mac and use that to reset the first mac's firmware in some unspecified way that can't otherwise be done" or "reinstall from scratch and then try to apply your migration afresh", neither of which are exactly compelling options.

October 13
I have still not completed my DVD-to-DLNA conquest, having been sidetracked by such things as "holidays", "work", and "losing interest in the project before it's done".

I picked it back up again today, though. Albeit mainly trying to figure out where I'd left off. Looks like I'm trying to reconstruct a video processing toolchain from, er, 2015 or so. Ok.

I got a compilation! Except... it's in the dependent library, and it turns out to have changes that are incompatible with the thing I'm trying to build. So now I have to step back through changes to the dependent library to see if I can find where the incompatibility was introduced.


October 12
So we watched Salem's Lot, which I thought I'd seen. I had not seen this - I think I may have been conflating it with Lost Boys. In any case, you'd imagine a Stephen King story directed by Tobe Hooper might be a bit of a slam-dunk hit but this was... by the third hour we were fully into mocking the movie. Yes, three hours - it was originally done as a miniseries and then wedged into single-piece movie. The pacing during the denoument in the Marsden house, where Mears is inexplicably fumbling around in his carry-all while his co-conspirator meets his doom, was utterly laughable, and for some bizarre reason the director kept reverting to "fumbles in carry-all" as a means of ratcheting up the tension. Mears' jeep with its unclosable door also came in for some mocking, as did the whole shtick of Mears making a "crucifix" out of a pair of tongue depressors, some tape, and a half-remembered blessing. Never mind the usual tropes of "vulnerable character decides to investigate things by themselves without telling anyone what they're doing" and "precocious kid takes on task adults are hesitant about". At some point Mears is rebuking the cop for running away from it all, and we're siding with the cop - town going to pieces, being overrun by vampires? Yep, get the hell out of there. Call FEMA or something if you feel like you need to do anything about it.

Oh, and the actual Head Vampire? Utterly laughable. I mean, yay, tribute to Nosferatu or whatever they were aiming for, but really, just laughable. We called him Snaggletooth.

October 11
Uncharted was a lightweight bit of fluff with a few good laughs and no real surprises. About the only grating thing about it was the extremely obvious setup for a sequel which appears not to have materialised.

October 9
OpenHAB Pi apparently dead again this morning, as a particular electrical socket didn't turn off at 7am like it's supposed to. Cursory investigation of the situation revealed said Pi sitting on the floor, approximately 75cm from its usual altitude, and lacking two of 4 rubber feet presumably due to the sudden decleration at ground level. Cat activity suspected.

October 6
I reconfigured the mail server. Clever banana that I am, I figured I'd put a symlink in the mail folder pointing back at itself so the client(s?) configured with a mail folder prefix wouldn't get lost. Apple Mail didn't like this and presumably tried to recursively iterate to infinity which, you know, ran out of memory. So much for that great idea. There is a certain lumpiness about this reconfiguration where the clients don't appear to notice what's happened for some period of time and behave a little oddly, but it looks like my phone can once more retrieve email, at least.


October 5
Reminiscence was a fairly decent premise but the execution was a bit on the lumpy side. Decent enough cast and performances, but the story just didn't quite click in some spots.

October 4
The Debt is criminally underated on IMDb, possibly because of the lack of exploding helicopters or something. It's an excellent drama and beautifully carried by a stellar cast.

October 3
Figured out how to debug the iOS mail client issue and yeah, it's doing what I think it's doing which is deeply annoying. Gonna see if the patch update to iOS fixes it before I reconfigure my frickin' mail server to compensate.

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Waider
October? In this economy?