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:
Can I provide the DLNA player with some subtitles that work,
just to see what specific format(s) it supports?
Can MPlayer do the transcoding for me, and save me from
further yak-shaving?
If not, can I use some unholy combination of
transcode and FFmpeg to make DVB subtitles the DLNA
player is happy with?
Can I recover and reinsert the metadata MPlayer loses when
encoding?
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.