Tag: bash

Rotating Videos and Preserving Metadata

ruibmLeave a comment

So this is a pet peeve that’s been biting me for a sometime.

Often when you take a picture with you phone or digital camera, the camera rotation sensor (gyroscope?) gets it wrong and ends  up taking a picture that is sideways (ie, rotated +/- 90 degrees).
Surely enough you can use your phone’s photo library app to rotate it and job done, sanity restored.

However, the really really annoying thing is when you camera gets the orientation of a video wrong. Rotating a video is just not a functionality that the photo library offers off the shelf. That’s because rotating a video involves actually re-enconding it from the scratch. Some nice video players (eg, VLC) allow you to rotate while playing the video, but this is fiddly and hard to remember to do every time you play the video.

So in any case, here are a few bash lines that I cobbled together to rotate a batch of videos trying to preserve as much of the metadata information as possible.

for i in $( find *.mov ); do
  IN=$i OUT=${IN}.m4v && \
  ffmpeg -i ${IN} -c:a copy -map_metadata 0:s:0  -vf "transpose=1"  -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset medium ${OUT} && \
  exiftool -tagsfromfile ${IN} -makernotes -make -model ${OUT} && \
  exiftool ${OUT} && \
  rm *_original
done

NOTE: To run these you will need to have ffmpeg and exiftool installed in your system.

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Bash Shell $PS1 Configuration

ruibmLeave a comment

After a recent talk with Jim Meyering I’ve decided to finally organise a bit my .bashrc and all my .dot_files in general.

So first and foremost important change, track all .dot_files in some for of version control system. I’m right now using Mercurial powered by BitBucket. Git is also a great choice. Go with whatever you are comfortable with, just make sure you don’t lose your precious configs and that you can easily synchronise all you unix/linux/bsd boxes effortlessly.

The other big take for this talk was to make sure your $PS1 shell prompt gives you the right information. Two key things that are absolute gold to have:

  1. The branch/bookmark you are currently in if you are in a VCS directory.
  2. The exit code of the previous command if it returned an error (different from 0).

Here’s how my current $PS1 looks like:

.bashrc $PS1

And this is my current .bashrc $PS1 configuration:

############################################
# Decorate $PS1
############################################
function __get_vcs {
local path=`pwd`
while true; do
if [[ -d "${path}/.hg" ]]; then
echo "mercurial"
return
elif [[ -d "${path}/.git" ]]; then
echo "git"
return
elif [[ "${path}" = "/" ]]; then
echo "none"
return
fi
path=`cd ${path}/../ && pwd`
done
}

function __get_vcs_branch {
vcs="$(__get_vcs)"
out=''
case "$vcs" in
"mercurial")
out=`hg id -b`
out=" (hg:${out})"
;;
"git")
out=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
out=" (git:${out})"
;;
*)
out=''
;;
esac
echo "$out"
}

function __get_exit_code {
local code="$?"
local msg=''
if [ $code != 0 ]; then
msg="[${code}] "
fi
echo "$msg"
}

red='\[\033[01;31m\]'
green='\[\033[00;32m\]'
purple='\[\033[01;35m\]'
yellow='\[\033[01;33m\]'
blue='\[\033[01;34m\]'
black='\[\033[00m\]'
export PS1="${red}\$(__get_exit_code)${blue}\t ${green}\W${purple}\$(__get_vcs_branch)${blue} \$${black} "

Finally, here are some other things that could be interesting to display:

  • \u – Username
  • \h – Hostname
  • \w – Full path of the current working directory

PS: Word of advice, it’s very easy to get carried away and try to add ‘the world information’ to your $PS1. Up to you what you value the most.