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September 14, 2009

transcode tips

Filed under: Uncategorized — Nate @ 6:58 pm

I downloaded a show off my Tivo Series 3 last night, and wanted to convert it from it’s native MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. I’ve done it before, but didn’t want to spend time trying to find the scripts so I spent a bunch of time searching around for some quick tips on how best to do it. And despite some honest efforts I came up with nothing useful.

So a short time ago I dug up my scripts and thought to share some of them, not only will it make it easier for me since I can check this site for the syntax in the future but maybe it’ll help you too.

Of course I won’t cover installing transcode or it’s dependencies, I assume you have all of that done. I don’t recall what all of the options do but as you can see there are quite a few, not the easiest thing to remember. See the man page or transcode documentation for what the options mean.

Export audio portion of a video file to OGG Vorbis:

transcode -i input_filename -y raw,ogg -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0x55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m filename.ogg -o /dev/null

Export audio portion of a file to MP3(using lame):

transcode -i input_file -y raw -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0x55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m output.mp3 -o /dev/null

Convert video+audio from some format(e.g. MPEG-2) to MPEG-4:

transcode -i input.mpg y xvid4 -F mpeg4 -E22050 -b 64 -N 0x55 –w 250,200,3 -V -M 2 -o filename.avi

I wish transcode had some easy to use templates, such as convert with low, medium, or high compression type of deal. I mean if you don’t specify any options by default it seems to use maximum quality and in some cases despite going from say MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 I’ve seen the file size increase.

Fix hanging vmware tools on linux

Filed under: Virtualization — Tags: , — Nate @ 5:48 pm

I can’t be the only one who has come across this, back in early June I filed a support case with VMware around the fact that roughly 90% of the time when the latest version of vmware-tools that shipped with vSphere loaded on my CentOS 5 systems it would hang part way through, if I logged into the console I and just pressed <enter> it would continue loading. Naturally the Tier 1 support rep was fairly useless, wanting me to do some stupid things to get more debug information.

I went off on my own and traced down the problem to the vmware-config-tools.pl script towards the end of the script at around line 11,600, where it tries to make a symlink. If I disable the offending code the problem stops(the link it’s trying to create is in fact already there):

sub symlink_icudt38l {
my $libdir = db_get_answer('LIBDIR');
install_symlink($libdir . '/icu', $gRegistryDir . '/icu');
}

If your interested in the strace output:

[..]
[pid  7228] <... read resumed> "", 4096) = 0
[pid  7228] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
[pid  7228] fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid  7228] close(4)                    = 0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) =  0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_IGN},  {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] wait4(7244, [{WIFEXITED(s)  && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0}], 0, NULL) = 7244
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] lstat("/etc/vmware-tools/icu", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777,  st_size=25, ...}) = 0
[pid  7228] read(0,

The last line there the system is waiting for input, when I hit <enter> it continues loading.

The support case sat..and sat..and sat. Then a couple of weeks ago some manager called me up and wanted to know how the case was doing. I guess they didn’t spend any time on it at all. I told him I already found a workaround, and he said because of that they were going to work up a KB entry on it then close the case. Then another week passes and I get an email saying OH! We see you found a workaround, we’ll forward that to engineering and get back to you. Yes the workaround I sent on JUNE 16.

So hope this helps someone, I’ll update this when/if they get a KB entry out on it. It’s certainly saved me a lot of time, it is very annoying to have to connect to each and every system to press enter to get it to continue to boot to workaround this bug.

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