Debian :: Util To Generate Thumbnails / Contact Sheet From Video?
Apr 1, 2011
I'm looking for suggestions for a command line utility than can generate a contact sheet (e.g. jpg etc) from a video? I'm mainly interested in starting from FLV files, but i guess the solution will probably work for other formats with appropriate codecs etc. So, for example, if i have a 30 minute video, every 2 minutes through it i'd like it to generate a thumbnail and then put 15 of these in a 5 x 3 grid in a single jpg. On Windows,Media Player Classic Homecinem will do this through its ave Thumbnails command.
Ideally i'd like to do this from the command line/script in a debian server environment, rather than a desktop GUI. It doesn't have to be a single command, if a chain of steps could do it.
I tried to search about this from google and opensuse forums but didn't find any help, so I'm starting this topic.I just updated to OpenSUSE 11.1 with newest gnome and default kernel. The problem is, I don't have video thumbnails any more in nautilus. If I recall correctly, in 11.0 I had them with totem-xine, but now I can't find it in any repos. Added some additional repositories, but still nothing.
If there is not totem-xine available, how to get video thumbnails, I mean like generating automatically every time I open a folder with video files in it.
I have Ubuntu 9.10, and writing video files to a mounted disk is slow. The reason is every time the buffer is flushed to disk, Ubuntu starts making a new video thumbnail for the file.If I skip the first block that has the RIFF data, then Ubuntu doesn't realize it's a video, and the write speed is about doubled. Then I can write the RIFF data at the end of the transfer (in the appropriate place in the file).I have tried setting an exclusive flock on the file while writing; however, that does not prevent Ubuntu from reading the file while it's being written and generating thumbnails.
I'm using Nautilus 2.28.1 with Ubuntu 9.10.With WMV videos which were recorded using "Microsoft Windows Media VC-1" codec, even though they play okay in MPlayer, no thumbnails are ever created or displayed in Nautilus. Other video formats display thumbnails fine. I must already have the VC-1 codec or MPlayer would not even play the video.Is there anything I can do to get the thumbnails to display for this video format
I'm currently using Lucid Lynx and my video thumbnails won't load. I already modified my preferences that thumbnails would always load, and set that files smaller 4GB will load. Only the generic video thumbnails load. I already tried deleting the files in ~/.thumbnails/fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory/ but still problem exists.
I'm running 64-bit Debian testing Xfce and can't get Thunar to generate thumbnails for video-files in ogg-format. It works for avi, mp4, flv, etc. I have thunar-thumbnailer and ffmpegthumbnailer installed.
When I open Thunar, I can see thumbnails of jpegs, but notfor video,or document files. I've got the Thumbnailers package installed as part of XFCE Goodies,nd also ffmpegthumbnailers (? I think, I'm at work so can't check). I've looked for a setting to change, but can't see anything relevant. previous installations have allowed me to have beautiful thumnail icon
I regularly use an online imageboard website, and as such I am constantly uploading images. Being new to the linux OS, I was quite familar with Microsoft Windows file explorer and its adaption with file uploading. However, it would seem that GNOME follows a different method and uses a separate file browser to a file uploader Here is my file browser and the various options available (icon size, icon view, bigger thumbnails):
And here is what I get when I upload files to a website: My question is, is there a workaround or package available to allow changeable icon sizes/thumbnails in the file uploader? The picture preview is good, but really isn't enough for what I require
I have a problem with nautilus thumbnails since a few days. I checked they are indeed generated in .thumbnails, but all I got in nautilus is the "loading.." icon instead of the thumbnail, for all kind of files (pdf, image, video..) + a high cpu load.
I really don't see what to look at here, didn't found any trace of error in several logs/debug tool like gdb (and btw does nautilus have log abilities?)
I don't know which change could have triggered this (it used to work fine), maybe adding the i386 compatibilty with "dpkg --add-architecture i386" ? (I did this a few days ago in order to install acrobat reader)
Also I've been copying all of the home folder files from my previous ubuntu account to the new debian one, maybe I broke something in the process ?
I just installed KDE and I had 2 minor problems with Konqueror:
1) Every time I emptying the trash, I'm getting the error message: "The file or folder /...path here.../.Trash-1000/files/...filename here does not exist.". Seems like I had deleted this file, and before emptying the trash, I deleted somehow this file outside Debian installation (probably from a live cd). Other than that, trash is working OK. I'm just wondering if there's a way to get rid of the error message. (Of course emptying the trash from command line, doesn't brings any message).
2) Konqueror stopped displaying thumbnails of JPGs, PNGs etc. (with the exception of Photobook view, which is not very convenient for large number of photos).
I bypassed this problem, installing d3lphin (since dolphin is not available for lenny), and browsing the photo catalogs with it.
I used Kubuntu with KDE 4.5.1 up to August, when I switched to Debian Squeeze with KDE (currently frozen at 4.4.5). Before migrating, I used rsync (luckbackup) to backup the whole Home directory. Kontact version used on Debian is now 4.4.6. While I could use the import feature successfully to retrieve all my e-mail messages by pointing it to ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/, I couldn't find a way to do the same with contacts.
I don't have backups of my old ~/.local/share/contacts, the folder simply doesn't exist. However, I have ~/.local/share/akonadi. I never used Akonadi Tray Icon to create a backup. In KAddressBook, I have Personal Contacts, which is empty. While waiting for a solution, I filled Default Address Book with some contacts' e-mail addresses retrieved manually from archived past e-mails.
In ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc I have the following:
1) a folder named lock, containing a text file named _home_lelamal_.kde_share_apps_kabc_std.vcf4g7TNh8g and another called _home_lelamal_.kde_share_apps_kabc_std.vcfXASyTlNE. If opened, they show 1372 kontact, and 1629 korgac respectively.
2) A file named std.vcf of 0B size.
3) 8 files, numbered progressively, named "std.vcf__ std.vcf__7, all of which are also of 0B size.
I tried renaming the old /kabc to /kabc.old (in case it got modified in the process) and used a copy of it as a target for Default Address Book in KDE Resources, whose path was changed to point to it. Nothing changed, when I reopened KaddressBook there were still only the new contacts I manually created.
Akonadi Configuration shows Personal Contacts, and it correctly points to ~/.local/share/contacts/, but if the folder isn't there I'm not sure what it's pointing to. I also have a Default Address Book, and when I click on Modify, instead of showing a path like Personal Contacts did, it shows a blank field. When I click on Open File Dialog, it expects me to point it to a vCard Address Book File.
If I'm back to KAddressBook, and open the Personal Contacts addressbook to import the the only vCard I am aware of (the 0B sized std.vcf file in /kabc) nothing happens, it remains empty.
I ran into this problem myself, and I've seen that others have had the same problem when updating from Karmic to Lucid via apt-get. There is a bug in apt for Lucid, and it has been noted on one of the Ubuntu lists
This is a simple how-to and a work-around to the upgrading with apt-get:
1) Update your sources.list file to replace all instances of 'karmic" to 'lucid' : $ sudo sed -i 's/karmic/lucid/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
2) Run apt-get update: $ sudo apt-get update
3) Run a regular upgrade; $ sudo apt-get upgrade -y
Here is where the problem comes in. Apt is looking for the util-linux package, which is part of upstart-job, but someone apparenlty forgot to write the code to tell apt-about this (whoops!)
So, you now need to install upstart-job by itself. By skipping this step you will get the error message when you try to run step 5: "E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'util-linux'.Please see man 5 apt"
4) $ sudo apt-get install upstart-job
5) Now you can run apt-get dist-upgrade: $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
I've found that my skype stopped working with recent -current updates ( around beta ... ). It was looking for a libuuid.so.1 library - on checking I found the 64-bit version but no 32-bit version - quite strange as this has been working fine since my original slackware64 13.0 installation. Anyhow, I got the 32-bit util-linux package, did the 32-bit package convert thing and skype is now working:
1. convertpkg-compat32 -i util-linux-ng-2.17.2-i486-1.txz 2. un-archive 3. copy the libuuid lib to /lib and soft-link in /usr/lib
I didn't install the whole compat package as this is not really necessary I think.
I use this machine as a samba server with one small IDE hdd for system and one large SATA hdd (1.5TB) hooked via 4xSATA PCI card. The machine has 1.5GB RAM, and is also to run 2 ktorrent clients inside two Xvncs.The problem is, that even when ktorrent is doing nothing I observe A LOT of hdd activity to the point where movies or even mp3s stored on this server played via samba on a windows machine "stutter". E.g. smplayer will repeat 5 second piece a few times before moving on to the next piece... and it goes on for a good 10 minutes, once it starts.Even browsing directories is slow to the point where it takes 5-20 seconds to show the content in Total Commander (equivalent of Midnight Commander for windows).I am not sure how I can track what is really happening. Why would ktorrent clients create a massive I/O when there's virtually no traffic to/from them? (I have total of 1kB/s down and 10kB/s up while taking the masurements below).Or is there something wrong with the hdd? I had to send back the first one I got, it had plenty of bad sectors (this one does not though, as far as I can tell no data loss occured, just performance sucks).Here's some diagnostic data, please let me know if there's anything else I should check.
I'm trying to generate a list of my music directory folder structure WITHOUT the files included. I have my music directory set up in a hierarchy of Artist>Album>Files, and I just want to generate a list of the folders because that will, in effect, output a list of what albums I have by what artists, which is ultimately what I'm after. I did some looking on the internet through various forums over the past few days and found two ideas that looked promising, but ended up being not exactly what I needed. The first was to generate a .txt file based off of a shell ls command:
ls -R [music directory name] >> ~/mymusiclist.txt
That's great, except that it also includes the 40,000+ individual music files by name. I'm not about to invest that much time editing the files out of the list when I know there has to be an easier way.The second idea I came upon involved using the extglob function. I tried enabling extglob and using it to input a "negative wildcard" into the above method to remove anything .mp3 from the returned list, but extglob didn't play well in that context. I'm not a command line wizard, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something fairly obvious. In fact, I'm sure I am. So this is a great opportunity for me to learn something new. If anybody knows of a command line way to do this, I'd love to know it. Or, even better, if anybody knows of an app that can do this, even better. I'm not above installing a secondary music player just to import the library once and get my list.
I run Ubuntu 10.10 now and was surprised when I couldn't find Kivio which I use for simple charts for work. I now know that's it's no longer supported and so decided to try Dia as it's more of a native app' anyway, so here's the problem..The page setup dialog has a page size of A4 but it appears that this only relates to one of the (for want of a better term) cell sections on the sheet, I found this out after (stupidly) creating a diagram that spanned a few of these cells and being surprised when my printer started spitting out sheet after sheet of diagram bits!
So can someone help me out and tell me how to setup Dia up so that what I can see on screen is what I'll get when I print, If I try to stay in one cell section it looks daft to work on and is far too small as well.An explanation of what the actual thinking and benefit behind the current layout is would also be appreciated, I'm sure it's great for some people but I just want to do a few flow charts!
My F12 is connected to a Xerox DC432 printer on the network. The problem I'm facing is that banner sheet cannot be disable. The configuration setting on Administration->Printing showed that banner is off by default. "/etc/cups/printers.conf" file also have "JobSheets none none". I had the same problem with F11. Is there any step I'm missing? It doesn't seem to be problem of the printer itself because I could do this on a Windows OS.
I have a Epson SX215 and despite of being apparently installed well, everytime I try to print something I only get the printer take out all the sheet in blank.[URL]
in openoffice i could open my excel spreadsheets. now that i have GNOME and Abiword, they won't open. any suggestions? can't find OOffice in the repository.
I was wondering how you might go about printing multiple images on a single sheet of paper...I used to know how to do it in Windows but have never done it in Ubuntu.
I'm looking for a means to automate filling out web-forms with data (names, addresses, etc...) from excel spreadsheets. I'm not sure how to do it with a macro, of if theres programs out there, or if a script could do the same work.
