Categoria: multimedia

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Avidemux, a good video editor

If you don’t need a sophisticated video editing, but a linear editing one, Avidemux can be still a good option.

However it has not an official updated release (for Ubunutu) since 2022. An alternative to get it updated is flatpack, but with flatpack Avidemux uses a very huge quantity of disk space.

Another good linear video editing app would be Lesslosscut, but it is an app even bigger (and sucking ram) than Avidemux. Not to speak of installation problems with wayland.

So I resolved to:

  • uninstall avidemux flatpack and so free an huge space on disk:
flatpak uninstall org.avidemux.Avidemux
flatpak uninstall --unused
  • download a Nightly automated build and install it. In this way: I unpacked the files and do this command:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

and I fixed missing dependencies

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libqt6core6 libqt6gui6 libqt6widgets6 libqt6network6 libqt6openglwidgets6
sudo apt install libfaac0

sudo apt –fix-broken install

Now I have an updated Avidemux app, with a fair space usage.

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Get subtitles from a mkv

1) With Mkvtoolnix, if there is a subtitle in a mkv, you can easily extact it, deselecting all the other tracks and then giving the command “start multiplexing”: it will save that track as a mks file.

2a) If that track is a text one, you can easily convert it in a srt with this command (with a subtitle editor you could have to do another, easy conversion from an ass format to a real srt format):
mkvextract tracks "your-mks-file.mks" 0:a-name-you-want.srt.

2b) It the track is an image one (i.g. with one .sup file or two .sub e .idx files) you should use some online tool, such as subtitlestools.com so that from two files, sub e idx, you can one file srt. It could be a long process, waiting for your time aftr other users. But that webpage should keep working even you go offline and the day after you come back to download your srt file.

Sometimes however the easiest way is to find your srt files online, i.g. with OpenSubtitles.

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Quodlibet icon tray in KDE Neon

It could happen that in KDE Neon, the icon tray of Quodlibet, an excellent audio player, works quite wrong: same behavior with the right and the left mouse key.
I solved, with a no-flatpack release, installing indicator-application

sudo apt install indicator-application

and the reboot.

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Kodi in OpenaTV 7.4

After months, today I managed to get Kodi work in my OpenATV 7.4. In this way

  • I downloaded this file from OpenaTV forum
KODIDownload
  • and copied the 7.4 content in /usr/bin decoder folder
  • then modified the file advancedsettings.xml (in /usr/share/kodi/system), to set Enigma2Player instead of E2player as Kodi default video player.

Now I have Kodi working in OpenaTV 7.4

Warning: with this release (7.4) it occurs that Kodi freezes.

In that case, reboot and put the usb with saved settings.

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Removing silence from an audio track

Audacity provide a tool to remove silences from an audio track (with tools – >Truncate silence), as explained here . You should customize the settings according to your needs.

But in my experience the “duration” of “detected silence” should be at least 1.5 sec, and the decibel “-30”. In this way you should avoid to truncate words said in a low volume, as it can happen.

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Create a video with a static image from an audio file

In Linux this is possible in a terminal, with the following command:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -i audio.mp3 -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -c:a aac -b:a 192k -vf "scale='iw-mod(iw,2)':'ih-mod(ih,2)',format=yuv420p" -shortest -movflags +faststart out.mp4
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How to cut a video where you want (beyond keyframes)

With editor like Avidemux you can cut a video only in correspondence with certain specific points (the Keyframes). Otherwise the video is corrupt. But there are applications that allow you to overcome this limit: for example ShotCut.

To use it a simple way is to add the video to the timeline (with “+”), and to set a cut point (with “][“), so splitting the video, and then to remove the undesired part (after selecting it). Then export the resulting video.

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Google speech-to-text

If you use Google speech-to-text one problem is to type signs such as ‘(‘ or ‘)’. In English you can say (in a low voice) open bracket or close bracket. In Italian apri parentesi tonda o chiudi parentesi tonda: indeed saying only apri parentesi Google will type “apri parentesi” and not “( “.

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audio players

An excellent audio player is Clementine (and its fork Strawberry), which can do a lot of things. Its graphical intercace is very intuitive and complete.

But quite good is also QuodLibet: very fast (with a spartan graphical interface, not really intuitive) but highly customizable (i.g. you can create, edit and view new type of audio tags, or create bookmarks within an audio file). In my (personal) opinion it can integrate, but not replace Clementine. Indeed Quodlibet has some serious limitations, such as crashing, if you add some plugins, or it is not able to browse your disk (the only navigation is through tags, not through files).

Audacious is a very light solution, a good one if you don’t have too many audio files and you don’t need to have multiple options.

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Sound in Musescore 4

In Ubuntu, to get the sound in Musescore 4, after installing Pipewire (with its repo) you could have to follow these steps (in Italian, but you can find it in English as well).

If you have, following that steps, an error (such as Error while installing package: trying to overwrite '/usr/share/man/man1/pipewire-pulse.1.gz', which is also in package pipewire-pulse 0.3.48-1ubuntu3) you can resolve with this command:

sudo dpkg -r pipewire-pulse

As said here.