Monthly Archives: June 2010

Youtube MP4 files to m2ts

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So, I got the 1080p version of Taeyang – Wedding Dress (really sad MV there) and decided that I’d stream it (via VLC) to our Canmore. However, the transcoding is rather inefficient and thus a lot of frames are being dropped. VLC even makes it a point to tell me that my CPU is slow T_T. I decided to just convert the thing to m2ts and copy it over instead of streaming it via the network.

ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/WeddingDress.mp4 -f mpegts -vcodec libx264 -b 3721216 -bf 2 -acodec libfaac -ab 131072 -y /home/rystraum/wd.m2ts

-b and -ab should be adjusted according to the video and audio bitrate accordingly. libx264 and libfaac are the video and audio encoders for h264 and aac, respectively. The ffmpeg version that comes with VLC doesn’t have them out-of-the box and requires a recompile from source.

I should be able to enjoy my HD Youtube downloads now (after transcoding everything). :D

Setting shortcut keys for Rhythmbox

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I used to avert using Rhythmbox as my music player and usually resorts to VLC. Today, however, I just wanted a shuffle play of my whole music files and decided to use Rhythmbox for it.

It’s actually convenient enough since it’s integrated with Ubuntu already so it neatly stays at my taskbar. There was a catch though, it did not have shortcut keys support (at least, out of the box, it doesn’t)

It’s easy enough to add though, through System >> Preferences >> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Just add a new shortcut, mine’s:

Name: Rhythmbox Next
Command: rhythmbox-client --next


Name: Rhythmbox Play-Pause
Command: rhythmbox-client --play-pause

and then assign a shortcut key/combination for it. That easy!

A bit of a background:
rhythmbox-client is a CLI utility that controls a running Rhythmbox instance. You can view all the other different options through the man pages.

man rhythmbox-client