QD video trimmer v1.1 is finally out now

WHY TO USE QUICK AND DIRTY VIDEO TRIMMER

• Want to save storage space by storing only interesting parts of your video (e.g. from continuously recording action or drone camera video)
• Speed up and ease your video editing workflow by working only with video clips trimmed in advance 

BENEFITS COMPARED TO OTHER FREE VIDEO TRIMMING SOFTWARE

• No limitations in video length (especially in bookmark mode, basic mode may just get difficult to use with longer videos, but not limited)
• No annoying watermarks or similar, it just makes direct copy from original video
• Non-destructive, original video remains untouched, new clips are just partial copies of it which also allows really fast operation  
• No resolution down scaling or similar, video and audio codecs and their parameters are copied from original video 
• GUI should be intuitive, easy and fast to use with minimal mouse clicks which makes demanding trimming sessions convenient

INSTALLATION:

• Download the program here
• Unzip somewhere 
• Download FFMPEG here and install somewhere, remember to have FFPROBE as well at the same folder 
• Copy path of FFMPEG into config.txt at QD_video_trimmer_v1 folder 

USAGE OF SLIDERS AND PREVIEW WINDOWS (BASIC MODE):

• Run QD_video_trimmer_v1_1.exe 
• Browse a video file .mov or .mp4 (may also work with other file formats but not tested)
• Use sliders to select desired starting (top one) and ending (lower one) points for your new video clip 
• Press Trim and soon you should find trimmed copy from the path of original file e.g. original.mp4 --> original_clip0.mp4, original_clip1.mp4, etc. (original video resolution and codec are )

USAGE OF BOOKMARKS MODE:

• Program supports VLC bookmarks stored at .m3u format 
• With VLC, create and store bookmarks only for one video per bookmark file and save it into same path as video file 
• Amount of bookmarks per file does not matter, but they are treated as pair: odd ones are start points for trim and even ones are stop points 
• Now one can browse this created bookmark file and it will be automatically processed and clips will be generated as described above 

DEVELOPMENT AND TEST PLATFORM

• Windows 10 64-bit 
• FFMPEG 20180410-d64183e 
• VLC 3.0.4 (different versions may have different bookmark file structure and may not work properly)

KNOWN ISSUES

• Scandinavian letters like ä and ö may not be supported in file names and paths 
• RAM consumption may increase while using preview windows and sliders (should not be the issue in bookmark mode). As a workaround, after some usage period, program restart may be beneficial. 
• If video file locates in root folder e.g. c:/ the writing permissions of OS may prevent proper operation. Hence, place your video file into another path. 
• For long videos (longer than 10 minutes) sliders may get inconvenient to use due to scaling and in this case it could be beneficial to use bookmark mode instead. 

LICENCE AND MISC

• You can freely utilize the program in your non-commercial and commercial video editing tasks.
• You can freely copy and distribute the program.
• You cannot reverse engineer the program or benefit commercially from it e.g. by selling it.
• If you feel unsure about the licence or you have any questions, feel free to contact me. 
• This is just hobby project and some support/improvements could be arranged depending on my resources and I will always appreciate constructive feedback. 
• If you enjoy to use QD video trimmer, acknowledgement will always make Sumppihuuhkaja glad. Happy trimming!

Free GIMP Luminosity Mask plugin

Luminosity mask is sweet method for tuning images and more information below the hood can be found for example here and with Google.

Workflow requires quite many mouse clicks and after few images I decided to write Python script for it as a hobby. Tested on Win10_64bit and with Gimp 2.8 & 2.10. However, no guarantees are given anyway and use it with your own risk.

Installation instructions

1. Download plugin file from here
2. Close GIMP 
3. Move downloaded create_luminosity_masks.py file into path C:\Users\<your_user_name>\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\2.10\plug-ins 
4. Done 

Usage

1. Start GIMP
2. Open desired image
3. Select (or make active) the image from layers-brushes window 
4. Browse into Colors>Auto>Luminosity masks... 
5. Briefly one should find created masks in layers-brushes window 
6. Enjoy 

Few words about the licence
You can freely utilize the plugin in your non-commercial and commercial image editing tasks.
You can freely copy, share and distribute the plugin.
You cannot modify or use the parts of the plugin source code in your own projects or benefit commercially in anyway from it without Sumppihuuhkaja's permission.

Acknowledgement makes Sumppihuuhkaja happy!

Static MAC address for gaming with Linux Mint

After a couple of years of silent time in the field of gaming I decided to invest and purchased Counter Strike Global Offensive (CS-GO) via Steam market. On the previous weekend I had tried slightly my old Counter Strike Source, but it seemed that most of the gamers had moved to play newer CS-GO and games were lame.

Purchasing and installation went nicely, thanks to Steam software and game started to run instantly. I was just a bit worried about my mobile net via my Samsung Galaxy S3 4G and its ping. Even though the connection is 50 Mbit/s 4G with unlimited transfer. Fortunately, ping turned out to be desirable within 25-80 ms range depending on server location. Only some short ping peaks with a maximum value of ~300 ms occurred occasionally. However, these peaks actually started to feel frequent and annoying because they, of course, took place in the most critical moments and ruined whole gaming.

Stopwatch showed that peaks occurred after every ~120 seconds, thus it was not random. Possible reasons for this odd behavior were: game server, server of internet service provider (ISP), mobile phone and operating system (OS). It could not be a game server because other gamers did not share the same pain. I turned off all updates and synchronizations from the phone and OS too, but they did not help. ISP and mobile phone were excluded by testing with another phone (iPhone4) and another ISP which neither removed the problem. Thus, it was Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon 64-bit OS (Cinnamon version 2.2.16 and kernel 3.13.0-39-generic) with high probability.

After googling for a while and getting frustrated about reading tens of discussion threads a solution was found. MAC address for wireless network must be set static so that wireless adapter does not try to refresh connections after every 2 minutes which basically kills the connection for a short time. Setting MAC address static is shown in the pics below.

The problem was totally gone after these actions. From discussion threads it was found that 4G connections of Saunalahti ISP are behind NAT (at least currently) which makes it impossible to host games where others are joining outside the LAN because there does not exist proper IP address. This is just for your information.

Now, after over 10 hours of gaming I am still happy about the purchase and the 4G connection which really can be used for gaming. Based on this experience the advantages of wired ADSL over wireless 4G are negligible. Also the total costs per month are only half from ADSL with 4G. But lets see what happens in the long run.

Preface

The time has come for blogging and as usual, I am again starting something after it was cool. Even better is that I have no idea what I am doing, so let's see what happens.

Cheers,
Sumppihuuhkaja