Notices

hmm. makes me wonder where I went wrong.

I downloaded the script above, put it in /usr/bin, replacing the one I had there, ran chmod +x on it, and added the -x to the prefs in mytube. ...wouldn't download or play any video until I took the -x out of the myytube preferences...

Try running mytube from a terminal and see if you get any error messages.

Oh and for my next trick.. auto crop and scale of widescreen clips. It's a hack, but once it's ready it should be a simple drop in.

There you go again, brontide. Taking a perfectly good, working application...

...and making it better. Thanks.

Ok, here is the deal with the hack...

auto crop and scale imposes a long ( 8 seconds if downloaded, longer for streaming ) the first time a video gets played. It's the best I can do without rewriting this app to handle the post processing.

There is no delays after it gets played the first time.

What imposes this delay?

mplayer's cropdetect has to scan the video and spits out a stream of possible cropping suggestions. So I take and run mplayer on 1000 frames ( -benchmark -nosound so it goes full speed ) and then pick the proper crop for the video.

It's a one time penalty because I cache the results in a sqlite3 db for later retrieval.

I can probably get the time down for saved videos, but for streamed videos I'm not sure. I could also apply a new algorithm to try and deal with the edge cases with fewer frames. But for now that's the price of glorious full and widescreen mytube.

Thinking about the problem... yes i have another algorithm that I can apply. It's pretty easy in fact to get the time down and still have fewer edge cases. The new alogrithm will only detect no crop or proper letterboxing ( roughly equal top and bottom ). I will have to rewrite the code, but I think it should detect properly with much fewer frames ( and fewer frames = less latency on first play ).

100 frames... yep, that's less than a second delay for saved, and probably 3 seconds streaming. There are still misses, but this actually hits better than the last one with 1/10th the frames.

Of course, this leads me to think about using your cropdetect / aspect ratio algorithm in other situations...

For instance, I would love to see you work your magic with josiahg777's mplayer-opt script...