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Methanar
Sep 26, 2013

by the sex ghost

PersonFromPorlock posted:

Question the first: Is there any handy program, free to moderately priced (let's say, up to $150), that will take a video file (an MP4 or maybe ProRes or whatever) and spit out MPEG DASH files ready for streaming, at several resolutions and bit rates? I know it can be done manually from the command line with FFmpeg and MP4Box, but that's time consuming and quite frankly mind numbing. If I had a program that could just do it for me, it would be worth its weight in gold. If it can batch process, platinum.

Any program to do that for you is going to be a wrapper around ffmpeg and every bit as complicated to use and instead just expose the very same flags and arguments to you.

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Motronic
Nov 6, 2009

Memento posted:

Is half-and-half just half cream and half milk?

Yeah. Half whole milk and half HEAVY cream.

I dunno how cream is sold down under, but there is a stark different between heavy/whipping (40% milkfat) and light cream (18%) in the us. And we have several types of milk too with varying fat levels.....whole (3.25%), 2%, 1% and skim typically around my area.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

PersonFromPorlock posted:

Question the second: I'm a amateur photographer (very amateur). Film photographer that is -- I simply could never get into digital. I typically process the film myself but I've run into a bit of a road block. I'm not keen on prints, I shoot reversal (slide) film. When reversing black and white film, you need a bleach bath between the first and second development stages. I have always, for the last twenty-five years, used concentrated sulfuric acid for the bleaching agent. Back in the day, I just went to the local camera store and bought it by the gallon. That place has been gone a decade or more. I can find nowhere that carries 100% sulfuric acid now, not even after filling out a DEA form. I could use battery acid, it's the same stuff, but it's only about 30% the strength of concentrated acid and it would throw off all my timing -- I'd have to learn again how long to leave the film soaking and that would be troublesome, as it's all really down to rote memory at this point. Does anyone know of a seller?

I have no idea how price-competitive they are, or how willing they are to sell to random folks, but you might look into laboratory suppliers. For example, Carolina sells 18M sulfuric acid in 2.5L bottles.

Hyperlynx
Sep 13, 2015

I guess you could distil it from drain cleaner


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgUH0HXrOKE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DUGRWjdNLI

Also, regarding the format conversion stuff, you can buy dedicated hardware to do it for you, if that works for you. I know https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ make em.

Hyperlynx fucked around with this message at 05:01 on May 5, 2021

Vegetable
Oct 22, 2010

El Jeffe posted:

Real recognize real?

Scarodactyl posted:

Game recognize game?
Both work for me, thanks!

Memento
Aug 25, 2009


Bleak Gremlin

Motronic posted:

Yeah. Half whole milk and half HEAVY cream.

I dunno how cream is sold down under, but there is a stark different between heavy/whipping (40% milkfat) and light cream (18%) in the us. And we have several types of milk too with varying fat levels.....whole (3.25%), 2%, 1% and skim typically around my area.

Right, cheers. I can get 35% "pure" cream, I assume I don't want "thickened" cream because the thickeners might not play well with the drink. From there the next step up is 56% "double cream", which sounds like way too much.

I'll get some 35% and mix it with the 4% milk I have - I can't imagine it will be easy to mess this up.

By the way, if you're into coffee liqueur at all, Mr Black is an Australian brand that has just started selling in the US and they make a really good product.

https://mrblack.co/

Motronic
Nov 6, 2009

Memento posted:

By the way, if you're into coffee liqueur at all, Mr Black is an Australian brand that has just started selling in the US and they make a really good product.

https://mrblack.co/

Ohhhhhh, this is absolutely my kind of thing. Cheers.

E: dammit answering your question just cost me $75 because of course I had to order 2.

Motronic fucked around with this message at 05:28 on May 5, 2021

alnilam
Nov 10, 2009

PersonFromPorlock posted:

Question the second: I'm a amateur photographer (very amateur). Film photographer that is -- I simply could never get into digital. I typically process the film myself but I've run into a bit of a road block. I'm not keen on prints, I shoot reversal (slide) film. When reversing black and white film, you need a bleach bath between the first and second development stages. I have always, for the last twenty-five years, used concentrated sulfuric acid for the bleaching agent. Back in the day, I just went to the local camera store and bought it by the gallon. That place has been gone a decade or more. I can find nowhere that carries 100% sulfuric acid now, not even after filling out a DEA form. I could use battery acid, it's the same stuff, but it's only about 30% the strength of concentrated acid and it would throw off all my timing -- I'd have to learn again how long to leave the film soaking and that would be troublesome, as it's all really down to rote memory at this point. Does anyone know of a seller?

There's a film thread in The Dorkroom with lots of people who have darkrooms in their house, probably a great place to ask.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Is there a way to completely empty your Watch Later list on YouTube? All the instructions I could find for doing so relied on features that seem to have been completely removed from the site.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Unrelated question:

I frequently use an OCR app on my phone to upload text to my Google drive. Sometimes it very conveniently has "Upload to My Drive" in the top row of shortcuts. Other times "Drive" is in the bottom row of shortcuts, which means I have to confirm the folder I want to upload to. But a lot of the time other apps show up there that I literally never use the Share function with at all. Is there some way I can manually customise these lists?



I used WhatsApp today for the first time in months and it's just grabbed three of the four spaces in the top row. I have literally never Shared to OCR, Firefox or Cx File Explorer, but there they are in the second row. How can I get rid of this garbage and put useful stuff there?

dirby
Sep 21, 2004


Helping goons with math

Drunk Driver Dad posted:

So what do I need to buy? I'm fine with the firestick or roku thing as long as I can operate it as described.
The newish Chromecast with Google TV is a fire stick competitor (it can work as you described) and can do things the others probably can't (e.g. connect to a PS4 controller and let you play Android games or stream PC games)

Manager Hoyden
Mar 5, 2020

What is the best program for filling out pdf forms that don't have fillable text fields? Just picking a font/size and writing on a pdf.

I have Acrobat and it is an absolute slog getting anything done in it.

greazeball
Feb 4, 2003



I use the free Foxit pdf reader for that

CzarChasm
Mar 14, 2009

I don't like it when you're watching me eat.

Tiggum posted:

Is there a way to completely empty your Watch Later list on YouTube? All the instructions I could find for doing so relied on features that seem to have been completely removed from the site.

There's two ways to do it depending on how your list is and what you have already watched. Both from the Watch Later list/screen. Also assuming desktop and not mobile.

On the Watch Later screen it is divided in 3 sections. Your menu on the left (Home, subscriptions, playlists, etc.), Then the section with the thumbnail of the first video, and under that "Watch Later", then more info like how many vids are in the list. And on the right is the list of vids itself.

In the middle section, there should be three dots, and if you click on that there should be an option to remove watched videos. It will prompt a confirmation, and if you click OK/remove, it will clear all the watched items from your list.

The other way to do it, which is a bit slower is to go to the list of vids on the right, and as you hover over each video there will be a three dot menu there on the far right side. Click on that and choose remove from watch later list. This sucks a bit i fyou have a lot of vids to go through as you have to do them one by one.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


CzarChasm posted:

The other way to do it, which is a bit slower is to go to the list of vids on the right, and as you hover over each video there will be a three dot menu there on the far right side. Click on that and choose remove from watch later list. This sucks a bit i fyou have a lot of vids to go through as you have to do them one by one.
There's an easier way to remove videos one by one: Click the first video in the list to play it, scroll down, and click the rubbish bin icon beside each video in the queue.

But what I'm looking for is a way to remove every video all at once - because I've got over 3000 unwatched videos in my Watch Later list and I want them all gone.

tuyop
Sep 15, 2006

Every second that we're not growing BASIL is a second wasted

Fun Shoe

PersonFromPorlock posted:

Question the first: Is there any handy program, free to moderately priced (let's say, up to $150), that will take a video file (an MP4 or maybe ProRes or whatever) and spit out MPEG DASH files ready for streaming, at several resolutions and bit rates? I know it can be done manually from the command line with FFmpeg and MP4Box, but that's time consuming and quite frankly mind numbing. If I had a program that could just do it for me, it would be worth its weight in gold. If it can batch process, platinum.

You’ll want to use a shell script for this, like it shouldn’t be something you do manually more than once or twice to test.

Boba Pearl
Dec 27, 2019

by Athanatos
https://www.alphr.com/delete-all-watch-later-videos-youtube/

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.



As mentioned in the comments on that article, that method doesn't work any more.

Methanar
Sep 26, 2013

by the sex ghost

PersonFromPorlock posted:

that's time consuming and quite frankly mind numbing. If I had a program that could just do it for me, it would be worth its weight in gold. If it can batch process, platinum.


bruh

code:
for f in files/*.mp4; do
ffmpeg -i $f -yourshit -o dash-${f}
done

Crankit
Feb 7, 2011

HE WATCHES

Tiggum posted:

There's an easier way to remove videos one by one: Click the first video in the list to play it, scroll down, and click the rubbish bin icon beside each video in the queue.

But what I'm looking for is a way to remove every video all at once - because I've got over 3000 unwatched videos in my Watch Later list and I want them all gone.

I had a similar, well 100 vid, problem like this, i found a url to the classic interface of youtube which then allowed me to use old features which aren't in the new interface, sadly i don't remember the details but hopefully searching for youtube classic interface will help.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Crankit posted:

I had a similar, well 100 vid, problem like this, i found a url to the classic interface of youtube which then allowed me to use old features which aren't in the new interface, sadly i don't remember the details but hopefully searching for youtube classic interface will help.

Yeah, I used to use that disable_polymer trick but it stopped working a few months ago.

Trapick
Apr 17, 2006

Could you set a tab to just play through your watch later and go to bed? Not a quick solution but they'll eventually clear out.

Crankit
Feb 7, 2011

HE WATCHES

Tiggum posted:

Yeah, I used to use that disable_polymer trick but it stopped working a few months ago.

Are you any kind of webdev/scripting guy, there's a youtube API that can change items in playlists.

Gobbeldygook
May 13, 2009
Hates Native American people and tries to justify their genocides.

Put this racist on ignore immediately!

PersonFromPorlock posted:

Question the second: I'm a amateur photographer (very amateur). Film photographer that is -- I simply could never get into digital. I typically process the film myself but I've run into a bit of a road block. I'm not keen on prints, I shoot reversal (slide) film. When reversing black and white film, you need a bleach bath between the first and second development stages. I have always, for the last twenty-five years, used concentrated sulfuric acid for the bleaching agent. Back in the day, I just went to the local camera store and bought it by the gallon. That place has been gone a decade or more. I can find nowhere that carries 100% sulfuric acid now, not even after filling out a DEA form. I could use battery acid, it's the same stuff, but it's only about 30% the strength of concentrated acid and it would throw off all my timing -- I'd have to learn again how long to leave the film soaking and that would be troublesome, as it's all really down to rote memory at this point. Does anyone know of a seller?
Yes.

FreshFeesh
Jun 3, 2007

Drum Solo
When my grandfather died about 20 years ago he left me two Maasai spears and a shield, acquired by unknown means during his African safaris in the 1960s and 70s. I have zero interest in keeping the artifacts, and unfortunately I didn't get a response back from the Maasai Cultural Heritage Center asking if they would be interested in their repatriation.

Are there other groups or organizations specializing in African heritage I could reach out to? My cursory searches didn't pull up anything promising.

PersonFromPorlock
Jan 27, 2019

That's true!
Great. I've never had much success with any of the alternatives to potassium dichromate and concentrated sulfuric acid as a bleach, and I'm completely out of my old stock of acid. I understand dichromate is illegal to sell in much of Europe and you've got to make due with the inferior permanganate. I do hope it doesn't come to that here. Enough chemicals already you've got to fill out DEA forms swearing you're going to use them for photographic film processing and not as drugs/weapons/bombs.

Edit: And thank you to everyone else who answered as well.

PersonFromPorlock fucked around with this message at 01:38 on May 7, 2021

Crankit
Feb 7, 2011

HE WATCHES
How do landline phones separate the talking from listening, when you talk you don't hear your own voice in the headset do you?

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.

Crankit posted:

How do landline phones separate the talking from listening, when you talk you don't hear your own voice in the headset do you?

This takes place in the telephone hybrid, and specifically there are anti‐sidetone circuits that control but do not totally eliminate feedback.

e: If you want circuit diagrams, this post has a few.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 03:03 on May 7, 2021

Motronic
Nov 6, 2009

Crankit posted:

How do landline phones separate the talking from listening, when you talk you don't hear your own voice in the headset do you?

You do, and if it wasn't there you would probably think the phone was broken.

I don't understand your question about "separating talking and listening" though. I mean.....you talk into a microphone, you listen on a speaker. They are attached to different wires that go to different places.

Crankit
Feb 7, 2011

HE WATCHES

Motronic posted:

You do, and if it wasn't there you would probably think the phone was broken.

I don't understand your question about "separating talking and listening" though. I mean.....you talk into a microphone, you listen on a speaker. They are attached to different wires that go to different places.

I don't think I ever heard my voice in it, but I've not used one in... 15 years maybe. But ultimately your voice goes into the same wires that the other person's voice comes out of.

Motronic
Nov 6, 2009

Crankit posted:

I don't think I ever heard my voice in it, but I've not used one in... 15 years maybe. But ultimately your voice goes into the same wires that the other person's voice comes out of.

So you're asking how it works electrically. That would be impedance matching.......and lookie here Platystemon posted the wiki article right before I posted.

Platystemon posted:

This takes place in the telephone hybrid, and specifically there are anti‐sidetone circuits that control but do not totally eliminate feedback.

e: If you want circuit diagrams, this post has a few.

There are things you are "used to" about phones that you probably don't realize. Talkback into the earpiece is one and noise is the other. We can totally get rid of noise when people aren't speaking but it sounds like the line is dead and it's unnerving. In VoIP we don't want to use the bandwidth to send silence so we generate "comfort noise" on the receiving end. It's literally fake noise.

Motronic fucked around with this message at 03:14 on May 7, 2021

Crankit
Feb 7, 2011

HE WATCHES

Platystemon posted:

This takes place in the telephone hybrid, and specifically there are anti‐sidetone circuits that control but do not totally eliminate feedback.

e: If you want circuit diagrams, this post has a few.

Yeah the snack exchange post is great thanks

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.
Lots of weird stuff went on behind the scenes in telephony.

People believe that a dial tone could be heard when the other party hung up, because that usually happened in the movies, but some may recall that as untrue. Hollywood was one of few areas where the dial tone could be heard after hangup, as Tom Scott explains, and even in such locales, you only heard it if you received the call.

The “step by step” switching showcased in that video meant that there was a time in which “tracing the call” was legitimately dramatic. Detectives had to have a technician standing by in the room with the switch gear to work out the connection while it was active. If the perp hung up, the switches reset and the trail was broken. Clifford Stoll talks about the West German police doing this in The Cuckoo’s Egg, circa 1987, and it was antiquated even then. Another very Hollywood move he pulled was to tap phone lines in the Berkley computer lab and stash printers in the attic, recording all text that went through the modem. The hacker was clever about watching his back and covering his tracks within the computer. The printers sidestepped that and were not detectible to anyone outside the building.

An old anti‐eavesdropping trick came up recently in the Lost Media References thread. Jam the rotary dialler out of position with a pen. The contact to connect the speaker to the line was engaged only in the resting position, because no one wanted the speaker blaring at them as the dial made its pulses. With no electrical connection, there could be no eavesdropping via the speaker (which of course functions in reverse as a microphone).

It came up in the Aeronautical Insanity thread, of all places, that music sounds terrible over the phone because the backend has layers of tricks that have built up over the years that maintain acceptable voice quality but absolutely murder other waveforms. Telcos have long used frequency‐division multiplexing to get more conversations over a wire. It’s like having a little radio station for each caller, with the voice frequencies riding atop higher‐frequency carrier waves.



https://www.britannica.com/technology/telecommunication/Multiplexing

Telephone companies went digital long before your desktop did, and in doing so they used early audio codecs at low bitrates. Saved telcos a bunch of money on trunk capacity, not great for sound quality, and we are largely stuck with that decision today. Sometimes same‐carrier calls can get higher quality, or you can sidestep the issue with VOIP like Facetime Audio or whichever service Google has not yet discontinued.

It could be worse. Early rural customers had not just party lines, but single‐line telephony using condenser telephones. That had to have been interesting in the rain.

alnilam
Nov 10, 2009

Platystemon posted:

Hollywood was one of few areas where the dial tone could be heard after hangup, as Tom Scott explains, and even in such locales, you only heard it if you received the call.


Oh my god that has always driven me crazy in movies, that explains so much

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Trapick posted:

Could you set a tab to just play through your watch later and go to bed? Not a quick solution but they'll eventually clear out.
Only if I didn't mind it showing all those videos as having been watched - which would annoy me greatly, even if I don't really use my watch history for anything.

Crankit posted:

Are you any kind of webdev/scripting guy, there's a youtube API that can change items in playlists.
Unfortunately no.


Thanks for the suggestions though.

Methanar
Sep 26, 2013

by the sex ghost

Tiggum posted:

Only if I didn't mind it showing all those videos as having been watched - which would annoy me greatly, even if I don't really use my watch history for anything.

Unfortunately no.


Thanks for the suggestions though.

time to learn selenium.

You might even be able to make an autohotkey macro to just click through the list for you.

regulargonzalez
Aug 18, 2006
UNGH LET ME LICK THOSE BOOTS DADDY HULU ;-* ;-* ;-* YES YES GIVE ME ALL THE CORPORATE CUMMIES :shepspends: :shepspends: :shepspends: ADBLOCK USERS DESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY, DON'T THEY DADDY?
WHEN THE RICH GET RICHER I GET HORNIER :a2m::a2m::a2m::a2m:

Platystemon posted:

Lots of weird stuff went on behind the scenes in telephony.

People believe that a dial tone could be heard when the other party hung up, because that usually happened in the movies, but some may recall that as untrue. Hollywood was one of few areas where the dial tone could be heard after hangup, as Tom Scott explains, and even in such locales, you only heard it if you received the call.

The “step by step” switching showcased in that video meant that there was a time in which “tracing the call” was legitimately dramatic. Detectives had to have a technician standing by in the room with the switch gear to work out the connection while it was active. If the perp hung up, the switches reset and the trail was broken. Clifford Stoll talks about the West German police doing this in The Cuckoo’s Egg, circa 1987, and it was antiquated even then. Another very Hollywood move he pulled was to tap phone lines in the Berkley computer lab and stash printers in the attic, recording all text that went through the modem. The hacker was clever about watching his back and covering his tracks within the computer. The printers sidestepped that and were not detectible to anyone outside the building.

An old anti‐eavesdropping trick came up recently in the Lost Media References thread. Jam the rotary dialler out of position with a pen. The contact to connect the speaker to the line was engaged only in the resting position, because no one wanted the speaker blaring at them as the dial made its pulses. With no electrical connection, there could be no eavesdropping via the speaker (which of course functions in reverse as a microphone).

It came up in the Aeronautical Insanity thread, of all places, that music sounds terrible over the phone because the backend has layers of tricks that have built up over the years that maintain acceptable voice quality but absolutely murder other waveforms. Telcos have long used frequency‐division multiplexing to get more conversations over a wire. It’s like having a little radio station for each caller, with the voice frequencies riding atop higher‐frequency carrier waves.



https://www.britannica.com/technology/telecommunication/Multiplexing

Telephone companies went digital long before your desktop did, and in doing so they used early audio codecs at low bitrates. Saved telcos a bunch of money on trunk capacity, not great for sound quality, and we are largely stuck with that decision today. Sometimes same‐carrier calls can get higher quality, or you can sidestep the issue with VOIP like Facetime Audio or whichever service Google has not yet discontinued.

It could be worse. Early rural customers had not just party lines, but single‐line telephony using condenser telephones. That had to have been interesting in the rain.
Great stuff. I remember reading about how, due to the low overall bandwidth of phone lines, sounds below some frequency were attenuated almost to the point of non-existence and that because of this, male voices should be almost unintelligible ... except that they could depend on the psycho-acoustical phenomenon of the missing fundamental https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental

Clever af

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


You know how Windows sometimes just refuses to unmount a USB drive because some unspecified program is supposedly still using it? And obviously what you actually do is try to eject it a couple more times and then give up and unplug it anyway. But what are you actually supposed to do in that situation? Do they want you to reboot your computer to remove a thumb drive?

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.
I think that rebooting is the way Microsoft intends you to handle this.

There are of course ways of finding which process is using the drive, and then that process can be terminated, but nothing that your elderly relatives (or younger relatives) would be comfortable with.

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BonHair
Apr 28, 2007

Re: telephones: the compression thing (Fourier transformation if I remember it right) that cuts of the parts of the signal that isn't relevant to speech is specifically why all the good drat waiting music sounds like absolute crap. It is essentially impossible to get listenable waiting music for your call center, so don't bother trying.

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