On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 02:46:26PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > > Iznogoud - Do you have access to a supercomputer? I had Minnesota > Supercomputing Institute (MSI) accounts for many years, but not > anymore. What are you doing with all the cores? > I have access to several here at MN and at other places. We do numerical simulation where I work. It is a lot of fun for the most part. I used to use the MSI's machines a lot when I was a graduate student in the late 90s. I had access to the SGI Origin and IBM/SP at the time. I did not use the Army Center's CM (Thinking Machines) or any of the Crays. Circa 2000 we built our own cluster and since then we have had 5-6 generations of them in our basement, all Linux. No, I do not mine for bitcoin! > About MPlayer -- your comment is intriguing. How could it change my > life? I thought it was just a video/audio player and I normally use > VLC instead. I guess I'm missing out on some really nice features. > I recommend that you take a look at what MPlayer does. You can put it in "interactive mode" and have it listen form commands coming from a unix pipe. You can sit at the other end (even typing by hand) and send commands; seek, crop, rotate, dump frame, etc, etc. The beauty is that you can manipulate its functionality without really having to code anything that uses its codecs or ffmpeg and all of that. The functionality becomes a black box via scripting on the command-line, or interactively through the pipes. Invest that time in it. Here is an example of extracting individual frames from a video: 'mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss "offset"' # "offset" is a number Here is an example of using a "video filter" that crops and rotates the image, and it drops every frame to a PNG image: 'mplayer -vf crop=172:622:170:0,rotate=1 -vo png video.mov' (The input video was an Apple's format; this is autodetected.) I believe this is a top Open Source Software project.