PHP on Wimpy's World

IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG-2 video, Part 2

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:48:36 +0000

UPDATE! I no longer use or maintain the script below. I suggest the vastly superior Sheet Maker for Linux.

Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place.

IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG-2 video

Today I’ve released v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September.

Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
Added usage instructions.
Added categorisation by Certificate.
Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
Added silent audio generation.
Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with jpeg2yuv.
Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
Never released to the public.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

IMDB-to-MPEG

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.

Netflix Has a Developer API

IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG-2 video

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:00:07 +0000

UPDATE! I no longer use or maintain the script below. I suggest the vastly superior Sheet Maker for Linux.

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll know I run Mediatomb DLNA server with my PlayStation 3 as the client, You’ll also know I am working towards importing my entire DVD collection into my Mediatomb server. However, my wife wants to know something about each film in the library without having to dig out the DVD case from storage. My solution is to include a MPEG-2 video displaying the film summary in the Mediatomb library for each DVD I have imported so it can be easily viewed from the PS3.

My script is called IMDB-to-MPEG and I’ve finally got round to uploading it.

IMDB-to-MPEG

The scripts takes one parameter as input, a film title. The plotline, year of release, genres, cast list and running time for that film are gathered from IMDB and formatted as text. Here is an example.

 The Usual Suspects (1995)

 A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and
 the key to this mystery lies with the only
 survivor and his twisted, convoluted story
 beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly
 random police lineup. (106 mins)

 Starring Stephen Baldwin as Michael McManus,
 Gabriel Byrne as Dean Keaton, Benicio Del Toro as
 Fred Fenster, Kevin Pollak as Todd Hockney, and
 Kevin Spacey as Roger 'Verbal' Kint.

 Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller.

 Rated 8.7 out of 10 from 227,964 votes.

The text is converted into an image and then encoded into a MPEG-2 video using the lowest possible bitrate/resolution that is acceptable to read when viewing on a 42" plasma from my sofa.

Directories for each matching genre are created and also one for the IMDB rating (rounded down). The MPEG-2 is stored in the ‘All’ folder and then symlinked to the genres and rating for that film. I then copy my video into the appropriate directory in ‘All’. For example.

 .
 |-- All
 |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects
 |       `-- About_The_Usual_Suspects.mpg
 |-- Genres
 |   |-- Crime
 |   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
 |   |-- Mystery
 |   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
 |   `-- Thriller
 |       `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
 |-- Ratings
 `-- 8
 `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects

This code was lashed up in a few hours, it ain’t pretty but it works for me on my Ubuntu systems, maybe it’ll work for you too.

Hacking WordTwit into WordDent

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:24:20 +0000

I have quickly forked WordTwit into WordDent. WordDent is a Wordpress plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Identi.ca account as a dent. It allows all your Identi.ca contacts to keep up to date with your blog postings. I’m still just testing that WordDent works correctly. I’ll find out if the nice people over at Brave New Code will agree to me releasing WordDent since I can’t fine any license details for WordTwit.

Blog post notifications to Twitter

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:45:12 +0000

I’ve just installed WordTwit on my blog. WordTwit keeps track of when you publish new posts, and automatically informs all of your followers by pushing out a Twitter tweet. All links are automatically converted to tiny URLs.

Simple iCal Server

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:20:28 +0000

For the longest time I have been meaning to setup a shared calendar for my wife I and to use. You see, like most men I have no idea when and where I am supposed to be. This is because my wife keeps all this information in her filofax and that lives in her handbag, somewhere I never venture. So I have spent this evening setting up PHP iCalendar on Lighttpd, and I am very happy with the results.

I have opted to use the publish.php add-on provided with PHP iCalendar, rather than add the WebDAV module to Lighty. For our modest requirements it works very well. We now have full read/write access to our calendar by using the Lightning extension for Thunderbird and read only access via the PHP iCalendar web interface. Viewing the calendar via the web interface requires a login first and the calendar publishing is protected by Lighty authentication using htdigest.

Lastly, because our calendar is a nice open standard I have options as to how I might sync it with my mobile phone. More on that when I figure it out.

Flexion.Org is re-activated!

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:22:43 +0000

I have finally got around to re-activating this website after many months of neglect. The first thing to do was move away from Jaws. Sadly, my Jaws installation is broken in a way that newer Jaws releases refuse to upgrade it.

I did some research and decided to migrate to Wordpress since it caters for all the essentials I require either in the core functionality or via plugins. Plus I can integrate with some other stuff I want to use.

The migration to Wordpress was made all the easier thanks to the excellent Jaws import plugin I found on the Wordpress trac. However, I decided not to use the Textile plugin to preserve the Jaws formatted text. Instead I chose to manually clean up some of the old entries so I could stick with the TinyMCE editor long term.

I am happy with Wordpress thus far and look forward to getting some plugins going and picking up a new theme over the coming days and weeks.

R3-born 0.1.1 is released!

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:59:45 +0000

R3-born 0.1.1 is released :-)

R3-born Core Change Log

Here are the main changes for this release. v0.1.1 : 9th March 2007

Added Akismet anti-spam API
Added a version checker for the Core and also for Blocks and Modules.
Added search bot (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc) detection.
Added logging (in Combined Log Format) to the R3-born Intrusion Prevention System.
Enhanced the Module API so it now supports safe updating and custom CSS for blocks and modules.
Enhanced the Layout Manager
Enhanced the Registration and Profile pages by separating them.
Enhanced the Template engine by back porting some features from phpBB 3.0.x
Optimised and fixed the Search API
Optimised and simplified Coloured Groups.
Improved the Groups Management ACP
Improved the Styles Management ACP
Fixed various bugs in the core.
Significant feature enhancements, bug fixes and optimisations added to the Menu and Who Is Online blocks.
Significant feature enhancements, bug fixes and optimisations added to the Comments, Downloads, Forum, Pages,
Private Messages, Weblogs and View Online modules.
New modules : bot_list, cookie, error, google, referrers and sql_backup
New blocks : recent_blogs, recent_comments, recent_pages, recent_topics, search, socmarks and visit_counter.

R3-born 0.1.1 has fulfilled its first major objective, which is to be functional enough to run a website.

R3-born 0.1.0 is released!

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:52:55 +0000

Finally, R3-born 0.1.0 is released. R3-born is a content management system for modest websites which I hope will be ideal for individuals running their own sites or small community websites.

Due to my accident I have not been able to address all of the bugs which have been reported recently and the downloads are only available as bzip2 tarballs right now. Please report any bugs you might encounter as 0.1.0 has really only been tested on Debian Sarge (stable) running PHP4 and MSQL 4. Feedback from other configurations will be useful and all reported bugs will be investigated.

Announcing R3-born

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:48:47 +0000

I suppose it is a bit silly to announce this just before I go on holiday but what the heck. R3-born is intended to be a simple and modular content management system for modest websites. My hope is that it will be ideal for individuals running their own sites or for small community websites. R3-born is coded in PHP (4.2.0 or better required) and requires an SQL database, currently MySQL 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, Postgres 7.x or better and MS-SQL 7.x or better are supported.

Current Status

Right now, R3-born is considered pre-alpha and not suitable for a production website but is ready for testers to start feeding back on bugs, feature requests and in the near future code changes. Development has been fairly rapid so far. I started the project in April 2006 and I hope to release a beta version of R3-born later in 2006.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/r3-born/

Comments off, Overdue update and R3-born

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 13:14:55 +0000

First of all, I have disabled comments on my blog. Jaws has spam protection and captachs but both implementations suck. This site doesn’t generate much feedback so disabling comments altogether is not really a problem. I haven’t updated the site recently and here is why. The 0.6.x release of Jaws is buggy and I still haven’t found anything else which fully meets my needs for managing my own web content.

Therefore for the last couple of months I have been working on an open source CMS of my own called R3-born. More details to follow about that soon, but you can find the project over at Sourceforge, don’t expect anything to work (although it does for the most part) it is pre-alpha and unreleased. SVN is the only way to snag the source.

R3-born

Project Minerva is coming home

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:42:11 +0000

Despite a generous offer from a Minerva enthusiast a year or so ago to freely host the Project Minerva sites, all the Project Minerva hosting is coming back to where it started and rightly belongs. Yes, right here with me. It just goes to show you really don’t get anything for free. The developers have had several outages with the server which was provided by SpiderTech Hosting, so we are bringing it back here where we can look after our interests directly.

Minerva users might be wondering if the fact I am fully hosting Project Minerva again means I am going to be developing for the project again. Well, we will just have to see but I did inform Chris of a little project I kicked off last week which may (or may not) lead to something.

Leaving Minerva

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:47:16 +0000

Yesterday was a sad day. I finally notified the core Minerva developers that I am leaving the project. Given that I started the project a few years back it was not a decision I made lightly.

I have a couple of reasons for leaving the project, the main one being that I just do not have the time available to effectively lead or contribute to the project. All open source projects require good leadership and I haven’t been able to provide that for most of 2005. It is with the best interests of Minerva in mind that I decided to leave.

However, Minerva is in very good hands and is under active development, with Dave and Chris leading the effort. I wish all the Minerva developers and users every success with the upcoming release of R4, it is a marvelous achievement and I am sure will prove to be very successful. I will be keeping an eye on R4 development, and if time permits, I may contribute some blocks and modules in the future. Until then, good luck and make me proud!

Introducing Stanley, a new theme for Jaws

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:29:53 +0000

I’ve finished hacking together a new theme for Jaws 0.5.x, which I have named Stanley, and is now the default theme on this site. I’ve still got to fix a couple of bugs and make sure that it is compatible with browsers other than Firefox. I wanted a theme which was crisp and clean, but also fully compatible with Jaws, so I decided to blend some of my favourite themes together. Stanley is inspired by the Kubrick theme which is popular among bloggers and although the Kubrick graphics have been borrowed the style sheet and layout are derived from the jaws, orange-grey and simple-green themes which are bundled with Jaws. As a result Stanley is properly Jaws compatible, in that left and right layouts work, all the CSS elements are supported and CSS tweaks are used throughout to improve the visual appeal.

Basic site layout complete

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:27:44 +0000

After fiddling around with the Jaws setup for a while I have finally settled on something which I’m happy with. Once I found the default_page setting in the registry I was very happy. I’ll enable more gadgets (plugins) as I find a use for them, but my next task will probably be creating my own theme or at least combining ideas from several existing themes.

Grrr, a site with teeth

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 09:10:10 +0000

Well, I have decided to get Flexion.Org on-line again and picked Jaws as the tool for the job. This might seem an odd choice considering I have been working on Minerva for the last 3 years, but there you are, life is strange.