Category Archives: ubuntu

Even a python can be abused 3

The first programming language I coded in is QuickBasic. I loved the simplicity and especially the IDE. It made things simple for a starter. Later I discovered Visual Basic which extended the same simplicity and added the “Visual” element with a splendid editor for GUI. In between I did some projects using Java, C#, C, [...]

Visualizing mpeg4 motion compensation vectors using mplayer 2

The MPEG4 video encoding process makes use of block motion compensation to achieve compression. The motion compensation process serves to produce the intra frames which are the frames between keyframes. I’ve always been fascinated by this process and was delighted to find out that my favorite video player, mplayer, allows one to visualize this process. [...]

Creating video thumbnails using ffmpeg 24

Generating thumbnails/screenshots of a video is useful in many ways. Youtube and many other video sites use this to show a preview of the video as a small thumbnail. Google video captures a series of thumbnails from a video at various time intervals to show a better video preview.

Create PDF thumbnails using ImageMagick on Linux 7

I have a bunch of PDF files for which I wanted to generate thumbnails. On looking around a bit, I found “ImageMagick“. Since I have Ubuntu installed, I did sudo apt-get install imagemagick It is not too big a download at around 740KB. To create a thumbnails for all pages in the PDF document (say [...]