October
2006
Bluetoothed Mplayer
Recently I have bashed togther a windows based PVR system which records straight to Divx, which you can see in action here, that’s the background.
So yeah I was bored of getting up to use the keyboard to navigate around mplayer. So within five minutes I had a bluetooth HID (Human Interface Device) profile for my mobile phone, which maps the relevant phone keys to the computers keyboard. Quite niffty eh, who needs one of those pesky “one for all remotes” anyway?
You can download the hid profile here to try yourself, if you have Mplayer of course. You’ll have to bluetooth the file to your phone for best reults. I use the Sony Ericsson W810 walkman phone and the Belkin 10m bluetooth USB dongle, which actually still allows me to control mplayer from downstairs, even though the PC is upstairs!! Oh you may also need the screen image which is here.
Welcome to Lazy Town!
The joypad left and right jogs playback by 10 seconds, up and down by 60 seconds with the centre button being play/pause. Volume control is mapped to the phones erm, volume control buttons and there’s a range of niffty actions in there like playback speed of 4 times normal speed, the ability to go full screen, to cycle frame dropping modes, to bring up the OSD, to mark EDL points for advert breaks and the list is almost endless. Mplayer is extreamly flexible in its control, I just got tired of using the computer to control it that’s all. Hey it’s fun to play with stuff like this too.
The playback in GB-PVR is rubbish which is why I use mplayer, mainly because I know a heck of a lot of those little tricks you can do with filters and -vf this -ovc that.
Cutting out the adverts
It doesn’t stop there, oh no, I have a collection of mencoder scripts, which will to take a recorded TV show from a suitable PVR system (such as GB-PVR), set edit points to an EDL file when I press the ” i ” key, which I have to refine and clean up. The “chop” script can use the EDL file to skip over time periods, say from 300 seconds to 500 seconds, thus cutting out adverts it can then transcode and change the bitrate and aspect of that TV show and clean it up by adding blur or sharpen filters. Why do this? So I can cut out the adverts of course and set the aspect to work on a widescreen TV downstairs, when burned to a data DVD. Our DVD player can play Divx files and those scripts produce files which work in Windows Media Player as long as Divx is installed. It’s also nice to clean up file sizes and squish as much as possible onto a DVD.
