Play an interlaced video without those funny lines

Problem
I wanted to watch a DVD but it was interlaced, thus it contained lots of disturbing horizontal lines. How to get rid of those lines? Is there a way to filter them out?

Solution
Mplayer has an option for that :) Try this:

mplayer -vf pp=lb interlaced_video.iso

This procedure is called deinterlacing.

_{Tip from here. Image borrowed from here.}

Update
VLC can do this too. Available under Video -> Deinterlace. You can also choose the deinterlacing method under Video -> Deinterlace mode.

Play the first 30 seconds of a song with mplayer

mplayer -endpos 00:00:30 song.mp3

I have an alarm script that loads a bunch of MP3s and starts playing them in random order in the morning. However, some songs are very long, some of them are boring, etc. So I prefer playing just the first X seconds of each song.

This tip is from here.

Screenshot and video information with mplayer

Let our test file be “/tmp/test.wmv“.

Getting video info

mplayer '/tmp/test.wmv' -ao null -vo null -frames 1 -identify

It will produce a long output. You can refine the output:

(mplayer '/tmp/test.wmv' -ao null -vo null -frames 1 -identify | grep ID_) 2>/dev/null

Again, it will produce a long output that I omit. The video length is here (given is sec.):

ID_LENGTH=119.93

Another interesting line is the video summary:

(mplayer '/tmp/test.wmv' -ao null -vo null -frames 1 -identify | grep 'VIDEO:') 2>/dev/null

Sample output:

VIDEO:  [WMV3]  320x240  24bpp  1000.000 fps  386.0 kbps (47.1 kbyte/s)

Taking a screenshot at a given time

mplayer '/tmp/test.wmv' -ss '20' -noautosub -frames 1 -ao null -vo png:outdir='/tmp'

Here we take a screenshot from the video at 20 sec. The output file will be /tmp/00000001.png (mplayer gives this name automatically).

Ref.: I found these tricks in this project.

Configure Midnight Commander to open files with custom application

Problem

You use Midnight Commander (mc) for all your file operations. So far it’s not a problem :) However, when you hit Enter on a file, you would like to set what application mc should use for opening the given file.

For instance, you want to open an .avi file with VLC instead of X player, etc.

Solution

Steps to follow:

cd ~/.mc
cp /etc/mc/mc.ext .
ln -s mc.ext bindings

That is, copy the global mc.ext to your local .mc directory and put a symbolic link on it called bindings. Now you can start customizing your local mc.ext file.

Don’t forget to restart mc after editing mc.ext!

Examples:

(1) You want to open all your video files with VLC. You also want to add support for .wmv files.

# add these lines
regex/\.([wW][mM][vV])$
    Include=video

# modify the include/video section
include/video
    #Open=(mplayer %f >/dev/null 2>&1 &)   # for mplayer
    Open=(vlc %f >/dev/null 2>&1 &)   # for VLC

(2) Open .docx files with OpenOffice.org.

# add these lines
regex/\.([Dd][oO][cC][xX])$
    Open=(ooffice %f &)

(Thanks for the mc mailing list for their help).

My mplayer settings

To customize mplayer, modify the file ~/.mplayer/config. Every time you launch mplayer, settings are read from this file. Reduce command-line arguments and put them in this file.

Here is my config file:

# Write your default config options here!

# Font
font=/home/jabba/.mplayer/fonts/comic.ttf

fs = "1"
#subfont-text-scale = "3"
subfont-text-scale = "4"
#subfont-text-scale = "5"
subcp = "iso-8859-2"
#aspect="4:3"
#aspect="16:9"

# audio output: ALSA
# PulseAudio caused a problem in Jaunty 9.04 beta
ao=alsa

# video driver
vo=xv

# Find subtitle files (1: load all subs containing movie name)
sub-fuzziness=1

# Font encoding
subfont-encoding=unicode

# Subtitle file encoding
utf8=yes

# Resample the font alphamap (10: bold black outline)
ffactor=10

# Font size (2: proportional to movie width)
subfont-autoscale=2

# Font blur radius (default: 2)
subfont-blur=1.0

# font outline thickness (default: 2)
subfont-outline=1.0

For subtitles I use the Comic font. Download it somewhere and specify its absolute path. Videos start in fullscreen (fs). Previously I had some problems with the accents in Hungarian subtitles but with subcp I managed to solve it. The other settings are mainly for the subtitles.