Tech Talk

We had a small tutorial session on preliminary ASIC design flow using synopsys and cadence tools. I was handling the tool demo while my guide introduced the concepts. We used VNC for demoing the tools, since I had set the entire thing on my work station.

One of the professors attending the session wanted to record the setup. I suggested vnc2swf to record the session, since we were not so keen on the voices. We only want to record “what menu, what choice and after what”! Anyways, as usual after a few technical glitches we managed to record the entire session in four SWF files. Interestingly, the combined file size was about 40-45MB. I guess lack of audio did the trick.

There is an internal wiki site where some of these recordings get hosted. We decided to host the files on that wiki, so that others can get to use it also. The problem started exactly here. How do you convert SWF to a flash movie like what they have on youtube? There are a bunch of proprietary solutions on google. I am the only guy who uses VNC for these things and I certainly don’t want to afford a converter!

There is a pyvnc2swf project that is hosted along side vnc2swf. Little did I realize that this project did exactly what I wanted. Power of using python? I was woken up by this forum via google. There is a simple edit.py that does the conversion. The command itself is
$ edit.py -o file.flv file.swf

And mplayer played the flash video fine, so I guess the web flash players would do the same too.

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I was viewing a video on youtube and suddenly thought I wanted to download the video for offline viewing. I have a fresh install of debian etch, a 1/21 CD install. So, you know what little tools are available on my machine. Above this I don’t have a really fast internet connection that I can afford the video twice. Of course, it was just a five minute video. But I had seen two minutes of it, which I didn’t want to download again. Actually, I started to see this video a week back, and every time I would cut it out at 1 minute!

I use Iceweasel that comes packed with etch and I had installed flash player 9 from the adobe website. I could not open a second tab and search for the youtube download plugin, because the download bandwidth was occupied entirely by youtube!! (Remember that mine is not a “broad”band connection!) So, I casually get to the /tmp folder and bingo, the video is getting buffered there as a single file (Flash**** something is the file name). I don’t know if this is how youtube videos are always played!? Well they had to get buffered somewhere, right? Now I have the video saved and without going through it a second time. If this is a bug, then you guys at youtube better have a look at this. Or else, hey this is just another simple way to download the video. Unless of course, you were using a download manager, that is.