Playing multimedia with Dillo
What if you want to use a web browser like Dillo, which lacks JavaScript support and can’t play audio or video inside the browser? Dillo doesn’t have the capability to play audio or video directly from the browser, however it can easily offload this task to other programs. This page collects some examples of how to do watch videos and listen to audio tracks or podcasts by using an external player program. In particular we will cover mpv with yt-dlp which supports YouTube … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

• KMail – e-mail client
  
• Okular – PDF viewer
  
• Gwenview – image viewer
  
• Dolphin – file browser
  
• KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don’t get it.)
  
• KPatience – card game
  
• Kdenlive – video editor
  
• Kleopatra – certificate manager
  

Qt:

• VLC – video player
  
• Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don’t remember.)
  
• sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser
  

Gtk:

• Firefox – web browser
  
• Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can’t remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
  
• Audacity – audio editor
  
• GIMP – image editor
  

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn’t have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I’d definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz this is how i find out the videos are capped at a minute

I’d need to think about it deeply, but at a first sight, nanoblogging would be a simple text (like the original twtxt spec, aimed for TUIs), and microblogging (like Twitter was a few years ago), would be about sharing texts, images, videos, GIFs, links, and perhaps Markdown styling.

Why? You have shorter messages than in a blog, but you may add almost anything you could do in a blog.
Buuut… who knows?

A depressing video about the current state of printers that just ends with “fuck this, I’m gonna talk about my cat now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpHX_9fHNqE

And I just added a video clip of the woodpecker. As you can easily see from the shaking, it hammers so dang hard that the whole ground around the tree vibrates.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wonder if we watched the same video.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Just before the pandemic, we watched Uncle Bob videos once a week in the lunch break. While almost all of my old teammates agreed with his views, I partially found them to be very odd and even counterproductive.

I didn’t come across John Ousterhout or any of his work before, at least not deliberately. So, this document is my first contact.

I only finished the chapter on comments and I totally agree with John so far. This document just manifests to me how weird Bob’s view is on certain subjects.

I always disagreed with the concept of a maximum method length. Sure, generally, shorter functions are probably better, but it always depends. And I’ve certainly seen super short methods that just made the code flow even worse to follow. While “one function should only do one thing” is a nice general rule, I’m 100% in team John with the shown examples. There are cases, where this doesn’t help readability at all. Not even close.

To me, a function always has to justify its existence. Either by reusing it at least at another place or by coming up with dedicated tests for it. But if it is just called once and there are no tests, I almost always decide against it. Personally, I don’t mind longer methods. We just recently had a discussion about that and I lost against two other workmates who are more in Uncle Bob’s camp, they refactored one medium sized method into three very short ones. Luckily, we agree on most other topics.

Lol, what!? The shorter the method, the longer the variables inside? I first thought I misread or the writeup mixed it up. I’ll always do it the other way around.

I’ve been also bitten badly by outdated comments in the past, but Bob must have worked on really terrible projects to end up with such an attitude to dislike comments. Oh well. No doubt, I’ve come across by several orders of magnitude more useless comments, in my experience (autogenerated) JavaDocs fall in the category more frequently than not. So, I know that there are different types of comments. A comment doesn’t automatically mean that it is good and justified.

But I also partially agree with Bob and John and think that a good name has a proper chance to save a comment. Though, when in doubt, I go John’s route and use a shorter name with a comment rather than use a kilometer long identifier. Writing good comments typically takes some time, sometimes much longer than writing the code. It regularly takes me several minutes. It’s a hard art.

I perhaps should read up on John’s work. He seems to be more reasonable and likeminded. :-) Let me continue to complete this document.

Those are some impressive wigs: https://imgur.com/gallery/life-imitates-video-game-5KlJBhj I wonder how it feels to wear such a thing for a day – especially in summer. 😅🥵

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Mate, what an amazing video, holy cow! :-D We only get complete jokes of icicles compared to what you had there ealier today. It’s a giant wall. For how many days did that grow on your roof?

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Wooooaaaahhh! That is BY FAR the biggest icicle I’ve ever seen. Really cool! :-) How long did it take to melt in your sink? The video download is still dripping in, looking forward to that.

Some satisfying icicle-breaking in our backyard: photos.falsifian.org/video/sM7G3vfS6yuc/VID_20250217_203250.mp4

I couldn’t resist taking home a prize:

It’s been snowy here in #Toronto.

(I tried formatting the images in markdown for the benefit of yarn and any other clients that understand it.)

#photo #photos #winter

This Sculpt OS video walkthrough explains how to use Sculpt OS
We talk about the Genode project and Sculpt OS quite regularly on OSNews, but every time I’ve tried using Sculpt OS, I’ve always found it so different and so unique compared to everything else that I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I assume this stems from nothing but my own shortcomings, because the Genode project often hammers on the fact that Sculpt OS is in daily-driver use by a lot of people with … ⌘ Read more

Reviving a dead audio format: the return of ZZM
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends t … ⌘ Read more

Android 16 Beta 1 has started rolling out for Pixel devices
Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It’s still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some … ⌘ Read more

SDL 3.2.0 released
SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, has released version 3.2.0 of its development library. In case you don’t know what SDL is: Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve‘s award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. ↫ SDL website This new release has a lot of impr … ⌘ Read more

Auf arte läuft heute Abend “The Cure”. Erst eine Doku über die Band und jetzt das Jubiläumskonzert von 2018. https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/120866-000-A/the-cure-anniversary-1978-2018/

The editor can launch a new shell now:

https://movq.de/v/6ec68b50dd/los86-edit-shell.mp4

Trivial to implement but super useful. It allows for simple but meaningful dev cycles: Edit source code, run/test it, back to editor. That’s what I do in the video.

(The Brainfuck program is silly, but I got nothing else at the moment.)

The I/O cache is also getting better. All that back and forth doesn’t hit the disk at all, once cached.

This whole thing is much more fun and interesting when you run it from a real floppy disk. It’s a 5.25” floppy in the video (so it’s actually floppy 😅). Disk seek times can be catastrophic and you don’t notice any of this on modern disks.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i don’t even have like time or space to stream unless it was no mic/video and just me doing stuff on my computer which can be boring without even mic input. plus no way to use camcorder that way. but. it’d be cool if i could so i dream

i wanna make more videos…….. editing in shotcut is kinda fnu

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This video never gets old! :-) Now I ended up on https://brendangregg.com/specials.html#rshutdown and laughing my ass off. :-D

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz well even after doing the new fixes my invidious instance is still dead because google blocked my ip i think and i don’t have a proxy server so uhhhhhhhhhh. not much to watch unless i use videos on my server

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz am i in an idol video watching mood or play with single board computers mood

thanks to prologic i now know i can post video here. sorry for bringing idol fancams to this humble network do you still love me

testing video posts here’s a yunjin fancam

@prologic@twtxt.net mediacms! it’s janky yeah but it does the job ultimately (even if sometimes videos don’t encode and i gotta do some weird python venv shit to force the encode lol…)

changing my video site’s logo to this silly no thoughts head empty tux clip art. because i can. https://openclipart.org/detail/103855/tux-the-penguin

Should Waymo Robotaxis Always Stop For Pedestrians In Crosswalks?
“My feet are already in the crosswalk,” says Geoffrey A. Fowler, a San Francisco-based tech columnist for the Washington Post. In a video he takes one step from the curb, then stops to see if Waymo robotaxis will stop for him. And they often didn’t.

Waymo’s position? Their cars consider “signals of pedestrian intent” including forward motion wh … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh nah it came out like that lol! i actually love how squished it looks it feels accurate lol

oh yeah i think i might have a tripod around but i do need a sandbag or something i could use as one. maybe yeah a giant bag of rice could work LOL. thanks for the tips!!! i took a video class last year in college and we worked with cameras and tripods with sandbags so it was on my mind

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah! as long as it’s fun :D experimenting with it like picking up the camera every once in a while to point somewhere else, or in editing inserting more video in between the static angles, that could be fun!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Yiha! I reckon the video is a bit squished together on the horizontal axis. Maybe your video site messed something up in postprocessing? No idea. Anyway, you’re already better at guitar than I ever was.

If you don’t wanna buy a tripod, you could make yourself a makeshift one with some sort of a sandbag, cherry pit pillow or an old, cut off and sewn shut trouser leg section filled with rice, lentils, etc. This gives you a shapeable surface where you can simply rest the camcorder on. It allows for some limited vertical up and down pitch. Obviously, that won’t work for extreme angles, but might be just enough for your application of recording at your desk. You just have to watch out for the side to side roll, this could otherwise lead to a slanted sailboat video. ;-)

i recorded my first camcorder video!!!! it’s just me practicing guitar after sooo long of not playing it. my acoustic, to be specific (well, it’s an electric acoustic thing but i can play it without plugging it in lol, i do have a stratocaster though). it’s capped at ~30 minutes because i used one mini DVD for it and decided i wasn’t gonna use another one to extend the run time. so yeah. it was super fun! i hope i can share it soon, i’m ripping the disc with make MKV right now, then i’ll re-encode to a web friendly format, and upload to my site and hope that works well

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org it’d be a blast to record too with my camcorder! i’d have to figure out positioning and stuff like you said but i could probably figure something out with a bit of testing :P yeah it probably does make the project itself longer than it should be but i feel like if you make it a cozy kinda “sew with me” video where people watch you sew and film it with a static angle instead of like, showing every step? i think that’d be nice even if a bit boring. so i could absolutely try that.

magnetic tape camcorders omg!!! mine is digital but i’d LOVE to get a tape camcorder

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’m an absolute sucker for all sorts of crafts videos, mostly wood and metal working, but also leather and construction. So obviously, your Tux sewing project would make a good video in my opinion. :-D (But I fear it would require way more work than just talking into the camera. Think of camera setup time with framing and focusing, repositioning a couple of times, editing, yada, yada, yada. I documented wood working build processes in my shop in the past and it made the projects take easily ten times as long, if not more. So, I stopped doing that.)

As kids we recorded some action films on magnetic tape camcorders. That was also great fun.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I never used DOS or OS/2, but I fully agree with you. A Unix shell with its tool landscape is hard to beat (photo/video viewing/editing aside).

need to come up with ideas for camcorder videos… i have one but it’s just ‘talk in front of camera about fave songs i listened to in 2024’ and i wanna do more fun things even though rambling in front of cam is already fun af

i want to make camcorder videos with this girl’s vibe she is insane https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg9isnie-qBpPIWx4ZQOnJw

my camcorder videos are gonna go so hard yall like i can post them exclusively to my own youtube site and just do whatever tf i want with it. i should make more vlogs

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i think what i love about “retro” (relative to me because i was born 2004) is that it has friction but in a different way than modern tech does. sure there’s friction with getting a video from your phone to a computer unless you’re a nerd like me with android and syncthing. but not only is that something that could be but isn’t easier, it’s just… it makes sense for a camcorder from ~2009 to have the kind of friction it does

I want to share the video of my last talk: Creating an Instagram in Django for an Iberian lynx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW69cYIULh8

(Spanish) #django #python

I’ve been making a little toy operating system for the 8086 in the last few days. Now that was a lot of fun!

I don’t plan on making that code public. This is purely a learning project for myself. I think going for real-mode 8086 + BIOS is a good idea as a first step. I am well aware that this isn’t going anywhere – but now I’ve gained some experience and learned a ton of stuff, so maybe 32 bit or even 64 bit mode might be doable in the future? We’ll see.

It provides a syscall interface, can launch processes, read/write files (in a very simple filesystem).

Here’s a video where I run it natively on my old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop (and Warp 3 later in the video, because why not):

https://movq.de/v/893daaa548/los86-p133-warp3.mp4

(Sorry for the skewed video. It’s a glossy display and super hard to film this.)

It starts with the laptop’s boot menu and then boots into the kernel and launches a shell as PID 1. From there, I can launch other processes (anything I enter is a new process, except for the exit at the end) and they return the shell afterwards.

And a screenshot running in QEMU:

found it, it’s ‘-video_size’

@bender@twtxt.net Well, so far, I’m using the standard web client. Haven’t found a great client yet. 🫤 Mastodon/Fediverse is also very different from twtxt, there are way more images/videos that I’d like to see – a TUI client like toot wouldn’t work for me.

Dunno, maybe I’ll make some changes in this area after christmas. Try self-hosting again or something like that …

Because I don’t have capacity on my server to host and stream video and I want others to be able to find the video.

I’m gonna upload my part of the video to youtube and the slides to my website within a day or two. Then you can add it to yarn.social etc.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net you mean This? if your browser doesn’t jump to the 00h26m56s time(-frame?) automatically you know where to look ;)

Wow! Just Wow! 😮 Discovered this whilst trying to debug why my Youtube frontend no longer works:

$ youtube-dl 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpiK1FMy2Mg'
[youtube] YpiK1FMy2Mg: Downloading webpage
WARNING: unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Portion of the modified Twitter TOS that goes into effect today (it’s on right now), as summarised (ironically) by Google’s Gemini:

“In simpler terms, this means that when you share your content (like text, images, or videos) on the service, you’re giving the company permission to use it in various ways. They can copy, modify, distribute, and even use it to train their AI models. This includes sharing your content with others and using it on other platforms. You won’t be paid for this, but using the service itself is considered enough compensation.”

I’m seeing strange lights in the sky. None of my cameras are sensitive enough to make a video.

It’s probably one of two things:

1. A ship on the nearby river with a lightshow going. It’s rare but it happens.
   
2. A steap hill nearby, cars driving “upwards”, and since super bright LED lights are normal nowadays, they reflect from the clouds.
   

Either way, looks fancy.

i’m kinda bummed that i haven’t had the time/energy to get further into my media infrastructure projects. a federated tiktok with good decentralized storage would be a force to be reckoned with. i don’t have to be first though. solving the fundamental problems of decentralized video streaming will make for a better experience anyway. i also have too many projects so i can’t get after myself for being a little behind the curve in several areas at once lol