I’ve been having an issue with the latest version of Growl (1.3.1) where notifications randomly get “stuck.” No amount of clicking and option-clicking will make them go away. Until there’s a fix for this, I’m using a brute force restart to clear them¹. I have it set up as an alias (killgrowl) in my .bash_profile and as a LaunchBar action (Restart Growl.scpt). It’s a really simple command:

killall Growl && open -a Growl

And in an AppleScript in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions/Relaunch Growl.scpt

do shell script "killall Growl && open -a Growl"

Easy enough, right? You could run the AppleScript from any launcher (e.g. FastScripts), too. Like I said, brute force and lacking in any elegance, but it’ll get me through until a fix comes out.

Related posts:

1. Clear sticky Growl notifications with a keyboard shortcut
2. MultiMarkdown Quick Look with Style
3. nvALT 1.0.5 (quick fixes)

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Quick Tip: Quickly clear stuck Growl notifications

What it does

The script is specifically designed to take an MPEG-4, H.264 file, move it to a new folder based on the filename, create WEBM and OGV versions of it in the new folder, and upload the whole folder to a server using rsync. SSH information and target directories are specified in the config at the top of the script. At the end, it takes what it knows about the files and filenames and creates a TextMate Markdown blog template, inserts the video shortcode for the VideoJS WordPress plugin (which is common syntax for other plugins as well) and opens it for editing in TextMate. The rsync command really needs keyless SSH login for this to be considered fully-automated.

If you run this script with Hazel, you can just render an H.264 video (.mov files that pass the H.264 test¹ will automatically be renamed to .mp4) to that folder from your screen-recording application of choice, sit back for a few minutes (or start writing the post) and wait for the pre-populated TextMate blog post to pop open. Then type or paste your text in, hit Control-Command-P (assuming you’re set up for TextMate->WordPress blogging) and your video is posted.

Improvements

The first thing that happened in this rewrite was a major simplification of the WEBM encoding process, which now only takes a third of the time it did before and the files are not significantly larger in most cases. They may even look better. The old command involved two passes, one of them turning out to be unnecessary; ffmpeg is smarter than I thought. The new command (using the variables from the script) is just /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$FILENAME" -b 614400 -s $MAXSIZE -aspect 16:9 "$BASENAME".webm.

I also added better logging, optional progress reports with Growl, batch file handling and a few other refinements. The logging, if enabled in the config at the top, will output information including processing time for each file and total processing time to STDOUT (command line) and to the system log where you can watch it from Console. If you enable growl notifications, the messages at the beginning and end of each conversion will be “growled” on your screen.

Using the script

You’ll need a couple of additional utilities to do the conversions.

Requirements

To run the script and do the encoding, you’ll need ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora. You can install ffmpeg from Homebrew (brew install ffmpeg) quite easily, if you’re set up for that. You can also pull the binary out of ffmpegX with a few simple steps. You can, of course, build your own if you have the developer tools installed.

ffmpeg2theora (needed for OGV conversion) no longer appears to be available from brew, but there are OS X binaries (and source) available for download.

The script is below. You’ll want to modify the information in the configuration section at the top, and modify the template output at the bottom to suit your needs. Anything between <<-POSTTEMPLATE and POSTTEMPLATE is freeform text that you can edit in any way you like, including the use of $variables. If you’d rather do something such as copy a shortcode to your clipboard and show a Growl message, just use pbcopy and growlnotify. You could also just comment out the template part and let Hazel tell you when it’s done, if you want to handle things more manually. I’ll let you work out the details on that.

Command line usage

To use the script from the command line, save it as “html5encode.sh” somewhere in your path, change to its parent folder in Terminal and run chmod a+x html5encode.sh. The you can run it on any h.264 .mov or .mp4 file and it will handle the rest. It also handles batches, so you can specify multiple targets or use *.mp4 to run it on all .mp4 files in a folder. It will process them one by one, creating new folders for each.

Hazel

If you want to run it with Hazel, you can follow the same procedure and set up a rule that runs a shell script when a .mov or .mp4 is detected in a watch folder. The script can then be run as a command or be pasted in its entirety into the Hazel script editor within the rule.

You should be able to pull off using this with OS X Folder Actions, as well, but I haven’t played with that yet.

Bonus tip: If you name your original .mov or .mp4 file with a CamelCased name, it will break apart the filename and create the title of your post based on it. Not an essential feature, but kind of nifty. Well, I think so anyway.

The script

View Raw | Download

#!/bin/bash
#################################################################
### html5encode.sh by Brett Terpstra and Mike Rose
### Published 05/01/2011
### Freely distributed, modifications welcomed (with attribution)
#################################################################
### Configuration ###############################################
#################################################################
MAXSIZE="960x540"
DISPLAYWIDTH="600"
DISPLAYHEIGHT="338"
SSHURL="username@ssh.host.name"
SSHDIR="/server/folder/target/for/rsync/"
WEBDIR="/front-end/url/path/video/" # used for blog template
LOGGING=true # send status messages and times to STDOUT and syslog
GROWLLOG=false # duplicate messages to growl, if installed
##################################################################
### END Configuration ############################################
##################################################################
 
# function to handle logging (if enabled) to STDOUT and STDERR 
# as well as Growl (if enabled)
function logit() {
  if $LOGGING ; then
    logger -st "HTML5 Encoder" "$1"
    if $GROWLLOG ; then
      /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -t "HTML5 Encoder" -a "Terminal" -m "$1"
    fi
  fi
}
 
# Count the inputs for log message
if [[ $# -gt 1 ]]; then
  logit "Starting batch conversion."
  maintimer1=`date '+%s'`
else
  logit "Starting HTML5 Encoder"
fi
 
# Loop through each passed file
for file in "$@"; do
  timer1=`date '+%s'`
  INPUT=$file
  # Check that input file is H.264
  isH264=`mdls -raw -name kMDItemCodecs $INPUT|grep H.264`
 
  if [ !$isH264 ] ; then
    logit "$INPUT is not h.264"
    continue
  fi
 
  DIRNAME=`dirname "$INPUT"`
  FILENAME=`basename "$INPUT"`
  BASENAME=${FILENAME%%.*}
  logit "Conversion of $FILENAME started on `date '+%D'` at `date '+%r'`"
  bytesize=`stat -f '%z' $FILENAME`
  filesize=`echo "scale = 2 ; $bytesize/1048576"|bc -lq`
  cd "$DIRNAME"
  if [ -d "$BASENAME" ]; then
    logit "Found $FILENAME, but directory $BASENAME already exists. Aborting"
    continue
  fi
  mkdir "$BASENAME"
  mv "$FILENAME" "$BASENAME/"
  cd "$BASENAME"
  if [[ ${FILENAME#*.} -eq "mov" ]]; then mv $FILENAME ${BASENAME}.mp4; fi  
  FILENAME=${BASENAME}.mp4
  /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$FILENAME" -b 614400 -s $MAXSIZE -aspect 16:9 "$BASENAME".webm
  logit "Completed webm conversion"
  /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg2theora --videoquality 5 --audioquality 1 --max_size $MAXSIZE "$FILENAME" -o "$BASENAME.ogv"
  logit "Completed ogv conversion"
  /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "$FILENAME" -ss 0 -vframes 1 -vcodec mjpeg -f image2 "${BASENAME}Poster.jpg"
  logit "Created poster image"
 
  # Create a title from camelcased filename
  TITLE=`echo "$BASENAME"|sed 's/\([A-Z][^A-Z]*\)/& /g'|sed 's/ $//'`
  SERVER=`echo "$SSHURL"|sed 's/^.*\@//'`
  logit "Uploading to $SERVER..."
  cd ..
  rsync -v -r -e ssh "`pwd`/$BASENAME" $SSHURL:$SSHDIR
  logit "Finished Uploading"
  # remove trailing slash from $WEBDIR
  WEBDIR=`echo "$WEBDIR"|sed 's/\/$//'`
  cat > "$BASENAME/$BASENAME.blog.markdown" <<-POSTTEMPLATE
Type: Blog Post (Markdown)
Blog: BlogsmithVideo
Title: $TITLE
Keywords: 
Status: draft
Pings: On
Comments: On
Category: Tutorial
 
Synopsis
 
[video mp4="$WEBDIR/$BASENAME/$BASENAME.mp4" ogg="$WEBDIR/$BASENAME/$BASENAME.ogv" webm="$WEBDIR/$BASENAME/$BASENAME.webm" poster="$WEBDIR/$BASENAME/${BASENAME}Poster.jpg" preload="true" width="$DISPLAYWIDTH" height="$DISPLAYHEIGHT"]
 
<!--more-->
Transcript
 
POSTTEMPLATE
 
  open "$BASENAME/$BASENAME.blog.markdown" -a "TextMate.app"
  timer2=`date '+%s'`
  time=`echo "scale=2 ; ($timer2-$timer1)/60"|bc -lq`
  logit "Conversion of $FILENAME complete"
  logit "It took $time minutes to process a ${filesize}M MP4 to webm and ogv and upload to `echo "$SSHURL"|sed 's/^.*\@//'`."
done
if [[ $# -gt 1 ]]; then
  maintimer2=`date '+%s'`
  total=`echo "scale=2 ; ($maintimer2-$maintimer1)/60"|bc -lq`
  logit "Batch conversion complete, total time $total minutes."
fi

Hopefully this will make a few people’s lives easier. Mike and I have battle tested it and it seems to be a pretty great fit for our needs. If you modify it for your own needs, please share (with credit) so that it can become as well-rounded as possible!

Related posts:

1. Automating HTML5 video encodes
2. Seriously easy HTML5 video encoding
3. oft: Bash function for opening a specific filetype

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Automated HTML5 video encoding revisited

It looks something like this (truncated):

background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KG...AAAAASUVORK5CYII=);

The image/png changes depending on the filetype that’s encoded, becoming image/jpg or image/gif, etc. Anyway, I got tired of shelling out to encode the images, so here’s a very simple command I set up in TextMate which allows me to drag any JPEG, PNG or GIF file into a CSS rule and get the background property with encoded image all at once. Don’t try it with big images, but for the kind of thing you’d actually put into a CSS file, it works great.

The command itself is this (it’s a one-liner):

# Drag command set to handle: jpg,png,gif
# scoped to: text.html.basic source.css.embedded.html, source.css meta.scope.property-list.css

openssl base64 -in "$TM_DROPPED_FILE" | awk -v ext="${TM_DROPPED_FILE#*.}" '{ str1=str1 $0 }END{ print "background:url(data:image/"ext";base64,"str1");" }'

It uses the openssl command that’s on a Mac by default. It encodes the file and outputs it to STDOUT, which is passed to awk. The extension of the dropped file is grabbed via Bash parameter substitution (${TM_DROPPED_FILE#*.}) and passed to awk where it’s subbed in and all of the line breaks are removed. Presto.

Here’s the actual TextMate command if you want to try it out and aren’t sure how to create a new one. Assuming you’re running TextMate (kind of a prerequisite for a TextMate command), just unzip and double click the file.

Related posts:

1. A TextMate Command for fast abbr tags
2. TextMate as WriteRoom, for free
3. Placeholder image TextMate Snippet

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at TextMate drag command for Base64 encoding images

• Open Automator and choose “Service” from the first menu.
• Tell it that the service “receives text” in “any application”.
• Drag the “Run Shell Script” action from the left side.
• Set the Shell to Ruby
• Paste in the code below (or something of your own, hopefully far more interesting)
• Save it with an intuitive name
• Use it.

require 'net/http'
require 'cgi'
 
input = STDIN.read
http = Net::HTTP.new('to.')
path = '/'
 
data = "url=#{CGI.escape(input.strip)}"
headers = {'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}
 
resp, data = http.post(path, data, headers)
 
if resp.code.to_i == 200
  print data.split(/value="/)[1].split(/"/)[0]
else
  print input
end

Basically, anything you can do to or with text or files using a major scripting language, you can make into a Snow Leopard service. Now that I’ve set the bar this low, I’d love to see what new Services everyone else is cooking up!

Update: Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. It works sometimes, but leaves url parameters in the shortened url half the time. I haven’t figured out why, but I’ll leave it up and see if someone can point out the error of my ways…Fixed it, just neglected to notice it needed a POST, not a GET

Update 2: Here, this one’s shorter and more useful :)

require 'open-uri'
require 'cgi'
 
input = STDIN.read
print open("http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=#{CGI.escape(input.strip)}").read

Related posts:

1. Is your URL too short? Try our system, free!
2. TextExpander: bit.ly with authentication
3. TextExpander experiments

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A System Service for to. url shortening

fp () { #find and list processes matching a case-insensitive partial-match string
        ps Ao pid,comm|awk '{match($0,/[^\/]+$/); print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)": "$1}'|grep -i $1|grep -v grep
}

fk () { 
    IFS=$'\n'
    PS3='Kill which process? (1 to cancel): '
    select OPT in "Cancel" $(fp $1); do
        if [ $OPT != "Cancel" ]; then
            kill $(echo $OPT|awk '{print $NF}')
        fi
        break
    done
    unset IFS
}

Related posts:

1. fk: a useful bash function
2. oft: Bash function for opening a specific filetype
3. Bash auto-complete for running applications

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at fk: redux