Cutting MTS file for Youtube

One thing I really hate about youtube (I think many others do too) is the crazy 10 minute limit. I know it as recently extended to 15 minutes but so what! But to be fair, even with this limitation, youtube is still probably the best site for video sharing.

It is especially annoying to me since we try to have a student presentation every week and post our videos on Youtube.  The videos are typically an hour long and cutting all these can easily waste someone couple hours. Youtube is nice enough to accept MTS file but without a way of cutting it, what is the point.

After some searches and trials, I tested several windows software. They did the job but still I would prefer something more automatic. So after copying here and there, I compile a python script for that eventually. I use mencoder to cut the file. But since mencoder doesn’t seem to be able to cut MTS file, I have to convert it to mp4 first (again using mencoder). The script seems to work fine for my JVC HM200BU. The output file is big and youtube will take long time to process those files. But I care less about that. It is not my tiny desktop running transcoding anyway. So here is the python script

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
   import os
   import re
   import commands
   import string
   import math
   import datetime

def cutVideo(movie,segment_time):
   cmd="mplayer -frames 0 -identify %s.mp4 2>&1|grep ID_LENGTH|cut -f2 -d=" % movie # get video length
   print cmd
   len=commands.getoutput(cmd);
   print len
   movie_len=datetime.timedelta(seconds=math.ceil(string.atof(len)))
   start_time=datetime.timedelta(seconds=0)
   cut_len=datetime.timedelta(minutes=segment_time)

   print movie_len
   count=1
   while 1:
	   cmd = "mencoder -ss %s -endpos %s -oac copy -ovc copy %s.mp4 -o %s_%d.avi" % (start_time,cut_len,movie,movie,count)
	   os.system(cmd) # extract segment

   	   count=count+1
   	   start_time = start_time + cut_len

           if start_time > movie_len:
   		  break

if __name__ == "__main__":
   fin=sys.argv[1]
   bname=re.sub('\.mts$','',fin,1)
   bname=re.sub('\.MTS$','',bname,1)
   fout="%s.mp4" % bname
   cmd="mencoder %s -demuxer lavf -oac copy -ovc copy -of lavf=mp4 -o %s" % (fin,fout)
   os.system(cmd) # convert to mp4
   cutVideo(bname,10) # cut video into 10 minute segments
   cmd="rm %s" % fout
   os.system(cmd) # remove tmp file

Save the file as cutMTS.py and change it to “run” permission (chmod 755 cutMTS.py). To cut a file 00001.MTS, simple type

./cutMTS.py 00001.MTS

It will generate several avi files 00001_1.avi, 00001_2.avi, and so on. Each of them will be 10 minutes long. If one wants to change the length of the video segment, simply change the argument in the line cutVideo(bname, 10). For example, for 15 minute segment, change 10 to 15.

smbmount doesn’t work in 10.10

An annoying change I felt for 10.10 is that it doesn’t allow normal user to mount network drive by default anymore. I’m not sure why this is a sensible change. Maybe it is more secure for somebody but for me, it is just a horrible inconvenience. A simple workaround for me is to add the following line to /etc/fstab

\\\\<your remote windows host ip>\\<your remote windows host folder> /home/<your username>/<your local mount> smbfs username=<your username>,password=<your password>,user,errors=remount-ro 0       1

This will allow you use smbmount as before with

smbmount \\\\<your remote windows host ip>\\<your remote windows host folder> /home/<your username>/<your local mount>

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that I can umount it after it is mount. Please let me know if you know how. But I’ll just bear with it for now.

Some update: my 10.10 keeps complaining my nvidia driver (my gdm stops starting itself every time I reboot) and so I have to reinstall the video driver every time I restart (thank god(s) that this is linux, I only reboot like once a month).  However, the mount drives seem to be broken when I do that. Maybe it is because one of my network adapter is a usb plugin. Luckily, if I hibernate my computer, it doesn’t go hibernate but seems to fix the problem. Don’t know why but it just happens.

Close button back to the right side

It has been addressed in many posts such as this. I include this just as a personal note. The random decision by Ubuntu is quite a bit annoying sometimes, even though I still love it…