Improvements to film summaries embedded in videos
Improvements to film summaries embedded in videos

UPDATE! I no longer use or maintain the script below. I suggest the vastly superior Sheet Maker for Linux.

Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place.

Today I’ve released v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September.

  • Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
  • Added usage instructions.
  • Added categorisation by Certificate.
  • Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
  • Added silent audio generation.
  • Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
  • Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
  • Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with jpeg2yuv.
  • Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
  • Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
  • Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

  • Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
  • Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
  • MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
  • Never released to the public.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.