Cheet’s Blog

Finally I figured out this workflow using free software on OS X, for my projects (they are produced into DVD but I need to take samples for Youtube). By doing this, I am leaving all the encoding work to Youtube, since it will re-encode your video anyway. Supplying the original file to Youtube directly will avoid any quality degradation from your local encoding works.

Here is how I do it:

1. Open your favourite video player that can playback the DVD or the VOB file (I use VLC Media Player), take a note of the start and end time of video you want to extract.
2. Use MPEG Streamclip to open the DVD or the VOB file), it will complain that it need Apple’s Quicktime MPEG-2 Playback codec ($20) to play the video. Ignore this, I am not going pay for that.
3. Press ⌘+G (jump to time), enter the start time you noted, press I (set In point). Press ⌘+G (jump to time), enter the end time you noted, press O (set Out point).
4. Press ⌘+T (trim), now you should have the section you wanted. Press ⌘+S (save) to save the extracted video clip. MPEG Streamclip will save it using original format (VOB) without conversion or re-encoding.
5. Verify your VOB clip by opening it with your favourite video player. Use the same procedure above to make adjustments.
6. Upload to Youtube*, even though Youtube said it doesn’t support VOB file, it actually works well (since it is just MPEG-2 video).

* The VOB file is likely to be very big. If you have slow connection / bandwidth limit / can’t wait, then you will be much better off by encoding the video to H.264 first

…当我只用Windows的时候，我并不知道Windows的缺点，我以为自己生活在一个完美的世界里。…

…Mac OS X真正闪光和留住用户的是他的设计哲学。那是简单，尽量不要让一些不必要的概念来干扰用户。…

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Do you know how to use Windows application on Mac/Linux? - Wine

An excellent article of installing Wine on Mac: http://davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/

How do you execute an .msi file on Mac/Linux? - Wine

Sometimes windows installers come with msi extension instead of regular exe extension. Such software can be installed with the msiexec command which comes with wine. For example to install a file setup.msi you will run: msiexec setup.msi

http://tech.gaeatimes.com/index.php/archive/how-to-install-windows-msi-installers-with-wine-on-linux/

Very easy A glass of Wine.

I’ve been trying to use the native Cisco IPSec VPN on Snow Leopard, but I only got the Cisco .pcf file….

Snow Leopard lacks the ability to import the .pcf file for its native Cisco VPN support, which is just annoying…Damn Apple..

What could I do with a .pcf file? I need a group password but (obviously) it is encrypted in the .pcf file.

Google reveals a somewhat “non-ethical” approach to this problem:

Open the .pcf file in a text editor. Copy the text from the ‘enc_GroupPwd’ field, paste it into the form on this web site: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/bin/cisco-decode and click ‘decode!’. Select and copy the text next to ‘clear:’ and go to the next step.
(Note: if there isn’t anything in ‘enc_GroupPwd’ but there is something in ‘GroupPwd’ they you can skip this step. Just copy the text from ‘GroupPwd’)

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