Converting Video to Image Sequences with ffmpeg

Another little aide-memoire masquerading as a blog post; the specific incantation required to turn a video into a named sequence of images with ffmpeg is…

ffmpeg -i <path to source video>  -vf fps=<frames per second> <output directory/basename->%d.png

…where…

<path to source video> is the path to the video file in question.
<frames per second> is the number of frames per second of footage to extract. This can be less than 1 if you wish to extract at a lower rate than one frame per second.
<output directory/basename->%d.png is a composite instruction to create files in the directory ‘output directory’, for these files to have the prefix ‘basename-‘, and for these files to have an incrementing count appended to the end. It also specifies that the output files should be in the ‘.png’ format.

Getting Red Hat Linux 5.2 up and running on 86Box

A somewhat oddly rendered Feb 2024 google.com in Netscape 4 on Red Hat Linux 5.2. I suppose we’re lucky a 26 old browser can access google at all..!

Introduction

One of my longer-running goals for Period Sites in Period Browsers was to include a good number of non-Windows hosted web browsers and the first stage in that is the creation of a functioning instance of the operating system hosted within an easily managed virtual machine. Unfortunately, whenever I’ve tried to install premillennial versions of linux within QEMU, I have categorically failed.

And, given the lack of guides on the internet, I’m not the only one.

In this guide we’re going to install and configure a working (albeit non-perfect) version of 1998’s Red Hat Linux 5.2. By the end of this guide we will produce a Red Hat Linux 5.2 install with a working network connection and functioning XWindows/Desktop environment.

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Counting Chrome Tabs on MacOS (Or, I have an open tabs problem!)

Another aide-mémoire; open Chrome tabs can, on MacOS, be counted via the following incantation. This particular incantation will pull the tab count from all open windows – minimised or otherwise – without the need to activate Chrome in any way.

osascript -e{'set text item delimiters to linefeed','tell app"google chrome"to url of tabs of windows as text'} | wc -l

Which, when run on my currently open set of tabs, comes back with a number slightly higher than 4,000.

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Disabling Windows XP Ballon Tips

And it’s time for an aide-mémoire for a fact that seems to be disappearing into the ether.

Windows XP bubble tips can be disabled by:

  • Opening Regedit
  • Navigating to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
  • Creating a new String value of ‘EnableBubbleTips’.
  • Setting this value to ‘0’.
  • Restarting Windows.

86Box config for RedHat 4.X

Recently I’ve been playing around in 86Box (build 3.7.1 for MacOS to be precise!) with 1997’s Red Hat Linux 4.2. After a little fiddling I seem to have got it mostly working – with one major caveat; I have had real issues with getting X/FVWM to work with any other display resolution than 640*480. Should I come up with a solution I shall, of course, update this page.

Linux Kernel 2.0.30? Gosh!
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