Video

This is a quick post to remind me of two things: 1) ShareX is the tool of choice for screen recordings on Windows. 2) On high-DPI (4K) screens there is a mouse pointer offset that can easily be fixed.

Many web meeting services have a recording functionality. Most recordings are provided as MP4 files with the video encoded in H.264 because that offers the most universal compatibility. However, it also needs a lot of disk space. H.264 has a successor, H.265, which only requires half the space for the same visual quality. This post shows how to use StaxRip, a free tool, to re-encode H.264 video into H.265 quickly by making use of GPU hardware encoding.

Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video formats, codecs, and GPU acceleration techniques is at work to make it all happen. This post explains what is what.

This is an update to my post on how to convert Quicktime videos in MOV format to MPEG-2. Recently a friend of mine asked me how my conversion script could be used for a slightly different camera model. While I use it for the videos from my Lumix LX3, he owns a TZ7, which uses slightly different parameters that make it necessary to tweak the script. Luckily those changes are small.

My simple yet effective batch file-based solution for converting digital videos in Quicktime MOV format from Panasonic Lumix and other cameras to MPEG-2, MEncode.cmd, now supports wildcards, too. Now you can run the following command to create MPEG-2 versions of all MOV files copied over from your camera:

Updates: Update 1: Fixed bugs in the batch file and made it available for download Update 2: Wildcards are now supported Update 3: Timestamps are now copied from source to destination files. For this, touch.exe is needed. Update 4: File names with spaces in them are now handled correctly I recently bought a new compact digital photo camera, Panasonic’s Lumix LX3. Although I acquired it solely for its still image capabilities, I quickly discovered that it records video in very high quality, especially when compared to my digital video camera, a JVC model equipped with a hard disk on which video files are stored in MPEG-2 format in DVD resolution.