I despise Docker Desktop. Before I knew anything about docker or containers, all I knew was that it was in the required software list for my work for building our software. All I knew was that if it wasn’t open, my build would fail and if it was open, my laptop would slow down to a crawl.

Eventually I took classes on Docker for work and learned quite a bit about it. I learned that I could use docker from command line with no UI, and I wouldn’t take anywhere near the performance hit. I eventually linked my IDE docker runtime to podman running on WSL2. Now I take pretty much no noticable performance hit.

TL;DR: you can replace Docker Desktop with WSL2 command line commands and have no UI.

I always squash my commits before rebasing. Is your way easier? I never really seem to have a problem with merge conflicts.

Totally agreed the run time difference matters sometimes. In my experience it’s hasn’t been the case for scripts, as they are generally small in scope in comparison to C++ applications.

I’ll take a look at Click. Something better than argparse definitely piques my interest, because while the features are great, it feels a little cumbersome at times.

So you’re wasting hours of development time to save a couple of milliseconds of run time.

If that’s your only criteria for choosing a language, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Do you do any scripts beyond extremely simple ones?

I do a fuck ton of scripting in both bash and python. I never want to do string manipulation in bash. As soon as string manipulation is required, I automatically choose python for a script. Also, if I need named arguments or multiple levels of arguments for subcommands. You can use sys.argv for basic args, which isn’t any harder than bash arguments, but for complex inputs, argparse is a godsend. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it can handle anything. Bash requires you to write complex arg handling manually with loops and reducing.

I put a hours of research into this, and I felt like documentation was difficult to understand, so I wanted to pass along what I’ve learned! I hope it works for you.

Your reminder worked! Here is the command I used. I put it in a script, and would pass it the file I wanted to convert.

ffmpeg -i "$1" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -map 0 -c:s copy "${1%.*}.h265.mkv" > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null &

If I called this script convert_to_h265.sh, I would call it with convert_to_h265.sh some_video.mkv

Here is an explanation for the options I used:

ffmpeg is the command
-i "$1" is the input file. In this case, the argument to the script
-vcodec libx265 is specifying the plugin to use as libx265
-crf 28 is specifying the quality/compression rate. I found this one to be pretty acceptable
-map 0 makes it select ALL audio tracks and ALL subtitle tracks
-c:s copy copies subtitle tracks
"${1%.*}.h265.mkv" specifies the output file. In this case, everything up to the last dot, then replace the extension with ‘.h265.mkv’
> ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null tells the program to output to a log file instead of writing to your terminal. It also sets the input to nothing, and without that, it won’t work in a script for some reason.
& tells the whole thing run in the background so it doesn’t hold up your terminal. You can even close your terminal and do other things and check back on it later.

You can monitor the progress with tail -f convert_logs

If you want to get fancy, you can even put this in a loop to run on all the files that end in .mkv in the current directory:

for i in *.mkv; do
       ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -map 0 -c:s copy "${i%.*}.h265.mkv" > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null
done

And if you want to get mega fancy, you can have it run recursively for all files that end in .mkv in the current directory and all files in all child directories.

shopt -s globstar
for i in **/*.mkv; do
        ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -map 0 -c:s copy "${i%.*}.h265.mkv" > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null
done

If you do either of the latter two, I would put it in a script. Let’s call the first one convert_all_to_h265.sh and the second one convert_all_to_h265_recursively.sh. Call them with convert_all_to_h265.sh & and convert_all_to_h265_recursively.sh & if you want to run them in the background.

You also might want to play around with the -crf 28 value if you want more compression or more quality. The lower the number, the better the quality. It needs to be a value between 0 and 51.

I put it in a script, so I’ll need to check my server later.

Do we have a remindme bot here?

I converted all my ripped Blu Rays over the past couple of weeks. I just used ffmpeg. It took a a while to find the right options to keep subtitles and multiple audio channels and such, but eventually I got it all perfect.

I found that using my GPU made the quality absolute shit. It was about 3x faster than using my CPU though.

🤚 0=false, 1=true

👉 0=true, 1=false

Please, JS peeps, don’t do this to us 🤦

I don’t use python too often, but I need to use it every once in a while. Every fucking time I get the red squiggly under “true” and I’m sitting there for a second like, “…the fuck??? Ohhhhh, right.”

Every time.

Google: developers should use Go.
Google: no not like that.

Yikes. I pay $80 a month for 1Gbps up and down with no data cap. It’s amazing what happens when one company doesn’t have a monopoly in an area. Prices go down and quality of service goes up.

I feel like I would never get along with anyone who has an attitude of “I believe X. Change my mind.” I can’t imagine anyone starting a conversation that way is not an asshole.

All Google needs to do is make a public RCS API. Then we will have all the important features iMessage has on Android via regular texting. I have no fucking clue why they are making RCS exclusive to their messaging app.

I just sent another one. If you don’t see it, can you try DMing me?

I think you may have me confused with someone else because I don’t contribute much of interest. 😅

Hi, I’m still interested in containerizing this. I sent you a DM, but I don’t know if you saw it. :)

Mine goes really deep, so just spraying it wouldn’t work for me. I gotta shove my pinky in there, and it’s mildly uncomfortable. But yes, I do it daily. When I was younger I didn’t do it consistently, and what would come out when I would clean looked a little disturbing.