Extract, cut, join and merge audio and video streams

This is mostly a note pad for myself with quick instructions about how to extract, cut, join and merge audio and video streams.

In Igalia we often hold meetings with several parties attending remotely. The easy setting of such meetings usually involve a shared desktop through VNC and a SIP call in a multi user room hold in our Asterisk installation.

When some of my Igalian mates cannot attend we may want to record the meeting so they can play it later. Fortunately, GNOME Shell provides integrated desktop recording out of the box and we have Asterisk set to record automatically our calls in specific multi user rooms.

So, all what it is left after a meeting is just to get both files, edit them slightly and sync them to merge them in a single multimedia container.

Usually, I would use Kdenlive in my video editing tasks. However, Kdenlive doesn’t support “video edition” without re-encoding and I would really like not to re-encode the whole stuff. Specially, the video stream. Therefore, I still will use Kdenlive for the task of syncing both streams and looking for the cutting points for both, the video and the audio file.

For most of this “without re-encoding” actions I will use the great avconv tool.

First, I will cut the video in the time 00:07:45 as starting point and 02:05:20 as ending point:

$ avconv -i screencast.webm -c:v copy -ss 00:07:45 -t 02:05:20 cut-screencast.mkv

This command basically demuxes the WebM container and extract the video stream between those two points to mux it again into a Matroska container.

Then, I will cut the audio in the starting point 00:02:13 and ending point 01:59:48. For editing OGG files we can use Oggscissors or OGG Video Tools’ oggCut .

You won’t find Oggscissors in Debian (the distribution I use). Therefore, you will have to download it and install pyvorbis and pyogg and, maybe, modify slightly the script to use the proper python interpreter. You can install the missing packages like this:

root$ apt-get install python-pyvorbis

Once with Oggscissors working, we can get the interesting audio chunk like:

$ oggscissors.py --from=133 --upto=7188 conf-call.ogg cut-confcall.ogg

or, with oggCut, like:

$ oggCut -s 133000 -e 7188000 conf-call.ogg cut-conf-call.ogg

It may happen that we actually want to extract the audio from another video file. This has happened to us, eventually, when wanting to use the audio from a synced file into another video with higher quality.

We will also use avconv for this:

$ avconv -i synced-video.ogv -map 0:1 -c:a copy synced-audio-output.ogg

It may also happen that we want to join a couple of OGG files since our SIP conf-calls sometimes have hiccups. With Oggscissors this will be done as follows:

$ oggscissors.py --join first.ogg second.ogg joint-output.ogg

With oggCat this will be done like:

$ oggCat joint-output.ogg first.ogg second.ogg

Finally, we will merge or mux the resulting video and audio files into a single media container. Again, with avconv this will be done like:

$ avconv -i final-screencast-conf-call.mkv -i cut-conf-call.ogg -c copy cut-screencast.mkv

Following the examples above this will result in a Matroska video file which contains a VP8 video stream and a Vorbis audio stream.

Hope you find this useful!

Switching between nouveau and the nVIDIA proprietary OpenGL driver in (Debian) GNU/Linux

So lately I’ve been devoting my time in Igalia around the GNU/Linux graphics stack focusing, more specifically, in Mesa, the most popular open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification.

When working in Mesa and piglit, its testing suite, quite often you would like to compare the results obtained when running a specific OpenGL code with one driver or another.

In the case of nVIDIA graphic cards we have the chance of comparing the default open source driver provided by Mesa, nouveau, or the proprietary driver provided by nVIDIA. For installing the nVIDIA driver you will have to run something like:

root$ apt-get install linux-headers nvidia-driver nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-xconfig nvidia-kernel-amd64

Changing from one driver to another involves several steps so I decided to create a dirty script for helping with this.

The actions done by this script are:

  1. Instruct your X Server to use the adequate X driver.
    These instructions apply to the X.org server only.
    When using the default nouveau driver in Debian, the X.org server is able to configure itself automatically. However, when using the nVIDIA driver you most probably will have to instruct the proper settings to X.org.
    nVIDIA provides the package nvidia-xconfig. This package provides a tool of the same name that will generate a X.org configuration file suitable to work with the nVIDIA X driver:

    root$ nvidia-xconfig 
    
    WARNING: Unable to locate/open X configuration file.
    
    Package xorg-server was not found in the pkg-config search path.
    Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xorg-server.pc'
    to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
    No package 'xorg-server' found
    New X configuration file written to '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'
    

    I have embedded this generated file into the provided custom script since it is suitable for my system:

        echo 'Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Layout0"
        Screen      0  "Screen0"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    EndSection
    
    Section "Files"
    EndSection
    
    Section "InputDevice"
        # generated from default
        Identifier     "Mouse0"
        Driver         "mouse"
        Option         "Protocol" "auto"
        Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
        Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
        Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
    EndSection
    
    Section "InputDevice"
        # generated from default
        Identifier     "Keyboard0"
        Driver         "kbd"
    EndSection
    
    Section "Monitor"
        Identifier     "Monitor0"
        VendorName     "Unknown"
        ModelName      "Unknown"
        HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0
        VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0
        Option         "DPMS"
    EndSection
    
    Section "Device"
        Identifier     "Device0"
        Driver         "nvidia"
        VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    EndSection
    
    Section "Screen"
        Identifier     "Screen0"
        Device         "Device0"
        Monitor        "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection     "Display"
            Depth       24
        EndSubSection
    EndSection
    ' > /etc/X11/xorg.conf
    

    I would recommend you to substitute this with another configuration file generated with nvidia-xconfig on your system.

  2. Select the proper GLX library.
    Fortunately, Debian provides the alternatives mechanism to select between one or the other.

    ALTERNATIVE=""
    

        ALTERNATIVE="/usr/lib/mesa-diverted"
    

        ALTERNATIVE="/usr/lib/nvidia"
    

    update-alternatives --set glx "${ALTERNATIVE}"
    
  3. Black list the module we don’t want the Linux kernel to load on start up.
    Again, in Debian, the nVIDIA driver package installs the file /etc/nvidia/nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf that is linked, then, from /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf instructing that the open source nouveau kernel driver for the graphic card should be avoided.
    When selecting nouveau, this script removes the soft link creating a new file which, instead of black listing nouveau’s driver, does it for the nVIDIA proprietary one:

        rm -f /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf
        echo "blacklist nvidia" > /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-blacklists-nvidia.conf
    

    When selecting nVIDIA, the previous file is removed and the soft link is restored.

  4. Re-generate the image used in the inital booting.
    This will ensure that we are using the proper kernel driver from the beginning of the booting of the system:

    update-initramfs -u
    

With these actions you will be already able to switch your running graphic driver.

You will switch to nouveau with:

root$ /alternate-nouveau-nvidia.sh nouveau
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/mesa-diverted to provide /usr/lib/glx (glx) in manual mode
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.17.0

nouveau successfully set. Reboot your system to apply the changes ...

And to the nVIDIA proprietary driver with:

root$ /alternate-nouveau-nvidia.sh nvidia
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/nvidia to provide /usr/lib/glx (glx) in manual mode
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.17.0

nvidia successfully set. Reboot your system to apply the changes ...

It is recommended to reboot the system although theoretically you could unload the kernel driver and restart the X.org server. The reason is that it has been reported that unloading the nVIDIA kernel driver and loading a different one is not always working correctly.

I hope this will be helpful for your hacking time!