SmartPhone video on PC - old dogs and new tricks!

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TenderFoot
Posts: 130
Joined: Sun May 03, 2009 2:34 pm

SmartPhone video on PC - old dogs and new tricks!

#1 Post by TenderFoot »

Over recent recent years I have sometimes found it preferable to record interesting (to me) events as videos rather stills, usually with a (proper) camera but occasionally with my smartphone - either bacause I forgot the camera or had battery issues. Yesterday was the latter!

Unfortunately I'm somewhat incompetent with the smartphone camera (actually the word camera is redundant in that statement) not least because outdoors, especially if there's any sun, the screen is almost impossible to read compounding my difficulties (give me an optical viewfinder every time)!

However, today it occurred to me that I have never transferred any pics or vids from smartphone to PC for viewing though have done it the other way. At the time I was using Win but when videos are played using Vlc, they displayed sideways in landscape mode and could find no obvious way to correct this. After a search found a tutorial which suggested that Vlc could convert it but although it did the rotation it didn't change the aspect ratio and then froze, so closed it! (Furthermore, Vlc would no longer launch yet task manager showed it still running so killed it but whilst searching for an alternative noticed very high cpu usage, so back in task manager discovered that it was still running as a background process hogging 50% cpu so killed that too!)

Time to return to MX (though I don't think it can take all the credit for this). Launched Vlc to see if it could successfully perform the the conversion. No need. It must read the meta data and automatically play in portrait mode. Game over!

Interestingly - though not really surprising - still captures retain the original orientation but are easily rotated elsewhere but the magnification is excellent given the original source (Ok, probably not good enough for an A2 print but that's not really the objective and anyway lack the atmospheric twittering of birds or heady puffing of a steam loco...!).

[BTW Have now installed latest Vlc 3.0.4 to Win but still no joy there.]

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c4os
Posts: 29
Joined: Tue Jun 19, 2018 12:28 pm

Re: SmartPhone video on PC - old dogs and new tricks!

#2 Post by c4os »

Avidemux is a good tool to rotate videos or to make corrections.
Unfortunately there's only a flatpak image at the MX Paket-Installer.
I made a script to rotate video easily, but I don't know if there a command line function on the image.
The script uses avidemux2_cli.
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TenderFoot
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Joined: Sun May 03, 2009 2:34 pm

Re: SmartPhone video on PC - old dogs and new tricks!

#3 Post by TenderFoot »

Thanks for that but, as said, if I need to view smartphone videos on PC in future then using Vlc in MX is fine - and just puzzled why the Win versions don't seem to do it. If permanent change to portrait were required, I believe VirtualDub would do it in Win.

My OP was just sort of musing that a possible anomoly had never occurred to me!

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