Thoughts on the “Spring Hunting” vote..

Lets preface this with the line: I hunt and shoot and would vote “NO” if I could vote…

I will still hunt and shoot even if the “NO” vote wins. Hunting and Shooting as I do takes a lot of skill and is very demanding. My weapon of choice is different from the average hunter though (which is what makes it a lot harder)… Here’s the results of my shooting:

Maltese hunters target passage Spoonbills

Mark Sultana also shot a few and the Times of Malta posted the results of his hunting… (which if you click the photo you’ll see more and you will see the skill level is so high that when in flight getting the results is significantly more difficult.)

Spoonbills shot, BirdLife to protest to EU after Spring hunting decision

Oddly enough it seems there are many like me that enjoy hunting and shooting, and we can quite legitimately and legally hunt and shoot protected birds as well as non protected birds…

Pity the “YES” vote chooses to show people crossing fields with not a bird in sight, after all isn’t that what they are in favour of?

Pity the “NO” vote feels the need to post all the blood and gore of birds that have been blasted out of the sky being carried by tree huggers and the likes.

Pity the church (which seems to play politics here in Malta on items like Same-Sex marriage whenever it feels like it, yet) don’t seem to care that a “YES” vote means legitimising the killing of God’s Creations FOR FUN….

When it comes to voting on 11 April, don’t vote how people tell you to vote, don’t allow people to tell you how to vote, vote with your conscience… i.e. what you really feel is right, if that means vote “YES” then do it without worry, if that means “NO” then vote “NO”, the point of a referendum is to allow *YOU* to choose for yourself!

(And for those people whom their family and/or friends are being pressured into voting “YES” or “NO” just remember when it comes to voting, it is your choice, tell them what they want to hear, then when you get into the booth, tick the box *YOU* want to vote for. Remember, it’s YOUR vote not THEIRS!)

Converting h.265 (HEVC) to h.264 (AVC)

Quick techie entry for anyone using the newer h265 codecs but unable to use them in players. (eg: Torrenting H265 encoded files then trying to play via PLEX and Roku)

Roku and other media players don’t support h.265 and as such any attempt to play h265 encoded files will result in an ‘Unable to play file’ error, so you might be wanting to convert the files to another format such as h.264.  To do this you need ffmpeg, however ffmpeg can be a little difficult to work, especially as it has so many options, so I wrote a little perl script to ‘mass convert’ all files in the current directory if they are h265 encoded to h264 encoding.  It is published here for those on UNIX systems (or those who know how to install Perl on Windows) to make life a little easier:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

open DIR, "ls -1 |";
while (<DIR>)
{
        chomp;
        next if ( -d "$_"); # skip directories
        next unless ( -r "$_"); # if it's not readable skip it!
        my $file = $_;
        open PROBE, "ffprobe -show_streams -of csv '$file' 2>/dev/null|" or die ("Unable to launch ffmpeg for $file! ($!)");
        my ($v, $a, $s, @c) = (0,0,0);
        while (<PROBE>)
        {
                my @streaminfo = split(/,/, $_);
                push(@c, $streaminfo[2]) if ($streaminfo[5] eq "video");
                $a++ if ($streaminfo[5] eq "audio");
                $s++ if ($streaminfo[5] eq "subtitle");
        }
        close PROBE;
        $v = scalar @c;
        if (scalar @c eq 1 and $c[0] eq "ansi")
        {
                warn("Text file detected, skipping...\n");
                next;
        }
        warn("$file: Video Streams: $v, Audio Streams: $a, Subtitle Streams: $s, Video Codec(s): " . join (", ", @c) . "\n");
        if (scalar @c > 1)
        {
                warn("$file has more than one video stream, bailing!\n");
                next;
        }
        if ($c[0] eq "hevc")
        {
                warn("HEVC detected for $file ...converting to AVC...\n");
                system("mkdir -p h265");
                my @params = ("-hide_banner", "-threads 2");
                push(@params, "-map 0") if ($a > 1 or $s > 1 or $v > 1);
                push(@params, "-c:a copy") if ($a);
                push(@params, "-c:s copy") if ($s);
                push(@params, "-c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p") if ($v);
                if (system("mv '$file' 'h265/$file'"))
                {
                        warn("Error moving $file -> h265/$file\n");
                        next;
                }
                if (system("ffmpeg -xerror -i 'h265/$file' " . join(" ", @params) . " '$file' 2>/dev/null"))
                {
                        warn("FFMPEG ERROR.  Cannot convert $file restoring original...\n");
                        system("mv 'h265/$file' '$file'");
                        next;
                }
        } else {
                warn("$file doesn't appear to need converting... Skipping...\n");
        }
}
close DIR;


Enjoy!