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Showing posts from August, 2013

110GB+ worth of photos/videos on a microSD memory card #2

In my previous post, I talked about wanting to write a script to see how far I can squeeze 110GB worth of media (photos and videos). I wrote the script the quick-and-dirty way, in PHP. When people think of PHP, they think of web pages, but PHP can equally be used for writing your everyday scripts, just like Perl or Python. The script resizes all photos to a maximum width/height of 1024. I found this provides maximum size reduction for the photos without sacrificing the viewing quality in full photo mode on my tablet (screen resolution: 1280x800). Obviously it will affect the quality when zooming in, but I rarely do that when flipping through the photos. Since I haven't got a tablet with retina display yet, I am not sure how that will fare, but for this exercise, I am sacrificing quality for size. For videos, I use handbrake-cli to transcode all of them to MP4 with a maximum width of 640. Again, this reduces the size drastically, improves compatibility (since all Android tabl

110GB+ worth of photos/videos on a microSD memory card #1

We have a family NAS where we keep all kinds of stuff. Well, actually it's an old laptop that functions as a server, with 3 x 3TB external USB HDDs attached. I run all the standard mirroring and backup on the laptop, and one of the HDD is shared over the network for everyone to dump their stuff into. Like most family these days, we take photos and videos on a number of different devices. The smart phones, digital camera, DSLR etc. Even the kids have their own cheap digital compacts. And the devices have evolved over the years. The photos have mostly stayed JPEG, with the resolution increasing steadily. The videos, however, are a different story. Starting from the V8 (which we converted to XVID AVIs) to a Sony (which produced MPEG-1 files) to a Casio (which gave us H264/MOV files) to the current-gen Sony (MTS format), there's an incredible number of video formats we have to deal with. On top of that, we do scans of old photos and slides, the kids' artwork etc. These are al