Jake Wharton

Been busy…

pyy is nearing its first major milestone, 1.0.0. All that remains is writing a proper documentation and drafting some good examples but the code is pretty much stable in the master branch. pyy has a very wide scope of applications from rapid prototyping to generating and serving large web sites. Look for an upcoming blog post and formal introduction in the coming weeks.

Version 1.0.4 of mkvdts2ac3 has just been released which fixes the problems with portability to FreeBSD and OS X. A minor rewrite of the script is planned to resolve known annoyances as well as introduce must-requested features such as multiple file input and default settings. Once stable these features will be announced in a blog post and likely be tagged as 1.1.0.

The is_awesome checker has been completely rewritten from scratch to be much more robust and thorough in its testing of MediaInfo output. Native support for localization was also added and a few translations are already in the works. Any updates are likely to be minor bug fixes and will be announced via my Twitter feed.

A MacBook Pro is in the works so SMSBarrage for the iPhone can finally take off. The Windows Mobile and BlackBerry versions will also begin to take shape over the next few months. Android development of SMSBarrage 2.0.0 as well as SMSPoll and SMSMorse is finally resuming too.

Stay tuned to the blog for major announcements or follow my Twitter feed. Some notable hashtags that I use: #SMSBarrage, #SMSPoll, #SMSMorse, #mkvdts2ac3, #pyy, #polyreviki, #thebdmt, #twopr, and i’ll start using #is_awesome.

Version 1.0.0 of mkvdts2ac3 has been released, the first major milestone for the script. mkvdts2ac3 is a bash script which automates the conversion of DTS audio tracks to AC3 audio from within matroska files. You can read more about it here if you are not familiar with it.

You can download tarballs or zipballs from the GitHub download page. The current version is actually 1.0.2. I have made a few fixes since the actual tagging of 1.0.0 in the repository.

Users of the Popcorn Hour A-100 or older-model receivers might not be able to decode the DTS audio that is embedded within their movie files. It is for this reason that mkvdts2ac3 script was developed.

mkvdts2ac3 is a bash script for Linux and Mac OS which automates the task of converting DTS tracks in Matroska (MKV) files to AC3. There are a variety of arguments which control the resulting output file but running the script is as simple as:

mkvdts2ac3.sh Some.Movie.File.mkv

The DTS will be extracted, converted to AC3, and then appended to the file. Now when you play back the file you can switch to this AC3 track and finally enjoy the movie’s sound.

If you do not want to retain the DTS track or you want the new AC3 to be flagged you can indicate that with one of the script’s arguments. You can view all of the arguments in the script’s documentation here.

The source code is available for browsing and download from the GitHub project page.

The following projects have been moved to git repositories at GitHub to facilitate better contribution:

• mkvdts2ac3 – Bash script for converting DTS to AC3 audio inside Matroska (MKV) files.
• Polyreviki – Multiple key-value pair storage system for Python with revision control.
• PyCache – Rudimentary caching mechanism written in Python (PHPCache port).
• SMSBarrage – Mobile application which allows mass, repeated SMS messaging to numbers for Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile platforms.
• SMSMorse – Android service which vibrates incoming SMS messages in Morse code.
• SMSPoll – Android utility which allows you to conduct multiple polls via SMS and visualize their responses.

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