Chromecastize: Video conversion script for Google Chromecast owners

I'm happy owner of Google Chromecast and even though it's awesome for streaming online content from YouTube or Netflix, it's not so great device for playing local media (or media from your NAS), because it supports only limited number of video and audio codecs (see Supported Media for Google Cast).

My Synology NAS is not powerful enough to transcode videos on the fly, so I decided to write a script which converts all my local media into Chromecast supported format using ffmpeg.

You can get the script from my GitHub repository chromecastize and convert all your media to Chromecast supported format by running one command - such as:

./chromecastize.sh /Volumes/MyNAS

If you come across any issues or have ideas for improvement, please, report them by using issues in the GitHub repository.

TimeLapse Calc+ for Android is out!

I'm very excited to announce that today I released first version of TimeLapse Calc+, which is TimeLapse Calculator for Android. It's build for time-lapse photographers to set or calculate any attribute of shooting of time-lapse video (interval, length, shots count), result clip (frame rate, length) and required storage (photo size, total size). You just need to set any attribute you know (or want to achieve) and app will calculate other attributes for you).
I believe it's the most flexible app for this purpose on Google Play and hopefully you'll find out the same!
It comes in two versions:

• TimeLapse Calc+ Free (ad-supported)
• TimeLapse Calc+

I'm looking forward to any feedback!

Happy TimeLapsing!

Timelapse Calculator

I've recently fallen in love with timelapse videos (see e.g. The Mountain by TSO Photography). As I wasn't able to find good timelapse calculator so I decided to develop one in Javascript. The result is here - Timelapse Calculator.

Timelapse Calculator

This calculator allows you to compute e.g. Interval based on desired Frame Rate, Clip Length and Record Duration. Also calculates Number of shots to be taken and used Memory (based on Size per Shot). It is pretty flexible, because you can specify any values you know and it will automatically recalculate other ("unlocked") values.

If you provide too many values and they doesn't match each other, it highlights them and you have to unlock one of them. Also if you provide not enough information, it will highlight values you have to specify to get all other values ;-). Just check my Timelapse Calculator.

Custom Photogallery with Picasa Web Albums as back-end

Homepage: www.radekhruska.com

One of my friends has recently asked me to create him a simple site to share his professional photos from concerts. There were no special requirements and restyling of any CMS (Joomla with some gallery plugin) would do the trick. But I wanted to try something new ;-)...

Back-end

After some thinking I've decided to use Google Picasa Web Albums for uploading and storing pictures. It has a nice desktop application for album organization and synchronization with Picasa's storage. Google offers 1 GB of storage for free; which will be enough for a while. And of course - Picasa Web Albums Data API - the interface I used to access this data.

Front-end

So the only thing I had to develop was front-end. After some research I decided to implement it in Python scripting language, because I wanted to try host it on Google's App Engine. lt’s greatly scalable and even more - it's available as a free service! There are only some quotas for CPU time, number of requests etc. (Unfortunately there are going to be some changes in pricing, but some kind of free version should be still available.)

Implementation

It took only one night to get it running to fetch and display images from Google Picasa Web Albums (accessed by its API). I spent more time by styling and doing some fancy stuff with jQuery (e.g. displaying slideshow of Featured photos on homepage).
Have look on live version of Radek Hruška - The Photographer website.