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29 November 2020

Convert all MOV video files in the current folder to MP4

Convert a single MOV video file to MP4 format:

ffmpeg -i my_video.mov my_video.mp4
Convert all MOV videos in the current folder and sub-folders to MP4 and delete the orignal .MOV files: For Linux or Mac, or on Windows under msys, cygwin, cmder etc.
for video in `find . -iname "*.mov"` ; do
    ffmpeg -i "${video}" "${video%.*}.mp4" && rm "${video}"
done
NOTE: While the script with simple name.ext file names, it is likely to fail on files containing special characters, such as spaces, single or double quotes, slashes, dashes or !#&, etc. A more robust version that will handle correctly special characters in file names:
find . -iname '*.mov' -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} ffmpeg -i '{}' '{}.mp4' && rm '{}'
And another version of the same that avoids the use of xargs by using a sub-shell:
find . -type f -iname "*.mov" -exec sh -c 'ffmpeg -i "${1}" "${1%.*}.mp4" && rm "${1}" ' _ {} \;
If ffmpeg is not present on your system install it with apt install ffmpeg (on Linux) or brew install ffmpeg on Mac.

22 November 2020

CSS Style Sheet HTML Preview Generator (python script)

How do I see an HTML preview of every single CSS rule defined in a CSS file?

There is no fixed way to do it, especially if your CSS style sheets make abundant use of absolute and fixed positioning. This script below is a quick and dirty attempt to generate HTML tags for all the rules defined in a CSS file. If the rule is defined for a known HTML tag then that tag is rendered as itself, otherwise a div tag is created.

The script does not cover every possible scenario and only supports the most common CSS constructs. It wraps all fixed CSS rules into a dedicated iframe in order to prevent elements from overlapping. You can disable wrapping fixed elements into frames by passing --no-frames.

If you have a large CSS file the HTML generation can take up to several minutes since nested rules are iterated recursively.

⚠️ For complex CSS style sheets (1MB+) the generated HTML can cause the browser to freeze or rendering to take a signficant time even on a performant computer. You have been warned!

Dependencies

The CSS preview generator depends on the cssutil python module which can be installed with:

pip3 install cssutils

You are welcome to fork, improve and provide feedback.

Usage

css_stylesheet_preview_generator.py mystyles.css -o mypreview.html
For more options run with the -h or --help switch.

Example output

Python CSS preview generator script