The point of this page here is to document troubleshooting hints, one-liners and other such stuff.

Help, YouTube turned my 576p50 Video into 480p30!#

Problem#

You’ve recorded some PAL video and did a 2x deinterlace on it, and wanted to share it with someone you know through YouTube. But would you look at what has become of your video!

Solution#

Here are a few conversion commands to serve as references that produce 1440x1080 60p outputs which YouTube won’t downscale/reduce the FPS of:

ffmpeg -i input.dv \
  -vf "yadif=1,scale=1440:1080,fps=60,format=nv12,hwupload_cuda" \
  -rc constqp -qp 23 -c:v h264_nvenc -c:a flac \
  out.mkv

ffmpeg \
  -vaapi_device /dev/dri/renderD129 \
  -i input.dv \
  -vf "yadif=1,scale=1440:1080,fps=60,format=nv12,hwupload" \
  -q 80 -rc_mode 1 -c:v av1_vaapi -c:a flac \
  out.mkv

ffmpeg -i input.dv \
  -vf "yadif=1,scale=1440:1080,fps=60" \
  -crf 20 -preset ultrafast -c:v hevc -c:a flac \
  out.mkv

Explanation#

IDK. I guess YouTube doesn’t like PAL videos.

Can’t Find a Branch After a Shallow Clone#

Problem#

Did you do a little git checkout [branch]?

Are you getting error: pathspec '[branch]' did not match any file(s) known to git or perhaps even a Fehler: Pfadspezifikation '[branch]' stimmt mit keinen Git bekannten Dateien überein]?

Solution#

Try git remote set-branches origin '*' today!

Explanation#

Your silly little git clone --depth 1 implied --single-branch. See: man git-clone: (about --depth) “Implies --single-branch unless --no-single-branch is given to fetch the histories near the tips of all branches”

I Can’t Record Digital8 Video in LP-mode onto Regular Video8 Tape#

Problem#

You have a Video8 tape onto which you’d like to record LP Digital8. You also don’t care about people saying that this will cause dropouts.

Solution#

Punch a hole!

Here’s what a Hi8 cassette looks like:

front side	back side

And here’s what a Video8 cassette looks like:

front side	back side

Notice the difference? Yep, one of the holes differ. That hole is covered in Video8 and is empty in Hi8.

So the solution is quite simple, punch a hole:

Anecdotally, the dropouts have not increased. Regardless, if you experience dropouts in LP mode, you can just stick to SP. The hole being punched doesn’t affect SP in any way.

Explanation#

These cameras use those holes to identify what kind of cassette has been inserted into them. The most obvious sign of this fact is the write-protect tab, which changes how one of the holes (the red one) presents itself.

I am guessing that the hole I punched is the Hi-8 identification hole as it’s the only difference I could spot. I haven’t really googled or otherwise read up on this stuff so it could be for something else but hey, it works to enable LP.