Detect identical & black frame in video with ffmpeg?

Thumbnail creation is a very needed feature for any social networking site. Obviously, ffmpeg is the ideal solution for generating thumbnail.

Problem-1: Detecting identical thumbnails

Fortunately, we have a good solution--libpuzzle. It would be ideal to have a filter in ffmpeg for that.

Problem-2: Detecting black/dark frames

I'm still keenly looking for a solution tied up with ffmpeg. When Google turned no help, Heleena (my wife) solved it by calculating average luminance value of the frame and ignoring the frames based on certain preset threshold value--which worked better at that time.

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Valen Smith, the English teacher videos are missing!

I vaguely remembered that sometimes around 2009, engVid on YouTube was very popular. I especially liked a teacher by name Valen Smith's videos. She was not only beautiful but also very good at explaining the English usage. I also vaguely remembered to check her channel ValenESL around 2015. But, not sure what happened to her or engVid, all her videos are sadly gone. I have also noted that many people on Twitter were asking the same. Not sure what happened. Some people seem to have reuploaded her videos and YouTube continuously removing them with a note "This video contains content from LearnVid, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Strangely though, on Facebook, some people have managed to create a fake account using her old channel name ValenESL.

Looking Back at My Predictions

People who work closely with me often appreciate my ability to anticipate trends in technology stacks. With that in mind, I recently revisited some of my old blog posts—and it turns out, many of those predictions have held true. Here are a few handpicked posts that aged well: Prediction: Expensify will crash through its insane question-based hiring process February 23, 2022 BlackLivesMatter campaign may consolidate votes for Trump June 15, 2020 Technology prediction for 2018 January 16, 2018 Node.js and client app are the future of webdeving? December 29, 2011 Yahoo! and delicious.com - What's wrong? December 19, 2010 Disclosure: The following ChatGPT prompt is used in this blog post: Please fix the language of the below text and highlight the changes in bold:

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...