merompetehla

debian 12.11, yt-dlp stable@2025.07.21

aim: to download the best video available with the largest height but no better than 1080p, excluding av1 as well.

What works:

yt-dlp -f bv*[ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4] -S height:1080 --all-subs

but this command downloads, if possible, av1, which target hardware doesn't support for longer than 5 minutes.

Argument I don't know to add correctly:

[vcodec!*=av01]

I tried:

yt-dlp -f bv*[ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4][vcodec!*=av01] -S height:1080 --all-subs

and other variations, but it didn't work.

second question, aborting an active download not shutting the terminal down: neither ctrl+c nor ctrl+q work and opening htop to kill the process seems overkill. What I now do is to simply shut the active tab, but there must be a faster way.

Tinkering with yt-dlp -F

I know av1 is even better than h.265, h.265 being better than h.264

However, I don’t know where to put vpP09, vp9 and avc1

Audio formats: what’s better? m4a or webm?

debian 12.11, yt-dlp stable@2025.06.30.

I used this argument: "-f bv*[ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4]"

and it works: it downloads the best available video, audio and ffmpeg merges both in a single file. Automatically.

Except that the maximum resolution I need is 1920 x 1080 p. Best available video is oftentimes 4096 x 2160 p, too much for the target hardware.

Using -F to check different resolutions to then select one (like -f 299 or -f 148) is tiresome.

How do I do that? Ideally for whole playlists involving between 25 and 50 videos.

debian 12.11, organic maps from flatpak.

My local organic maps started to download the whole world. Every single map it could find. I tried stopping it but the only way to achieve that is to turn the application off. On starting it again, it resumes downloading.

Why?

The android based version found on f-droid is easier to use. I wanted to use the desktop based one because I work from home more often than elsewhere.

the x264 av1 file plays only audio on vlc but works with flaws on mpv: on mpv I get audio and video, but every 5 to 6 seconds it's like instead of getting 24 fps I get 22, the user noticing the missing frames.

Is this a hardware issue? software?

debian 12.11, vlc 3.0.21 flatpak, mpv 0.40.0 flatpak

what do I do?

when I say trim I don't mean to time trim a file, like getting rid of the last 2 minutes of the mkv file, but to picture trim every frame of the mkv file to get rid of black margins to both left and right of the actual image.

Files were originally recorded on 4:3 aspect ratio (some are movies from the 1950's) but the encoder somehow created / copied huge black margins to both left and right of the actual image. I want to get rid of these.

Some of my files are 30 minutes long but others 2 hours.

if ffmpeg is the application I need, could anyone knowledgeable enough write the actual command?

can it be done for several files automatically?

file title is an option present on mkvtoolnix (92.0 eyeglow on debian 12.11)

I could single open every file, remove the file title and save, but that's gonna take ages. almost 100 files.

Debian 12.9

I just downloaded a 30 MiB epub file, but I can discard the images that make most of this space.

Another epub file includes unsolicited advertising with a link to a subscription. I'd like to get rid of it as well.

Is there something I can use?