Nikhil Prasad nprasad2077

What you NEED to Know Before Touching a Video File

Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos. A man can only read "Use Handbrake to convert your mkv to an mp4 :)" so many times before losing it, so I am writing this article to channel the resulting psychic damage into something productive.

If you are new to working with videos (or, let's face it, even if you aren't), please read through this guide to avoid making mistakes that can cost you lots of time, computing power, storage space, or video quality.

FFmpeg cheat sheet

A list of useful commands for the FFmpeg command line tool.

Download FFmpeg: https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html

Full documentation: https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html

Basic conversion

whisper.cpp/examples/stream

This is a naive example of performing real-time inference on audio from your microphone. The whisper-stream tool samples the audio every half a second and runs the transcription continously. More info is available in issue #10.

./build/bin/whisper-stream -m ./models/ggml-base.en.bin -t 8 --step 500 --length 5000

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

Creating bootable Linux USB using Mac

CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc. Whatever Linux-based OS it is, you can create a bootable USB for it by using a Mac.

1. Prepare the .iso file

Download it, copy it, whatever it takes to prepare that Linux-based OS .iso file

2. Convert the .iso file into a .img.dmg

Bash Command Shortcuts Documentation

Repair Permissions

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

	# 👇️ optionally store installed packages in a file
	pip freeze > requirements.txt

	# 👇️ deactivate
	deactivate

	# 👇️ Remove the old virtual environment folder: macOS and Linux
	rm -rf venv

	# 👇️ Remove the old virtual environment folder: Windows

	## opens explorer at directory.

	```wsl-open .```

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