• Final Cut Server,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Scripting Video Changes in Lion: avconvert, pcastaction & podcast

    The avconvert command is a new addition in OS X Lion that allows administrators to quickly and easily convert video from one format to another using presets for video conversion. The presets are mostly common Apple formats tuned to specific devices. In its simplest form, avconvert uses a preset, a source and then an output to convert the source to the output using the preset to define the format to use for conversion. A useful preset is the 640×480 one. To convert this using this idea: /usr/bin/avconvert --preset Preset640x480 --source /Convert/test.mov --output Converted/test.mov While some of the presets are pretty self explanatory, I haven’t gone through them all to see…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Managing Mail and Safari RSS Subscriptions from the Command Line

    Safari can subscribe to RSS feeds; so can Mail. Podcast Producer is an RSS or XML feed as are the feeds created by blog and wiki services in Mac OS X Server. And then of course, RSS and ATOM come pre-installed with practically every blogging and wiki tool on the market. Those doing mass deployment and scripting work can make use of automatically connecting users to and caching information found in these RSS feeds. If you have 40,000 students, or even 250 employees, it is easier to send a script to those computers than to open the Mail or Safari client on each and subscribe to an RSS feed. Additionally,…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Deleting a Podcast in Podcast Producer

    In an earlier post I looked at querying feeds and removing objects from Podcast Producer in a somewhat broad manner. To delete a single podcast (not a feed), you need to first find the ID for the podcast, then delete the corresponding podcast bundle (pdb). Removing assets is one of the only processes with regards to Podcast Producer that isn’t intuitive, and it’s just waiting for someone to wrap these steps into a nice pretty GUI… To find the ID of the podcast, first let’s query the sql database for the title: sqlite3 /Volumes/pcp/PodcastProducer/Server/db.sqlite3 'SELECT * FROM episodes' | grep "TITLE" Note the date and the ID (the big long…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Scrubbing Assets from Podcast Producer

    At some point, you may find that you would like to remove all episodes from Podcast Producer that were brought in using a specific workflow, or based on a specific keyword, a string in the title, a date, or the user that created the episodes. All of these attributes are trapped in the db.sqlite3 database for Podcast Producer. This database is stored in the Server directory of your shared library. Within this database there is a table called episodes. Using that table you can locate all episodes that match the given pattern. To query, you will use the sqlite3 command and identify the database path. A very basic incantation of…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Unix

    Managing SyncPlans from the PresSTORE CLI

    PresSTORE has a Synchronize module, that can be used to copy data from one location to another. This is done by the use of synchronization plans, or sync plans for short. Each plan is given a name and has a number of attributes associated with it, such as whether it is enabled or disabled. PresSTORE has a command line interface called nsdchat that is available at /usr/local/asw. To run it in interactive mode you can run the following command: /usr/local/asw/nsdchat From here, you can use the SyncPlan command to interface with the plans that you have created. To see a list of plans you will use the SyncPlan command from…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Stupid Podcast Producer Tricks

    The document handler in Podcast Producer has been exposed to the command line in the form of a tool called document2images (located in the /usr/libexec/podcastproducer directory), which takes a pdf and converts it into a set of tiff files. In its most basic iteration the documents2images tool simply inputs a document and then outputs a couple of tiff files per page of that document. 15 pages will typically net you 30 tiffs and an xml output (not that you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again very easily). When you use document2images you will need to specify the pdf using the –document option, the xml file to output using the…

  • Final Cut Server,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Podcast Producer on Your iPhone

    PCP Remote is a great little application for initiating Podcast Producer workflows from your iPhone. In the current iteration you can also record audio tracks from the iPhone and use them in workflows as well. Oh, and it can connect to multiple Podcast Producer servers to kick off workflows. Since one workflow can summon another or write data into Final Cut Server, this gives a lot of options for different ways to integrate Podcast Producer and automate a number of items from your iPhone. Great stuff and I for one am really looking forward to the next version as soon as the App Store approves it!

  • Mac OS X Server

    Podcast Producer Error Codes

    When you are using Podcast Producer, whether you are looking in your log files on a server in Server Admin or whether you are looking in Console on a client, if there are any problems submitting jobs you should find a numeric reference code. The meaning can be cryptic, although I’ll try a little bit here: -500 = Camera agent went offline -501 = Podcast Producer agent timed out -502 = Agent failed to communicate -600 = Tunnel protocol mismatch -601 = Tunnel could not connect -602 = Tunnel timed out -603 = Tunnel failed 1 = Internal camera agent is failing 3 = Capture failed to run 4 =…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Cleaning Up Podcast Producer

    THIS CAN BE A VERY DANGEROUS COMMAND, USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. I’ve been seeing Podcast Producer deployed into a number of different types of environments. One of these is into school environments with quarterly turnover cycles. In these environments, all blog posts over a certain number of days old should be deleted routinely (namely when the quarter changes). Because in some environments, there can be hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, removing old content is cumbersome at best. Never fear, the find command can look at just items that have aged a certain number of days. This is accomplished using the -mtime options. The find command can also…

  • Mac OS X Server

    pcastaction verbs

    pcastaction comes with a number of verbs, each specific to a type of automation that can be used in Podcast Producer. These include: unpack – extract a folder archive before running the automation shell – run a command or shell script preflight – run a script before the automation postflight – run a script after an automation encode – input a standard video file and then output a video file using a different codec annotate – annotate a files metadata qceffect – run a custom Quartz Composer composition against a file watermark – insert a watermark into an indicated video file title – provide a title for the resultant file…