Tag: Transcoding

JavaScript History as Seen From 2035

Gary Bernhardt presents a thought-provoking history of JavaScript as seen from 2035.

His arguments are that

  • With asm.js JavaScript VMs ran code with 50% of native speed (even in 2013)
  • Anything that can be compiled can be compiled into asm.js
  • Asm.js has basically become the universal runtime

So by further moving the JavaScript VM into the kernel we save ourselves the overhead of hardware process isolation as the VM does this any way.

All this lead to interesting consequences

  • Nobody uses binaries any more, everything is asm.js
  • The windowing systems of old have been ported to the DOM
  • Deployments are as simple as a push
  • JavaScript (as a language) is effectively dead
  • Overall developer happiness has increased

:’D

Convert any file VLC can play to mp3

I just felt the need for a script that could extract the audio track of a video, transcode it and save it as an mp3 file … 2 hours later I was finished (get the Gist). 😀 It uses VLC to do hard work. 😉

Thanks to Kris Hom for the inspiration. 🙂

Update 2014-03-01:

  • Check whether VLC is installed
  • Should also work on Linux now
  • Increase default bit rate to 192kbit/s
  • Fixed bug where the file/playlist would repeat endlessly

Update 2014-11-05:

  • Also look for VLC in “~/Application/”

Update 2016-03-05