Louder SMPlayer volume

For some reason, a number of my shows and movies seem to be at a low volume. SMPlayer, my video player of choice, didn't seem to have a way of boosting the sound beyond 100%. Turns out it does, you just have to hunt for it:

Options->Preferences: General->Audio->Max. Amplification

Set that to 200 or so to allow further amplification in software.

Audio->Filters->Volume Normalization is another way to help boost sound.

PowerShell script to play latest video linked on web page

My auto-piracy machine do-it-yourself media center lists the most recently downloaded TV shows in a way that looks like this (in HTML, that is):

<a href="http://www.blogger.com/tv/How%20I%20Met%20Your%20Mother/05/how.i.met.your.mother.s05e11.720p.hdtv.x264-ctu.mkv">Season 5 Episode 11</a>;

The web interface isn't bad, but I like to mess around with scripting and command line stuff, so here's a powershell script that will play the latest show matching a given string. (Examples: latest how, latest -n 2 dollhouse)


param(
[switch]$switch = $false,
[string]$query = $(Read-Host -prompt "Keyword"),
[int]$num = $(if ($switch) {Read-Host -prompt "Number"} else {1})
)

$player = "C:\Program Files\SMPlayer\smplayer.exe"
$client = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$data = $client.DownloadData("http://spot/")
$page = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($data)

# They are displayed on the page with newest on top, but we want to play them in order (oldest to newest)
$matches = [regex]::Matches($page, "href=`"([^\<\>]*?$query[^\<\>]*?\.[^\<\>]*?)`"", "IgnoreCase") | Select-Object -first $num | Sort-Object

$files = ""
foreach ($m in $matches) {
$files += "'http://spot/$($m.groups[1])' "
}

if ($files.Length -gt 0) {
echo $files
Start-Process $player $files
}
else { echo "Could not find anything matching '$query'" }


Notes:

• [^\<\>] means "any character except < or >". The *? means "any number of the preceding". So in this case, it means "any number of characters except < or >". Useful for reading the text between tags.


• The bit at the top lets you optionally specify the number of matches to use with -num (or -n), defaulting to 1 otherwise. If you don't give it a query, it will prompt you. (It doesn't properly handle the case of -num w/o a number, but I don't care at this point. You'll get an error message, just not a nice one).

Notes-to-self: actually applying the sine curve stuff

A practical variation of the previous idea:

Use one quarter of the sine wave (covex up, convex down, concave down, concave up) for each block. Every other height will be used as an actual height, and the heights in-between will be used to determine whether the segment is convex or concave.