G->TechLink: G->Pointer's Technology Link

While there is a lot of buzz on data analysis and understanding data there for applied use of artifical intelligence and machine learning it is less known in the public on what Artifical Intelligence can do regarding generating original content and altering existing content. So called Generative Adversarial Networks can generate or change pictures and can even alter videos. E.g. The website www.ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com gives and interesting and somewhat worrisome examples of that technolgy. The speed at which this technology evolves is as astounding as the results it can give already. The technology can not only be used to generate static content like the pictures of faces, but can also modify videos. There is an example where the same scene filmed by day is recreated to appear at night: Another example illustrates how a video of a horse is transferred to a video of a zebra. As Ian Goodfellow points out the GAN did not only change the brown horse to be white with bla

Location: FFmpeg can either be installed individually or as part of other applications. E.g. if installed together with Audacity usually the entire contents of the downloaded ZIP file are extracted to a folder anywhere on the computer, then the Libraries Preferences are configured to locate the file "avformat-55.dll". One location could be C:\Program Files (x86)\FFmpeg for Audacity . Basic Conversion: FFmpeg can be overwhelming with its options. If you only want to encode a larger video to MP4 and do not care much about smaller compression artifacts go for: ffmpeg -i "input.avi" "output.mp4" Basic Trim (Cut) from/to: e.g. from the begin of the file to 45 1/2 seconds. ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:00:45.5 -c:v copy -c:a copy "output.mp4" For some stream-to-MP4-rips the audio bitstream filter 'aac_adtstoasc' might be needed as follows: ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:00:45.5 -c:v c