What had previously been hours of headaches and wrangling was done in moments on a whim. Seriously, I cannot overstate the satisfaction I felt in that moment.
When thinking about what I wanted to put on my GitHub profile README, I was just about to copy what I'd seen others do and write some "About Me" text, but then realised it could be way cooler to show off what writing with steno is like in a way that might resonate with developers.
GitHub doesn't allow embedded videos in the READMEs, so I had to resort to a classic looping animated GIF. After recording a video with OBS, I used the `ffmpeg` (https://ffmpeg.org/) and `gifsicle` (https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle) command-line tools to create a GIF that was not so big that it took ages to load, but also didn't sacrifice too much on image quality.
The command invocations are not easy to intuit, but in case someone wants to experiment with their own steno video LM and tweak the parameters, here is what got me my result:
`ffmpeg -i steno.mov -pix_fmt rgb8 -r 10 output.gif && gifsicle -O3 output.gif -o output.gif`
is inspired by and can essentially be seen as a combination of Emily's Modifiers and Achim Siebert's Left Hand Modifier Keys. Essentially, it allows every shortcut to be typed in two strokes and using only the left hand. As such, only the following keys are used:
- SRT captioning files are now word wrapped to 42 chars max and each line gets accurate start/end times
- word-wrapped captions in separate window while writing into the editor, with customizable character buffer for undos and minimum display time for each line
- (untested) send captions to MS Teams and Zoom sessions if you have the api link/token
- keyboard editing: type freely in the transcript with a normal keyboard whenever plover output is disabled, not necessary to use the insert text dialog
