Create a Waveform Image with ffmpeg
Waveform images have a variety of uses and I've started seeing waveform images overlaying at the bottom of videos. That type of feature seems useful if you want to see identify music in a video or specific spaces in a video which feature action. If you're creating an audio-centric app, you may have a dozen uses for the waveform image.
You can easily create a waveform image using the amazing ffmpeg utility with a very short command:
ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex "showwavespic=s=640x120" -frames:v 1 output.png
The image you'll get back will look similar to:

There are a variety of customizations you can create for waveform image as detailed in the ffmpeg waveform documentation. Take some time to experiment with all of the features provided by ffmpeg -- you can do amazing things with media!
![Introducing MooTools Templated]()
One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating:
new Element Madness
The first way to create UI-driven...
![How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam]()
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
![Display Images as Grayscale with CSS Filters]()
CSS filters aren't yet widely supported but they are indeed impressive and a modern need for web imagery. CSS filters allow you to modify the display of images in a variety of ways, one of those ways being displaying images as grayscale.
Doing so requires the...
![Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows]()
Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them. For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked. Just because we...
How do you get a transparent background?
Is it possible to build waveform image using
offlineAudioContext
? Seems like the exact tool for the job.