Applications

Starting XAMPP with port 80 on Windows 10 Professional 1

 in Applications  tagged apache / iis / port 80 / w3svc / Windows 10 / windows 10 professional / www / xampp by

Recently we were asked to have a look at a XAMPP installation on a Windows 10 Professional machine which would not start while giving the following error:

Problem detected!
Port 80 in use by "Unable to open process" with PID 4!
Apache WILL NOT start without the configured ports free!
You need to uninstall/disable/reconfigure the blocking application
or reconfigure Apache and the Control Panel to listen on a different port

The culprit of this problem was a module of the IIS (Internet Information Services for Windows Server) that is named World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service or W3SVC service). Apparently, the W3SVC was hoarding port 80 even though IIS was not executing. To provide a quick solution, we decided to stop the W3SVC and get over this difficulty in a jiffy.

As you can see in the following video, to stop the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service or W3SVC service) we performed the next steps:

  1. Clicked on the Start button
  2. Typed in the word services, which showed the Services link which we clicked to start the windows services  manager
  3. Then, we scrolled down in the Services window until we found the World Wide Web Publishing Service
  4. Finally, we right clicked on it and selected Stop.

After that, XAMPP was able to start Apache on port 80 with no issues.

 

How to create a video from thousands of images using ffmpeg

 in Applications  tagged ffmpeg by

We have this simulation that creates several frames demonstrating the life-cycle of an ant colony.
Having thousands of pictures is not very useful most of the times so we decided to create a video out of those frames.
To do so, we decided to use ffmpeg. The names of the files that we generate are 5 digit zero-leading auto increment numbers (e.g 00001.png and 00002.png) so we ended up with the following command:


ffmpeg -framerate 60 -i %05d.png video.mp4;

How to create a video from an audio file and an image using ffmpeg 1

 in Applications  tagged create video / ffmpeg / youtube by

Recently, we had this audio file ( mp3) that we wanted to upload to youtube.com. As it is known, youtube does not allow uploading audio files. Taking that into consideration we had to create a video with a static image just to upload the audio file to youtube. To do that, we used ffmpeg and the following command:


ffmpeg -loop 1 -i Saturday.png -i 20181020.mp3 -shortest -acodec copy 20181020.mp4;

How we concatenate multiple mp3 files into one using ffmpeg

 in Applications  tagged concatenate / ffmpeg / mp3 by

Recently, we needed to concatenate multiple mp3 files into one. We had at our disposal a machine that had ffmpeg installed.
To perform the merge, we created a list (separated by the character |) of the mp3 files, in the order we wanted them merged and executed the concat operation of ffmpeg to complete our task. Our resulting command was the following


ffmpeg -i "concat:20181021_080743.MP3|20181021_090745.MP3|20181021_100745.MP3" -acodec copy 20181021.mp3