First up will be a brief description about how this process usually works in germany, in general.
Aquire a diagnosis in form of indication for hormone replacement therapy by a therapist or psychatrist.
There isn’t really a standard on how to write this document,
but experienced mental health professionals can usually write this up after one or two sessions with them.
Find a doctor that prescribes you HRT and can take care of your bloodlevels to adjust your dosis properly.
Usually any doctor can prescribe you HRT without getting into trouble,
but as your bloodlevels need to get checked regularly, it makes a lot of sense to consult a specialist for hormones (an endocrinogist) for this matter.
(Optional) As an MtF patient, your insurance should cover a sperm-cryopreservation as well.
If you’d like to have children at some point, this is probably easier to do than adopting a child later on.
So if insurance covers it, why not.
Well, this step has caused most problems for me, you’ll read more about it later.
Receive a recipe!
Yay, you have done it, you are now getting HRT in germany!!
So the first step is usually finding a therapist that will write you an indication in a timely manner. Not all therapists know how to avoid gatekeeping you though and some of them don’t even know anything about the subject. So it makes a lot of sense to ask your local trans-self-support group for some advice on which ones to avoid and where you can get an indication easily.
As for me, I already had a great therapist at the time. After some initial confusion about the topic – I was the first trans-patient for them – they said, they’d write me an indication. They were really excited to help me out and they did also gender me correctly without me even bringing it up myself. There was also a lot of time to write the indication for her for reasons you’ll later read about.
Finding an endocrinologist was probably the 2nd hardest thing about this journey. Already being connected to the local self-support-group, I was told two places in my city – let’s call them place 1 and place 2 – that were able to do hormone replacement therapy.
I immediatly tried to make an appointment at place 2, because everyone said that they were far better than place 1 and most of the trans-woman in my city are there.
Unfortunatly, the hormone-doctor situation in my city has become pretty bad around that time. Some places closed only to privately insured patients, some closed all together. So there was really only one place left that was not part of a hospital, that’s place 1.
Therefore, after calling place 2 for two weeks and not being able to get through, I decided to go there in person to make an appointment. It was close to my home anyways. Well, I got an appointment, but it was for April 2025.
Mind you, it was April 2024 when I went there. I would have problably not made it through until April 2025, so I also made an appointment at place 1 to get anything until the good place has an appointment for me. The appointment I got at place 1 was in September 2024, so that’s also a 5 month wait time.
I wasn’t even really sure if I’d want to actually do HRT at that point, I wanted to talk to a doctor first and foremost. But this experience alone was such a frustrating one and it shows that our local insurance is not really doing a great job at supplying this city with enough health-care-services.
I told myself to chill out a bit, after all the most stressful part of the semester was to come up. And after that I had planned two amazing holidays where I could relax myself from the matter.
People had already told me a lot of bad stuff about this place, hence why I wanted to avoid it. But any HRT is better than none until the time I could find a better doctor. Also, they’d just prescribe you the medications at the reception once you’d get them and from there you essentially do what you want in terms of dosis. Not all too bad, as that allows me to choose a better dosage myself, from the start.
Well, the badness did arise as my name was called uppon waiting in the waiting room. I was dressed femme, I even did eye-makeup on that day and yet the doctor that was responsible for me still called me “mister lastname” when they went to pick me up at the waiting room.
Not up to a great start. But it wouldn’t get better from there:
She essentially just explained that we’re only taking baseline blood levels today and I should come back when I have an indication.
I told her that I already have an indication, she looked at it for about 3 seconds, handed it back to me and said that I should get one from a psychiatrist. My theraphist, mind you, is a psychiatrist.
She also handed me a handout about the effects of HRT (MtF) which talked about voice changes. So the handout I got actually contained false information. That should give you an indication at how little these people there cared about transgender patients.
The sperm-cryopreservation that should be covered by my insurance wasn’t even mentioned, let alone the fact that I’ll get infertile from the medication.
Blood levels were taken and I got told to come back when I have an indication.
After two weeks I went there again, asked for the blood test results, which were just about ready. I got told that something is wrong with my blood levels and that I should do another test. For which I got an appointment at the laboratory at the end of fucking october.
Well, not much I could do about that.
I then also asked for a transferral thingy for a sperm-cryopreservation. The person at the counter was a bit confused at first but in the end I got what I needed, to get this covered by my insurance.
I wasn’t planning to start HRT there after that initial experience, but I still told them I now have a new indication and the person at the counter scanned that. Just in time for this disaster, a friend told me about a place 3 that now also does HRT here, and I was about to make an apointment there as well.
This was by far the hardest part.
So, I found out that there’s two places in my city that do that. Let’s call them cryo place 1 and cryo place 2.
I first called cryo place 1, asked for an appointment because I got a transferral thingy, and got told that they don’t cover that with insurance in my case. I still made an appointment and thought I could deal with the fact that they don’t know how to cover my case by insurance later.
After three exhausting calls and a lot of discussion on the phone, I had to cancel the appointment, because I couldn’t provide what they wanted from my insurance and hormone doctor and the price that I would have to pay on my own was, simply put, more than I could possibly afford.
During those phonecalls I also got told that this isn’t a treatment that makes infertile and therefor I had to pay myself, absolute bullshit. Peak gatekeeping.
There was a chance that I could get it back from my insurance, but that was very risky and I would have to go into debt, to do that.
Completely insane if you take into account what my insurance had to say to that. We’ll cover that later, in chronolocial order.
Place 3 did have an appointment after about 2 months for me, which they already considered a long waiting time, but in my opinion it was worth the wait. A new doctor would be more motivated to do this and there was more room for discussion, is what I hoped.
I was very delighted after getting called “miss” after signing up at the reception. They told me that their IT system isn’t capable of saving another name and gender than what is on my electronic insurance card. They continued to gender me right though and every instance apologized about it, very heartwarming.
The doctor there took a whole 30 minutes to talk to me on an insanely busy day. The first thing she brought up was that I’ll get infertile.
I then told her the whole story I had encountered until now and asked if she could help me with an indication that says that I’ll get infertile from it. She said she couldn’t write anything specific for that, but that the letter that I’ll receive from her will explain that my medication makes me infertile anyways.
She also didn’t know how this should get covered by insurance. I then explained to her, what I had found out until then.
All in all that was a great experience. She said I should call or come back again when I have figured out the sperm-cryopreservation and then I’ll get a prescription!
Now after all those difficulties asking doctors about a cryo-preservervation that is covered by insurance, I wanted to ask my insurance what they had to say about that.
I got told that they do cover it normally and I would not need anything special for the doctor. I should talk to the doctor again and convince them, is what they said.
I also didn’t get anything in form of a signed piece of paper, that place 1 asked for.
Very frustrating overall and not helpfull at all.
Mind you, that was before my name was legally changed and everything with deadname. Very hard to do, very draughtful.
When saying goodbye the person talking to me was very kind though, gendered me right and even looked up information on hair removal in their system because I mentioned that.
People there are very nice, if you are nice to them.
I somehow magically got an appointment at a gynecologist by knowing someone in my city. They did know the head-doctor of cryo place 1 and had a lot more knowledge about this whole cryo-preservation thing.
I got told that this place has proportionally a high number of trans-people which makes sense since her own child is trans aswell!
She was also able to print out yet another transferral-document for me to try getting cryopreservation covered.
In the end she wrote an application to get the costs of cryo-preservation covered by my insurance for me, so that I could get the money back that I would have to pay for this process privately.
At that point I already had made an appointment at cryo place 2, which was significantly less expensive. They were surprised that something like this can be covered by insurance, but after enough reassurance and begging from my side – I was in a lot of mental pain at that point, mind you – they actually said they’d try to cover it by insurance.
Now yet again for another visit at the insurance, this time with the application to get something covered that doesn’t require an application. But head-doctor of cryo place 1 told me so.
This time they actually had some other documents that they gave me about some sentence that insurance had to cover cryo-preservation for trans patients (MtF)
So they themselves said they have to cover it, but did not give me anything that would legally help the doctors to get it covered by them.
Insanely frustrating but yet they gendered me right and were pretty kind.
I don’t get why they can’t give me a signed document that says that they’ll cover something that they have to cover anyways, but well. This is germany after all and things like that are very complicated.
It was finally time. This time nobody could stop me. My name and gender have already been legally changed, so I even got the documents for woman to fill out after signing up at the reception. I knew I could barely afford paying for it myself, so I was definitly going to do it, even if they don’t cover it.
After talking to the doctor, hopes were very high, because they told me they can probably cover the freezing step by insurance themselves.
Very cool!
But my hopes got destroyed again after they told me that the laboratory can’t do sperm cryo-preservations today, because the person doing it usually wasn’t there.
Uuuuuugh. That was sooo bad.
At least I got an appointment early in the morning right the next monday.
Mind you, I haven’t been doing “it” for a while, since that helps with sample quality and was relatively on edge at that point. At least I would spend the weekend at a friends place in another city, so I would be well distracted until then.
I did it. I went there. I gave off a sample. I went there again after an hour.
Quality was good, amount was good. Everything was set.
I could start HRT that day. It was truly a relieving day.
I couldn’t even be actually happy about it, since the exhaustion from the past few months settled in.
Finally I was able to start living again. I wasn’t in barely-functional-mode anymore.
The doctor there even told me, they can for sure cover the freezing process by insurance, but not the recurring storage cost. And they gave me a “fitting” form to give to my endocrinologist to fill out for them to get it covered.
Great!!
As expected I received a bill for the storage costs that I should be able to get back from my insurance.
But after some time, another bill came in for the blood test that was made in order to test for STDs (sexually transmittable diseases) that had to be made for the record.
The endocrinologist also said that they cannot fill out the form that I have sent them for the matter. I suspected that but did send it to them anyways.
Three matters that didn’t work out and made me very very annoyed. I therefore wrote a lenghty mail to the cryo place, asking about all of them.
Luckily, a very friendly lady called me a few days later and had an answer to all of my issues.
They can’t cover storage costs for any patients.
It is usually a thing patients have to pay themselves and get back from the insurance.
Apparently only a smal number of storage places can make insurance pay for it directly.
I don’t have to pay the bill for getting STDs checked!
That was a mistake from their side,
they have talked to the laboratory that sent me the bill
and they could make insurance pay for it.
At that point I had already sent them money though, so I made steps to get it back.
I got the wrong form!
Apparently the doctor taking care of me had no idea about the matter of transgender (MtF) people.
I then received the correct one after a few days.
This one, the endocrinologist could sign
and after sending it back to the cryo place,
I got a “nice, perfect!”
What a hell of a ride. But in the end it was worth it. We now have a place in this city that knows how to cover sperm cryo-preservation in case of MtF hormone treatment. Yay!
Only catch is that you’ll have to do a bi-yearly turnus of sending your insurance a bill and hoping that you can get the money back.
I have HRT now. I feel like I’m not wasting time anymore.
As of finishing this off (2025-01-01T20:22:42+01:00) I have already started noticing effects of it.
I feel more like I am myself now. I can actually look into a mirror naked and think: “I love my body!” I never though that would be possible anymore.
What a relief, what a ride to get there.
If you are on your journey to aquire HRT in germany and need help, reach out to me! I would love to help you, because I know how frustrating it can be.
Don’t stop fighting for your right to get a treatment!
Love,
Lucy
Essentially, all of this discovery started with an interest in crossdressing. My male self was curious about female clothes. When I was 16, curiosity was taking into action and I ordered some girl clothes myself. I think the first item I owned was a maid dress, which is quite funny if you think about it. And let’s say I really enjoyed wearing that!
The desire to try living as a girl was always present though. I always knew I had a female side and that I want to express it. The thought of becoming a girl always seemed faint though, as I was certain it would be impossible.
I also was always a weird kid. I always got along better with girls of my age. I even had some really sweet friendships in elementary school days. That was until being friends with girls became “ewwww” and everyone started hating girls. I felt so disconnected to the world around me and I remember giving up friendships because male friends started shipping me with them and I couldn’t handle that.
At the same time I never truly felt connected to any of my male friends. I don’t even have contact to any of my male elementary school friends.
I never managed to go out dressed female until much later though. It has always been an activity I did on my own or together with my partner behind closed doors. Funnily enough this has also always kind of been connected to sexual activities in my head. I always thought it was a fetish or kink of some sort. But it never truly felt like it was just a kink.
Then in 2021 I slowly started to realize that this female side wasn’t just crossdressing. Although what also happened in that year was my post about crossdressing in public. What I didn’t write about is the fact that my friend also dragged me onto the womans toilet. I just mentioned it as a joke and she went full in lol.
Anyways. Everything about this day felt so rewarding, so real, so colorful, so reviving, that I also started rethinking what I wanted to label myself as.
I came to the conclusion that my female and male sides can best be described by telling people that I was a femboy. This label got carried along for many years. But it never felt like this was describing the situation accurately enough.
Up to this point, I had already cleared out most of my closet of male clothes. Most of these got replaced with very gender-neutral clothing, mostly from the womans-section though. I found skinny jeans together with a T-shirt or hoodie to be the most comfortable for me. When it gets warmer, I also switch to shorts and hot pants.
Throughout 2022 and 2023 I started feeling even more girlish. I could really express myself properly that way. There was a female side, that always made me feel good when I showed it. And that was during very dark times at the beginning of 2022.
There also was a relationship in 2023 and the person encouraged me to dress more female. To dress more like the way I am. The “crossdressing in public” has turned into a regular activity throughout the relationship, many times even with makeup. I felt so accepted and so safe with that person that it really made myself come through.
That is when I started changing my label from “just a femboy” to “genderfluid”. I had that in mind for a long time, one of my friends is genderfluid aswell. And the idea that gender is something I can influence myself and that I can manipulate however it suits me best was very empowering for my self expression.
This also ment that I could deal with any situation that required my male persona in an easy way. I would just “switch” to male mode and try to present as male as possible. With mixed results. It was a way of coping with body dysphoria until I better understood what I was feeling.
As it turned out later though, this was very much a static phenomena.
So I had an entire mostly happy relationship where my partner used she/her pronouns on me,
called me a girl in front of her friends,
treated me like a girl
and exclusively used my female name.
I held an entire talk presenting female, using a female name, being refered to as she/her in the moderation. And it felt right!
And I still did not get it?!
People came to me after EH21 and just assumed I was a trans-girl. Of course they were right, but I didn’t see it. I mean I wasn’t even out to myself at this point in time.
I never looked back at any of those times and thought “oh I want to be more male right now”.
I never felt the need to express my male side.
It was always just tolerating the fact that I may act male now as society requires.
And it wasn’t until much later that I relised how hard this actually was for me.
I am in tears now as I am writing this.
At no point in time did I ever feel wrong when presenting female.
The desire to become female is so insane that I am struggling to not fall back into the despair that is called a depressive episode.
I am struggling really hard.
I am doing my second theraphy right now because of unrelated reasons. Always being more of a feelings-avoidant type, I have learnt to take my feeling seriously and I can now even handle feelings that would have made me explode from a fear of loss just over a year ago.
I have lost a parent when I was a teenager.
I have lost trust in the other parent a couple of years ago.
Both of these things have been beyond my ability to handle.
I managed to get over these traumatic experiences with help and manage to live with them every day.
And yet, these feelings of gender dysphoria completely wreck me every day.
Any social situation, any day to day activity, any part of my existence is filled with this constant thought of being in the wrong body.
Every day I wake up and consider the cost of confronting myself with body dysphoria before I manage to get up and start my day.
On some days I loose.
I call this the cost of coming out to myself. The cost of confronting myself with those repressed feelings. How was I even able to repress such strong feelings for all those years?
Shouldn’t I have realised the moment I wrote that story about living a day as a girl at school when I was 14?
Overall I feel more alive now. More happy, more connected to my friends. Ever time one of my friends uses the name “Lucy” to get my attention or refers to me as she/her I burst out into a bright smile internally. It makes me feel so validated, so incredibly happy, so like I am myself.
And that is before I even consider the positive effects of hormone theraphy.
Every day I desire changes to my body that would make the days where I can’t even look at myself in the mirror just a bit easier. At least I now know what to do against a feeling of numbness that has been created by repressed feelings (of body dysphoria). Every day I curse the effects that my first puberty had. My first puberty was also the first time I started noticing that something was off.
Well I met a certain Anna some time ago who said just one simple thing after I told her about my gender identity: “I feel like all of what you just told me boils down to that you are just scared.”
Oh she was so right. This single sentence started a chain reaction of self-discovery and “oh fuck”-realizations that ultimatly lead to the conclusion that yes I am in fact just a girl!
Thank you for making me face my fears. Thank you for being my transition-endboss, Anna.
Cheers,
Lucy
This video helped a lot to learn about efficient ways to control the lyrinx.
It inclused a warmup that you can do before practicing. Not much detail about resonance and how to turn the humming into a voice though.
Probably the most helpful of them all. More technical than all the others. Z has an audio background after all!
Then there’s a whole playlist that you can watch!
This video gave me a lot of hope!
Very good and straight up explanation technique that makes you follow along.
There’s also the possibility to read about it in formal medical literature if you can access that. Chapter 12 of Transgender Medicine: A Multidisciplinary Approach talks about it in a lot of detail.
You have more control over your voice than you think you do!
Cheers,
Lucy
I feel like there are three main building blocks and I wanted to talk about them. Maybe this is also a post about how to pass, I don’t know.
This is the first thing that another person will observe about you.
There are many different body-features and body-types that get identified as either male or female. HRT will help you to get a body type that better fits the gender that you are. There’s also a lot that you can do with clothing. Clothing can emphasize certain gender-typical body-features. It can also help you to hide certain body-features by wearing really baggy clothing for example.
Apart from clothing and body-type, hair style and skin are also two important factors that contribute to the gender that you’ll get read as on first sight.
Like clothing, makeup is also a valuable skill to emphasize features or to create new female (in my case) features.
Voice.
Sadly, voice is one of those things that can’t simply be fixed with a pill in every case. If you transition from male to female for example, there is no way around voice training.
But don’t freak out. There’s well known techiques to change resonance and help you speak in a more female manner. The hardware is already there and by essentially learning how to voice act, you will gain a much wider voice range than most females do. Isn’t that great!?
I wouldn’t call it voice acting though. It is your voice that will be adapted to better reflect your gender-identity. Through hard work, a lot can be done to feminize ones voice. A quick search for transgender voice-training guides on YouTube will demonstrate that.
This one is probably the hardest to describe. It is also seen last. Someone’s gotta know you already or has to observe you closely to know how you feel.
I feel like for most people, how they feel about their gender is already set where it should be from the start. Managing to accept those feelings and coming true to them is the hard part though.
You might have been told your entire life that you can’t be this way because people of your gender usually aren’t that way. It will make you surpress your emotions and it will let you feel disconnected from yourself.
How you feel makes up a big part of your gender-identity. And by accepting and embracing it through looks and your voice you can truly become who you are. Who you have always been.
For me personally, discovering how strong these feelings are — those feelings of wanting to be woman — was quite a rollercoaster and it still is. Coming true to those feeling feels incredible though.
I get read as female many times per week. It always feels very validating. But something is still missing. I’m already pretty good at looks. I know quite a bit about fashion and what female features about myself to emphasize.
It is still not enough though. There’s many cases where I feel like a boy in a dress because my body-type is just not compatible with some types of clothing. I want to wear more different clothing. I want to have soft skin and a female hair-line. That is why I think HRT will help me a lot.
On the voice part — as no medication can help me with that — I’ll just have to put in the work. Learn how to speak more female. Train the muscles. It will be hard. But oh god will it be worth it.
As for the feels. I have been doing the looks part long enough in public and I have been the girl on the internet for long enough to be sure about my gender-identity. All the exploring has been done. It has always been the female video game character if there was the option. People repeatedly told me in chats that they thought I was a girl until I told them I wasn’t.
How the actual fuck did I not get this.
Well I did get it about 3.5 years ago: Maybe I was always a girl But I ignored it. Which is pretty common, I found out. Please don’t be me. I went though a lot until I could observe these feelings again.
You see. These three parts play together. No part by itself will make me female. Not all parts are required to be perfect for me to be female. Transitioning is a process and not a cut.
I will make a proper coming out post soon enough (You can call me a cracked egg until then.)
Cheers.
Hier ist der Eintrag im Fahrplan.
War eine unglaublich tolle Erfahrung!
]]>Während man in einer gesunden Beziehung ist, festzustellen, dass man nie in der Lage war, einen Menschen so richtig zu lieben. Und dann die Beziehung zu beenden, um an sich zu arbeiten.
Ein unglaublich groĂźes BedĂĽrfnis nach einer starken Bindung zu haben, so eine Bindung zu finden, sich dann aber von dieser zu distanzieren, aus Angst, verletzt zu werden.
Nach der Trennung befreundet zu bleiben und dann spontan trotzdem den Kontakt abzubrechen, per Kurznachricht und ohne ein weiteres Gespräch.
This traumatizes people.
Beziehungstrauma gehört aufgearbeitet, bevor man eine neue Beziehung beginnt.
Du kannst nur eine andere Person lieben, wenn du dich selbst lieben kannst.
Quicksort takes a list of sortable data and returns a list of sorted data.
When writing this down in haskell, the solution is rather simple.
quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort [] = []
quicksort (p:as) = quicksort lhs ++ [p] ++ quicksort rhs
where
lhs = [x | x <- as, x < p]
rhs = [x | x <- as, x >= p]
As you can see, this is literary what I just described in the Algorithm section.
There’s just a couple of things that you might need to know to understand this piece of code:
++ concatenates two arrays.(p:as) will match the first element of the list (pivot) as p and the rest of the list as as.[x | x <- as, x < p] is a list comprehension where x < p is a filter.
It only copys elements smaler than the pivot element into lhs. Works the same for rhs.quicksort [] = [] is the stopping condition of the recursion.
There’s not point in sorting an empty list, is there.The 3rd line concatenates the arrays that we recursively called quicksort on by placing the pivot element in the middle.
I think this is very elegant and is a perfect pseudocode if you want to do quicksort on paper.
This one is probably more performant as less copying around of data is being done. Slice syntax ensures that only references are being carried around on the call stack. Therefore it will also consume less memory as no duplicate of the initial array is created.
pub fn quicksort(slice: &mut [i64]){
fn partition(slice: &mut [i64], pivot: i64) -> usize {
let mut i = 0;
for j in 0..slice.len() {
if slice[j] <= pivot {
slice.swap(i, j);
i += 1;
}
}
i
}
let part_index = match slice {
[] | [_] => return,
[rest @ .., pivot] => partition(rest, *pivot),
};
slice.swap(part_index, slice.len() -1);
quicksort(&mut slice[0..part_index]);
quicksort(&mut slice[part_index + 1..]);
}
As you can see, this is a lot more complex.
The only section that is somewhat similar to the haskell solution is the match slice { … } part.
The execution stops if it is called with an empty slice or a slice with one element. I.E. nothing is there to be sorted anymore.
In this case we’ll have to deal with indexes though which makes the whole thing less readable.
I was only able to understand how to do quick sort on paper after I came up with the haskell solution myself. It took me about 5 minutes to write that down. Having all of the indexes out of the way makes it very easy to understand recursive algorithms on lists. That’s because the haskell implementation is very close to mathematical notation.
I hope that someone finds this usefull!
Cheers.
You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.
Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:
YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP
Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file. After that, include the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.
Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:
def print_hi(name)
puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.
]]>ffmpeg to the rescue.
Programs required for this are ffmpeg (ffmpeg.org) and youtube-dl.
In general, all you need to do, is tell ffmpeg to fast forward to a timestamp that you supply, like that:
ffmpeg -ss 00:15:11 -i [input file] …
We put the -ss flag before the input file so that ffmpeg fasts forward to this time stamp before starting to read the file.
Time stamps are supplied in hh:mm:ss format where h equals hours, m equals minutes and s equals seconds.
The next thing we need to tell ffmpeg is how long the section is. If your section is 2 minutes long, an according ffmpeg command line would look like this:
ffmpeg -ss 00:15:11 -i [input file] -t 00:02:00 …
If you do want to keep the entire end of the video, you may omit the -t option.
Explaining this deeper would be beyond the scope of this artice, all you need to know is that there’s a way to extract a video-track without re-encoding the video. This is how that is done in ffmpeg.
We just need to tell ffmpeg to copy both the audio and video tracks into the output file:
ffmpeg -ss 00:15:11 -i [input file] -t 00:02:00 -codec copy output.mp4
If you get errors about the container format not supporting the video/audio that you want to put into it, try .mkv instead of .mp4.
If your video is stuck for the first couple of seconds/frames or your video and audio are out of sync in stupid video players, you need to reencode. ffmpeg can only cut the video losslessly at an I-frame, so if the next I-frame is seconds away from the timestamp you supplied, you will have a still image until the I-frame comes up. (This is the part that gets way too complicated for a simple how to like this, but at least now you know what to look up if you want to learn more.)
This is pretty straight forward. Instead of telling ffmpeg to copy all of the streams, we tell it to only copy the audio, but reencode the video with x264.
ffmpeg -ss 00:15:11 -i [input file] -t 00:02:00 -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -crf 19 -profile high -preset veryslow output.mp4
Also, this will not just fix any weirdness you encounter, it will also save you on file-size if there isn’t happening much on screen in the video.
Okay so this is what I would have done if the input file was on my local harddrive. Conveniently, ffmpeg also supports m3u8 playlist as an input so we just need to supply the extracted video URL from youtube-dl.
Get the video URL like this:
youtube-dl -g [URL to VOD]
Then copy the URL that youtube-dl returns and insert that for [input file].
Press enter and watch the magic go!
Congrats! There’s your cut out section!
Creating a local copy is okay, at least to current german law. Twitch VODs are not digital rights management protected content. But ask the creator before sharing sections of their VOD. This should be common knowledge but I feel like I need to say this regardless.
Now have fun creating long clips of your favourite streamers!
]]>The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 was released in september of 2013. I was looking for a smartphone back then that would last a while and I wanted to spend a lot of money (for that time) on it. So I bought the 32GB version with 3GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 800 ARM v7 processor. It came with Android 4.3 and the year later got an upgrade to Android 5.0. This was also the last update that it ever received by Samsung along with a couple minor security updates. And I am still using this smartphone today. This is the story of why I am still using that phone and why I will continue using it until it is 10 years old. It goes something like this:
This is pretty easy to explain.
One of my biggest issues in the last few years was that I took my phone to bed and watched YouTube or was on Twitter all night. I countered that issue by just outright removing these apps from my phone. I stopped using them and it got better.
If you’ve got a problem with managing your content consumption at night, try that. Remove all the Apps that consume more than 20 minutes of your day without giving anything back. Your phone will become incredibly boring. And you will think more about when you consume content.
A lot of people straight up reach to their phone if they ever have more than 10 seconds of boredom in their daily life. Boredom is very important tho. And not wasting ever smal bit of boredom on consuming content will make your feel less restrained over time.
Content consumption is a very mindfull thing for me and I really think about if I really wanna watch that YouTube video or not.
From this behavouir I turned into a person who mostly watches content with friends. I watch a lot of anime but hardly any if I’m alone.
A thing that has become more common these days is watching smal streamers. A little bit of social interaction via chat is exactly what I need in lonely evenings. Most of the time I just lurk and do something else. Whenever I feel like joining the conversation I write something in chat. Maybe I have been watching a little too many hours of VTubers in recent months tho, but what else are ya gonna do these days.
There isn’t much that I gain fromw watching content alone. It’s another way of consuming content and works best if you need to watch something for uni for example. But I don’t prefer it for content that has the purpose of being entertaining.
Yeah. Honestly, I don’t get why anyone would need a smartphone that has no microSD slot and not headphone jack. And companies continue to remove these essential things from their devices so that I have even less options to choose from.
Sure, processors have gotten faster and cameras have gotten better. But if I really wanna do something productive, I choose a real computer anyways. A smartphone just doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard and therefore interacting with it will always be slower and less productive than with a real computer. This fact will never change.
Modern smartphones become e-waste pretty quickly. Most of them last two years and then they are due to a complete replacement. The part that usually dies first is the battery.
I don’t want to ever own a smartphone without a replacable battery. Sure, built in batteries are safer and yield more flexibility during production. But they are also very bad for the environment.
Also, if my charging port gets stuffed with junk again, there’s no way to replace that part for 3€ like I did on my current Note 3.
Keep your smartphones as long as possible and push removable batteries. Don’t make your smartphone a content consumption device if you are pronte to wasting time and pulling it out if you get bored. Real computers with real keyboards will always be surperior.
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