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  1. Hi all

    Just wondering why the restriction on spaces in startup disk names for ffmpegx? I've always had a hard disk with the default name of 'Macintosh HD', and have never had any reason to change it. Is there any way round this restriction?

    I really can't rename the disk, too many other things rely on its name. I've used ffmpegx before on other machines (also with disks called 'Macintosh HD'), but on this one it just won't run.
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  2. Explorer Case's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
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    Middle Earth
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    The latest version of ffmpegX, v0.0.9y-L r2, seems to work fine on my Mac for almost three years now, with the startup disk named the default “Macintosh HD”. I was under the impression that most (all?) dependancies on the name of the startup disk had been removed in the later releases of ffmpegX.
    The name of the startup disk should be irrelevant to most command line tools that ffmpegX relies on, as the root of the drive is referenced as "/" in a path, instead of by name. The GUI relies heavily on AppleScript, so there might be some exceptions because of that, but I’m not aware of any.

    You did install (move) ffmpegX in the all-users Applications folder on your boot disk, right? The user account does have admin privileges, right?

    What errors, if any, are you experiencing?
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  3. Banned
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    Oct 2004
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    Freedonia
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    Unix, which is the father of Linux and the BSD variants, is the grandfather of Mac's OS X, which is sort of BSD based. Sort of. Anyway, Unix traditionally has disliked spaces in file names. You can do it, but as Unix has always been command line heavy, doing so was not easy. The general workaround for "I don't like spaces in names" problems is this. You put a \ before the space. So instead of something like this:
    ffmpegx Macintosh HD
    you would do
    ffmpegx Macintosh\ HD
    PLEASE notice that the slash goes \ and DO NOT be an idiot and use the / slash instead and then come back here complaining that it doesn't work. They are NOT the same thing.

    There actually are good reasons for not allowing spaces in file names, but debating that is FAR outside the scope of this thread. Let's just say it's a holdover from an older day where people interacted with computers on the command line a lot more than they do today.
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  4. Thanks very much Case and jman98. I trashed it and recopied it into /Applications, and it's fine now. Some sort of glitch, don't know what it was! But thanks very much for the info. I understand, now you explain that it's command line based, I wasn't aware of that. I work with databases, and I always avoid spaces in either field names or file names for the same reasons. It was just that I didn't really want to change something for one app, but now I don't have to, so that's great!

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