Archive for General
12.22.07
Posted in General at 8:21 pm by jw
It’s been a while, a few things I need to update, but I’m going to do this one first because it will probably interest the most random people out there. Recently I got myself a new Zune so I could watch my DVR’d BSG episodes while on a treadmill trying to get fit. I love the device – it has a nice big screen (about twice the size of a comparable iPod), 80G of storage and a pretty slick interface. Sadly, the PC software leaves a little to be desired though.
In any case, the Zune can only play WMV and simple MP4 video. The PC software automatically converts a bunch of different file formats for you into something the Zune can play (ie WMV) but wouldn’t understand AVI files, particularly ones that use the XVid codec.
I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to find something that would do the conversion for me and a quick search of Google told me there were quite a few products there that promised to make everything easy and magically do the conversion for me. They mostly cost about $30, but if I was going to spend money I really wanted something that would fit all my personal criteria:
- Zune native format – no second conversion by the Zune application after I’ve done my own conversions.
- Batch encoding – I want to point it at a whole bunch of files and just let it go.
- Low priority – I want to be able to run the conversion in the background and not have to fight with it when I want CPU power for something else.
- Multithreaded – I have a dual core CPU. Why not use it?
- MP4 format with H.264 encoding – why not use the best format the Zune supports?
- Keep the original frame rate – there’s no point converting 25fps to 30fps or vice versa.
- No black bars – if the original was 1.7:1 then just make another 1.7:1 video instead of putting black bars. The Zune can handle it.
- Reduce to 320x? – may as well reduce the resolution to the Zune’s native display.
- Able to cope with minor damage to the input files (some of my DVR’d files aren’t that good http://tabsmall.com/cialis-otc/)
Honestly, I didn’t think any of those were particularly much to ask from a conversion program. The later iPods support a very similar set of features to the Zune so I expected the conversion programs would easily do what I wanted. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Here’s a list of the apps I tried and where I found their failings were:
Cucusoft’s Zune Video Converter
Not too bad a product, but wouldn’t let me set an automatic frame rate (defaulted to NTSC), and insisted on putting black bars at the top and bottom of letterboxes. Failed to handle any input file errors, and was no ability to set the priority to default to low.
Xilisoft’s Zune Video Converter
Seemed pretty good, but again no automatic frame rate detection. Setting the encoder to H.264 produced a file that wasn’t playable on the Zune and had to be converted a second time. Didn’t cope with any input file errors and there was no ability to set the priority to low.
Imtoo’s Zune Video Converter
This was exactly the same program as the Xilisoft one. Go figure.
PQDVD’s Zune Video Converter
Seemed the best of the bunch – handled input file errors with no problem but didn’t seem to want to remember the previous encoder settings so you had to go back and specify H.264 every time. There was no automatic frame rate detection either, and the priority (again) couldn’t be set to low.
Free iPod Video Converter
I had great hopes for this one – it automatically kept the frame rate for me and promised H.264 encoding. The wizard interface was a little clunky but livable. Videos converted played fine in the PC player and transferred without conversion to the Zune but just gave an error when I tried to play them.
Nero Recode
I actually own Nero 8, so I gave Nero Recode a try. It seemed to do very well when using the iPod profile but when I finally got to play it on the device, it had trimmed the video to the left side rather than letterboxing it. The trim controls were strangely complex so I just gave up.
Windows Media Encoder
Promised a lot, but didn’t really deliver. Figuring out how to rescale the video and keep the frame rate turned out to be close to impossible and would have left me making a new conversion profile for every different type of file. Not something I really wanted to do.
Various Doom9 Solutions
The hard-core converters were a bit of a disappointment. As I expected they all had a whole bunch of controls but none really seemed to work as well as even the basic commercial ones above. Made me kinda sad because Doom9 has previously been a great resource for ripping my DVDs to media files for playing on my PC!
So, disappointed with all of these offerings, I decided to sit down and try to use the Windows Media Encoder APIs to do the whole thing myself. After a few hours work with the SDK and Visual Studio 2005 (it crashes with 2008 – go figure), I had something actually encoding to a .wmv file, but I ended up running against the same problems I had with Windows Media Encoder – you needed to build the profile up from scratch for every variation in the input file which really made it more work than I wanted to put in right then.
Finally, I was looking at the freeware H.264 encoder (x264) and noticed it was on the same site as one of my favorite open source media players (VLC). Looking more into VLC I found out that it can also transcode files, and noticed that .mp4 was one of the outputs. From there, it was all a matter of figuring out the arcane command line incantation to get it to produce an mp4 that the Zune itself was happy to play. Finally it all worked out and I ended up with the attached 4NT script: makezune.btm
Works like a charm! Go go VLC.
Edit: I’ve been asked by a couple of people to write a version of the script file that runs in the regular XP/Vista command shell, so here it is. I even threw in a couple of comments to make life a little easier! makezune2.cmd
Edit #2: Note that this solution only works with the Zune v2.0 (4/8/80G) and not the original 30G Zunes which can only play .wmv files. To get those to work is probably going to involve some heavy tinkering with the Windows Media Encoder libraries.
Edit #3: So I put the time in to actually tinker with the Windows Media Encoder. After finding Alex Zambelli’s upgraded WMCmd.vbs (local link) script, it was a relatively simple matter of trial and error to find the parameters needed to make a file compatible with the Zune. The real problem was figuring out the scaling. Fortunately, some really ugly batch file scripting came to the rescue and the final product is in makezune3.cmd
Note: For any attached file, use right click, save link as… and then rename it to the proper name. To avoid issues with downloads of script files being prevented by Internet Explorer, I’ve actually stored everything as text files.
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09.29.07
Posted in General at 10:05 pm by jw
Just a quick note while I’m out in Connecticut for the weekend (will post more on that this week) – I had the best steak and baked potato I can remember ever eating in the US at Rosy Tomorrow’s in Danbury. Still in heaven over that steak.
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09.09.07
Posted in General at 2:56 am by jw
I know I’ve been slack on the updates lately – been a lot happening since we listed the house and now I have a lot of new stuff to talk about (see, not posting for a while isn’t all bad).
New House
The house sold, very quickly. We had an offer less than a month after we listed and it went on a 30 day contract. Now, we’ve moved out into a one bedroom apartment (squishy) while we wait for things to wind down at work so we can make the move back to Australia in February next year.
It’s definitely been interesting moving from 3 bedrooms with a large family room to what is essentially a 2 room apartment with a large storage area downstairs. We’ve converted the small dining space into a computer area, kept the living room as a living room and moved all the sewing stuff into the (quite large) bedroom. Still doesn’t leave a lot of room to move about in but it’s comfortable enough to live in for six months and we shouldn’t kill each other before then.
New Computer
I finally got tired of Tahnia’s dual core Athlon x2 running rings around my old Athlon 3200, not to mention the fact I had this sparkly new GeForce 8800 GTX in the machine that couldn’t even get enough data to live up to its performance potention, so I spent the $500 to upgrade the CPU, Motherboard and RAM to a Core 2 Duo E6750, Asus P5K-SE and 4G of RAM.
Yes, I know I’m normally an AMD buyer, but this time I figured I’d cross the road seeing the Core 2 Duos were really doing very well when pitted against the Athlon 64’s. The systems I could get for the same price were very comparable and the C2D just felt like a better and more upgradeable buy right now. Maybe if AMD had the Barcelona stuff out already then I wouldn’t have switched, but their loss I guess http://www.tadalafilotc.com/.
Things just didn’t go right, however, from when I got the machine. First, Vista seemed to be taking a very long time to install, and once it was installed the disk accesses were hanging for a long time. Turns out that the Maxtor 500G drive I’d put in fresh out of the plastic bag (I hadn’t opened it from when I received the exchange for a faulty one last year) had exactly the same problem the drive that I returned used to show – freezing for a few seconds about 5 or 6 times a minute.
Thoroughly frustrated with this, I drove down the street to Best Buy and grabbed a Western Digital drive to replace it. It was an extraordinary difference! Vista installed in under half an hour. Right now, I’m so annoyed with Maxtor (which is now Seagate) that I don’t even want another drive from them. Teach me for going too cheap!
My next problem was the machine started to give me blue screen errors when playing games. This was most noticeable in Everquest 2, but also started to happen in Bioshock. Putting the crash dumps in the debugger showed no discernable pattern – the errors were truly random – so I started trying to isolate it.
- Disabled the sound card in the device manager. No change.
- Pulled the sound card out and used the motherboard sound. Actually sounded a lot better, but still crashed. Sound card got tossed into the cupboard but I was no closer to finding the problem.
- Reduced the memory to 3G (using boot settings). No change.
- Increased the voltage to the CPU. No change.
- Increased the voltage to the RAM. No change.
- Dropped the RAM speed to DDR2–667 (from it’s spec speed of DDR2–800) and no more crashes.
Ugh. So I have dodgy memory somewhere. However, it’s stable and with some tinkering I’m sure I can find it when I next upgrade. Benchmarking shows me I lose about 50 points on 3DMark06 (from 10700 to 10650) which right now isn’t enough to care about to send the RAM back. So, the PC works and I’m relatively happy with it. The performance is fantastic at least!
New Games
As I mentioned before, I’m messing with Bioshock right now. It’s an stunningly well done game, and I’m taking my time to enjoy all the little facets of the game that I normally just skip in a first person shooter. While there are a bunch of DRM issues (which I touched on in my previous post), the game itself is just “wow”.
I’ve also gone a little retro and been relaxing with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It was a little slow and annoying at the start (gang wars aren’t that much fun), but now I’m working for the Triads in “Las Venetas” things are a lot more interesting. I’m still amazed at how well they’ve captured the feel of San Andreas (Los Angeles), San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venetas (Las Vegas). Having been all over there last year, the feel is almost perfect. While it’s a fun game, I would absolutely NOT recommend anyone buys this for their kids. It’s just not a kid’s game. At all.
I’m still looking forward to trying Flight Simulator X out on the new machine. Should do really well! I might even run back through some of my old games that I couldn’t turn the quality right up on (F.E.A.R., etc.) and play them through when I have time. Got 3–4 weeks of vacation left this year before things all go crazy next year moving so seems a good plan near Christmas!
Anyhow, sleepy time. Will try to post more frequently!
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07.09.07
Posted in General at 1:31 pm by jw
I’ve been having even more fun with copy protection programs lately, and strangely enough they were both caused by demo software which really has no business even trying to use copy protection when you think about it!
SecuROM – Overlord Demo
My first issue was with the demo for Overlord, which was tossing up error messages because it didn’t like me running Process Explorer from Microsoft. I have no clue why they don’t like it running, but whatever, I stopped it and the demo still didn’t work and still claimed Process Explorer was running. A small amount of investigation later and I discovered what it was really complaining about was the Process Explorer driver being loaded (the driver isn’t unloaded after Process Explorer exits).
Ok – this was pretty obviously a bug in SecuROM (they want to stop people looking at their “sekrut programz” so try hard to detect anything that can even though Process Explorer isn’t that smart anyway), and I really wasn’t in the mood to reboot my machine every time I wanted to run a simple game demo. Digging out WinObj I messed around with the access control on the driver object itself and found that SecuROM happily ignored the presence of the driver if I just denied access to everyone. Of course, this then gave the problem that I couldn’t set the permissions back to what they should have been on the driver because I was denied access and WinObj didn’t give me any useful way to get the access back!
Well, it was time to write a quick program to block off access to the driver, run the SecuROM application and when the app was done, set access back to what it should be on the driver. In the end, it was all pretty easy and worked like a charm: http://www.chase.net.au/HidePE100.zip
Interestingly enough, after I wrote this program I bought C&C3 which had the same problem and I was easily able to use this program to get around SecuROM’s bug. It should also be noted that I’m not getting around their protections (which would be illegal thanks to the idiocy of the DMCA), simply because the program explicitly makes sure Process Explorer isn’t running before it allows the SecuROM program to run.
Tages – Silverfall Demo
My next problem was with the Silverfall demo, which I used Steam to download. After the gigabyte of downloading I try to run the demo and nothing happens. Pulling up Process Explorer (I love that program) I see the Silverfall application starting and exiting quickly, trying to run “TagesSetup_x64.exe”. Well, it turns out that Tages is yet another copy protection vendor which is exclusively limited to CD/DVD media and has the somewhat idiotic claim that it prevents 1:1 copying (which all copy protection vendors do). Turns out they aren’t providing digital signatures for their drivers that ship with Silverfall, so Vista x64 simply won’t load the drivers and leaves a report of the fact in the event log.
I’m really not sure what’s more idiotic. Providing unsigned x64 drivers when the majority of x64 users are on Vista and won’t be able to load the drivers anyway, putting copy protection on a demo, or putting copy protection on a game that is downloaded from Steam which has its own copy protection scheme anyway! I really don’t think I’m going to buy that game, at least until I find a good no-cd crack that removes the issue of idiotic copy protection that prevents legitimate customers enjoying a game http://tadacipbycipla.com/.
Summary
Copy protection doesn’t stop the crackers for more than a few hours. It doesn’t stop the bittorrents firing up with free versions of the games to download. The only real effect it has is to hurt legitimate users from enjoying games that they’ve probably paid good money for. I’ve lost count of how many games I’ve tried in the last few years that have given me grief over copy protection and the whole thing really makes me wary enough now to make sure a crack for the game exists before I go out and spend good money on it.
I hoped game companies would look at the success of Galactic Civilizations II which shipped in huge numbers without protections, compare it with the massive consumer backlash against StarForce and realize how bad the whole thing is for their bottom lines, but they keep drinking the SecuROM kool-aid and keep hurting their customers more than the pirates. Idiots.
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07.02.07
Posted in General at 9:09 pm by jw
I’m happy to see at least one news organization still has things in perspective. In Terror Idiocy Outbreak, the Register really has a good handle on just how stupid the headline grabbing “bomb” plots really were in the UK. It’s hard to believe this is a nation that was terrorized for years by the IRA, and is now throwing a fit because someone torched a car with a gas bottle in it.
Come on people – refuse to be terrorized!
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