Tuesday, March 25, 2008
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd started ripping my DVD collection and converting it to play as video files on my PS3.Initially, I used a piece of software to rip the DVDs, and then used DIVX converter to create the playable video files. However, I soon ran into problems, as DIVX converter insisted on converting to 29 frames per second, when the DVDs were only 25fps... causing huge audio sync problems. The films were ultimately unwatchable.
Anyway, after an amount of research into alternative solutions, I settled on a piece of software called Handbrake. I spent a couple of weeks ripping and converting, and then checking the conversions on my PC, just to be sure they'd come out okay.
Big mistake. I'd tested the very first one on my PS3, and it was fine, but for later conversions, I used a higher image resolution, and only much later did I find that this wouldn't play back on my PS3.
Doh!!!
So, after much research on various forums, looking for optimum settings, I realised that really, no-one who had anything to say, actually knew. Solution? Find out myself, through trial and error, and then write an article/tutorial on the subject.
And here it is....
Handbrake Settings For Converting DVD to mpeg4 for Sony PS3
Steve 2:59 PM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The last week has been rather difficult.My computer died... not sure if it was a hardware issue, a virus, or just generally corrupted system files, but whatever the case, it was mostly non-functional.
Anyone who knows me will know just how much time I spend on my pc, and so will understand just how distressing this was.
So... I bought a nice big 750gig external hard drive, and with the computer in safe mode, backed up all of my doccuments and transferable software.
Next I disconnected all non-vital hardware, ie card readers, webcam and gfx cards, and did a full reinstall of windows.
This worked just fine, right up to the point that I tried to re-fit my gfx cards. I have 2... one rather better than the other, but neither would install for reasons that fail me.
What this meant was that while I could have a perfectly functional workhorse of a computer, games were now out of the question.
Oh well.
On the upside though, now that everything was backed up, and my OS installation was fairly minimal, I could take the risk of repartitioning the hard drive, and setting the whole thing up as a dual-boot system.
So now I have a nice clean installation of Windows XP on one partition, and a very funky, not to mention quirky, copy of Ubuntu Linux on the other.
I'm finding this Linux malarky quite fascinating, having never used it before.
It seems to me that modern Linux OS's have something of a split personality.
On the one hand, they can be quite intuitive and very clever, allowing you to automatically install software from a huge list of compatible programs, without even having to launch a browser to find it.
On the other hand, installing things like drivers, which don't appear to be installed automatically, is like going back in time, to at least MSDOS era computing.
Very very odd.
This external hard drive thing is a cool piece of kit.
I'd been planning to buy one some time soon anyway, so the pc failure just prompted me to get the thing a little sooner.
The thing is... it can be accessed by my PS3.
Why does this matter?
Because the PS3 can play mp4 and DIVX video.
So think about it.... PS3 plugged into a 32 inch TV, with a massive hard drive containging my entire DVD (and later, VHS) collection.
No more searching for the right disk or tape... it'll be all right there, available at the touch of a button, not to mention being viewable all round the house (and garden) from my PSP, via wifi streaming.
And there's more....
For Valentines day, Andrea and I bought each other presents.
I gave her a Swarovsky crystal bracelet, which she seems very pleased with.
What she gave me pleased me no end.
It's a watch, but not just any old watch. This watch is also an mp3 player, and better yet... a video player.
It comes with software to convert your typical digital video file into 128x128 SMV video files. These are fairly tiny... 35meg, compared to a 150meg avi, and with the screen being so tiny, you don't notice the lack of quality.
So, I can fit my entire collection of Invader Zim videos into it's 2gig storage capacity, still have room for a load of tunes, and have the whole lot strapped to my wrist wherever I go.
Yay!
Labels: computers, consoles, gadgets, video
Steve 8:11 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
There's a chatroom I hang out in sometimes where they seem to really enjoy it when I read kids stories to them.Obviously, I don't read the story completely straight, but add a certain dry spin to it.... and in a room full of americans, with the english accent on top of it all, it seems to keep them quite entertained.
So, I figured, why not record stories like that, and upload them to youtube?
Here's my first attempt.
Labels: video
Steve 1:16 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Not a lot going on here at the moment. One or two things ticking over on the backburner, ideas bubbling away in the background, but most things on hold due to lack of motivation, funds, or both.I'll be altering the website a bit soon, removing the forum and chatroom links. The forum serves pretty much no purpose, and I'm totally done with the chatroom these days.
In their place will come a section for my youtube videos, and a links page, where I can add reciprocal links to sites that don't fit in any of the othther areas of the site.
Anyways... here's a video of Cat and his brother Milo, having a fight.
Cat's the agressive looking one.
I say "looking", coz he really isn't. He's very chilled, just Milo is one seriously annoying little shitbag of a cat, in most ways you could imagine.
Steve 10:56 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, April 06, 2007
Some video footage of my computer and games console collection.Labels: computers, consoles, video
Steve 1:24 PM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Cat likes webcams, so it seems.Steve 6:05 PM [+] (0) comments
It's been a busy few days.
Andrea's oldest daughter moved out a couple of days ago, taking one dog and two cats with her, while just a couple of days previously, we took in a stray dog.
So, while attempting to move much furniture and other stuff, we've been evading collision with Max, the staffy/whippet cross puppy, and Bailey, who looks like a german shepherd/rottweiler cross puppy.
How anyone could abandon such a sweet animal is beyond us. He'd been seen wandering round for several days, looking very lost, and when a bunch of kids started kicking him around, another more civilised kid brought him to Andrea. He's been reported as found to the appropriate authorities, but after over a week now, no-one's come forward to claim him.
Here's a video clip of Max and Bailey playing in the garden
Steve 1:10 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, July 03, 2003
I learned how to convert avi files to VCD last night, so today I spliced together all the short movies I'd shot with my digital camera and dumped them all onto a CD. It feels kinda weird watching them on tv after viewing them on the laptop for so long.Anyways, having gotten into the mood for dumping stuff onto CD, and wanting to take full advantage of my DVD player's multi-format abilities, I dumped my whole digital photo collection onto CD too... they're cycling through a slide show as I type this.
The other cool aspect of all this is that I've been able to delete a whole mass of stuff from my hard drive, freeing up room for some heavy duty video file conversions.
Labels: video
Steve 4:44 AM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Ah, technology... dontcha just love it?Sometimes techie toys go wrong for the most untechie of reasons.
Turns out the problem I was having was down to the cd resonating. Why was it doing that? Duh. The laptop's sat on a fold-up wooden chair, and wasn't entirely horizontal. A stack of coins placed under the feet at the rear of the laptop levelled it off and cds burn just fine now.
So... svcd movies. Are they worth the huge download time when you can get a highly compressed avi file of the same film in a fraction of the time? Hell yes!!! Very very nearly dvd quality... they stomp all over vhs, and as for vcd or avi.... no contest. Watching on a tv via an svcd compatible dvd player instead of pc monitor makes a big difference too, as the low definition screen acts as a great anti-aliaser... no jaggies, pixelation or blockyness anywhere.
I'm a happy chappy again :-)
Steve 3:56 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, June 06, 2003
I have a new widget.A Samsung dvd player.
Nothing too impressive about that you may think, but it's rather more than that. The number of formats it can handle is impressive to say the least, and means I can mothball several other players.
It'll play dvds, cds, vcds, svdcs, mp3s and displays jpegs on photo cds. Sadly it's unable to play mpeg or avi video files, and the conversion software I have doesn't seem able to convert them to vcd, so I guess I'm gonna have to hunt around a few bittorrent sites for .bin and .cue files and burn movies direct to video cd.
Heavy bandwidth usage here we come :-)
Steve 7:26 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, May 23, 2003
The Benway Guide To Downloading Movies (If you're not interested in such stuff, skip this post, it'll bore you senseless.)The first port of call when looking for a movie is always going to be Kazaa Lite closeley followed by MinMX
These are both fairly typical file sharing systems where you'll often find movies in mpg and avi formats. However, the movies you'll find here have usually been reprocessed by various movie sharing groups, and the quality can often be questionable. The speed of downloads can often suck too, as very often people just grab the movie they want and then remove it form their shared folder, meaning there are only a few people sharing the file, with thousands trying to download it.
The solution to both of these problems is to go directly to the source, obtaining the movie in it's original form (or as near to it as possible) as it was distributed by the group who first obtained it.
The first port of call is usually an irc channel, the details of which I'm not going to go into, as usually these files are split into about 50 rar files, which then need to be decompressed, rejoined, and have numerous other conversions done to make them work. I know how to do it, but it's a pain in the arse and not really worth the hassle.
So... the next place these files will so up, and a much more useful system is on BitTorrent.
This is a very clever and (I suspect deliberately) confusing file sharing system. Unlike Kazaa Lite or WinMX, there is no search facility, and to make things more confusing, the first time you run the program it will give you nothing but an error message, and appear not to be working. Pretty good for putting those who'd like to shut it down off the trail.
So how does it work?
First, you go to the link above and download the program. Next, you need to go the a website that lists live torrent files, the most popular at the moment being www.suprnova.org. Here you'll find a list of links to various movies, tv shows, software, games and various other files. If you have the bittorrent program, you can click on those links, a small file will download onto the temp files folder of your system which will automatically run your bittorrent program and begin downloading the movie or whatever file you've clicked on. If you don't have bittorrent installed, all you'll get is a webpage or file filled with rubbish that appears to make no sense at all. (Also good for putting off those who don't know what they're doing.)
What happens next is, bittorrent will allocate a space on your drive for the file, making it look like you already have it (this confused the hell out of me at first), and only then will it begin downloading, while at the same time uploading the same file from you to other users. This is rather an elegant system, as it removes the need for large queues as seen on other systems. Also, the more data you upload, the faster your download will come through (usually), which is handy for preventing people from hacking the system so they can download without uploading, and makes the whole thing more usable for everyone.
Now, assuming you've downloaded a movie from bittorrent, chances are you won't have an mpg or avi, but a set of .cue and .bin files ammounting to 1 - 2 gigs, which don't appear to do anything. At this point you can either burn then to a writable CD using nero or similar (I've never done this so can't go into the details), or alternatively, you can use vcdgear to convert them into mpg files which you can view with media player.
Other Useful Sites:
www.vcdquality.com has up to the minute reviews of all the latest movies that have been made available by the various crews and groups.
AVIPreview allows you to preview movie files from Kazaa Lite, WinMX and similar before they've finished downloading... handy for checking that they're not fakes or broken files. (This doesn't work with bittorrent.)
GSpot is a handy tool for telling you what video codec a file needs to be viewed. Very often a file may appear to not be working, when in truth you simply don't have the required codec.
MovieCodec.com is a good starting point for finding info about codecs, and has a large (if sometimes obnoxious) forum which can sometimes be informative.
Steve 11:06 PM [+] (0) comments
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