by Matt | Oct 12, 2007 | Culture, Tech
Apologies on the brevity of this post, I’m heading out the door in a few minutes. I just wanted to say how cool it was of my boss to pick up some computer parts for me for all my hard work this month. It’s the beginnings of a great system. He had a bunch of stuff to order from NewEgg and slipped in a nice Gigabyte S-Series GA-M61P, 2Gs of Patriot DDR2 (PC2-6400) memory and a shiny new Athlon 64 X2 5600+ for me. That was so unexpected and total awesome. I haven’t given it much thought, but I’ll probably use my current 500w power supply and my hard drives and case of course (Uber case lives on!). I guess now all I need is a video card. It’s been so long since I’ve bought one. I know I’ll be going Nvidia, but does anyone have any suggestions for specific models or brands?
by Matt | Feb 13, 2007 | Culture, Games, Tech, Web
No sooner had I posted that last long winded post did I read, deep in the forums I found it on, that the development had forked, gotten a GUI and a new website. You can check out the new versions here. Pretty slick. This will certain ease the pain of having to encode everything by hand. Ah, the wonderous power of the internet, lol.
by Matt | Feb 13, 2007 | Culture, Games, Tech
Ever since I heard of the existance of the Xbox 360, I was intregued by it’s alleged “streaming media” capabilities. When I got one, I knew it was a feature that I simply needed to try. That was December. I had been running Windows Media Player 11 long before that, and downloading and setting the connectivity part was simple. I had my mp3s streaming in about 10 minutes. Since then I’ve become quite the “library whore”, having a constant need to manage my own content, fix ID3 tags, get album art, etc. For the most part, WMP11 has stood up to my abuse, and I applaud it for that. I still think there are better players out there, but for library and organization sake, I find WMP superior to iTunes. That’s just one man’s opinion. I don’t have an iPod, so I can’t attest to iTunes “awesome trendyness”. But this article isn’t about iTunes vs WMP, actually, it isn’t even about music. It’s about TV.
While WMP11 streams music and photos to the 360 with ease, video is a whole other ballgame. At first I just put various TV shows into a folder, added the folder to my library and hoped for the best. No dice. Although WMP can play all sorts of media files, the 360 won’t see them. So I start digging. Apparently the original 360 dashboard and the original versions of WMP11 forbid streaming video. This was a pretty blatent attempt to sell more copies of XP Media Center Ed., which worked right out of the box with the 360 and could stream pretty much everything with little or no effort. The other option for streaming content was to wait for Vista, since Home Premium, Premium and Ultra all had the media center components build in. All this was going on in the latter parts of last year, before I even got my 360. When I was Google’ing the problem, I kept on finding “it simply won’t work without Media Center” as the answer, but all the articles and forum posts were early or middle 2006. Surely there had to be some sort of update since then, especially now that Vista is here. Sure enough, there was a WMP update, a Media Connector component update and a few dashboard updates. All this combines to let the people with the bleeding edge, newest updated copies of WMP stream a VERY specific type of WMV file to the Xbox.
Fantastic, awesome, now I can stream video to my Xbox right? Kinda. Like I said, it needs to be a specifically encoded WMV video file, with a certain type of audio encoding as well. Specifially, you need the Windows Media Encoder Series 9 codecs. You also need to have the video compressed with MPEG4 and MP3 192kbps audio. This is the only combination I could find that would work.
So, I have the right format. What about my content. Well, my main motivation in doing this is to watch TV. You see, I don’t have a DVR. I can’t watch TV when I want to. I’m at the mercy of the networks. I know, shame on me for not being with it and having a DVR (trust me, I want one). Thankfully, the internet comes to my rescue. TV torrents are among the most popular things on the planet at the moment. Not to mention that these torrents are almost always of the HD version of the show. The main problem is, all these bountiful, HD quality shows are all Xvid encoded AVI files. What’s a boy to do? Convert them of course!
Converting video these days is easier said than done, at least for the average home user, and especially when speciality formats are involved. I already mentioned that for the WMVs I needed the WME9 codec, MPEG4 and MP3 audio right. Well, to use the AVI files, I also need the Xvid codec, the DivX codec (for some), and AC3 audio filters. Of course, you need a program to actually do all this conversion. Well, most, if not all the popular conversion software can’t convert into that funky WMV format that the Xbox needs. WMEncoder can, but it can’t DECODE the AVI files. This is where it gets complicated. After searching for days, I finally determined that with the help of a VB script and a lot of command line decoding/encoding, it’s possible to do it fairly painlessly… but one video at a time. Of course, you need MORE crap to do that too. FFMpeg, FFDShow, and the front end to the AC3 filters do most of the work, and the VB script I found was called Encode360.
Basically, once you get all the pieces in the right place (which took the better part of a day), all you need to do is drag and drop a file onto the VB script and a couple minutes later, you have a fantastic looking, still fairly HD quality, properly formatted WMV file, that WMP11 recognizes, shares, and that your 360 finds and players perfectly.
Now, the only thing left to do is to re-encode my entire library of stuff. While it’s always beneficial to keep the AVI files, I usually just burn them to disk and get them off my system. There’s no sense in keeping the AVI files on my system when I would have to be in front of my computer to enjoy them. I’ll just keep the WMV files handy so that I can watch TV more or less on demand. Seeing as there’s only one evening’s worth of TV that I watch in the first place, that shouldn’t really be that daunting of a task. How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men and CSI:Miami. I’ve got the occasional episodes of Family Guy and The Office, but that’s pretty much it. I would like to get the entire collection of Red vs Blue on there, but I think I’d be looking into getting a new (giant) hard drive before that happens.
So, my question to you guys is this… do any of you have any experience transcoding stuff like this? Is there an easier way to do it? Any suggestions on programs or processes to speed this along? I’ve already tried TMPG-encoder, VLC player, and MediaMonkey. They either didn’t work, didn’t work properly, or produced poor and unwatchable results. I had videos without color, without audio, with audio but without video, all sorts of crap. I’d really like an all in one package that I just give it a file, tell it to make it a WMV with X, Y, Z parameters, and let it go to town. Any thoughts?
by Matt | Jul 28, 2006 | Tech
Just a test to make sure the RSS is working…
Edit: Seems to work, at least as far as Sage is concerned…. mmmm, sage is good. 🙂
by Matt | Jan 4, 2006 | Culture, Personal, Tech
As of this moment, our new Canon SD550 and the Canon ELPH accessory kit are on their way from NYC to my doorstep. I opted for the accessory kit because it’s only $50 and contains a $45 battery, a $15 metal strap and a $20 leather case. The only thing left to do is get a larger SD memory card. I have a gift certificate for Fry’s that’s burning a hole in my pocket, so I think I’ll start there. I’ll probably end up picking up a 1G Lexar or SanDisk. We use their CF counterparts here at work and have always been impressed by their performance.
I’m gitty as a schoolgirl. 😛
by Matt | Dec 23, 2005 | Culture, Tech
Given my recent mouse trouble (link), I was feverishly wanting to put my new Logitech G5 laser mouse through it’s passes the moment I unwrapped it. Having used what I consider to be the pinacle of mouse technology for 5+ years, I was skeptical about the new mouse living up to my fairly high expectations. Last night after some Christmas present wrapping I had a chance to put the G5 through it’s passes. To be perfectly honest, with one exception (which I’ll get to shortly), it’s probably the smoothest and most accurate gaming mouse I’ve ever used.
The mouse itself is adorned in rust orange and gun metal gray/silver. Looking a bit like it belongs in the world of Half Life instead of on my desk. The orange LEDs embeded within it’s surface reinforce that notion as well. The mouse is also well textured, going with more of a tactile feel that would closely approximate very fine grit sandpaper. It’s not hard sleek plastic at all. This definatly won’t be sliding around on you and “sweaty mouse palm” is a thing of the past. The thumb-rest on the left side is a soft textured rubber so that you can grip the mouse easier. It a very comfortable mouse to use.
The underside sports teflon coated pads for easy glide on desktops or in my case, a RatzPad “gaming surface”. It’s also home to one of the two unique features of this mouse, the weight cartridge. A small eject button in the bottom exposes a removable orange tray with 8 small holes. Each of these can be fitted with a small weight that comes in a nice metal tin. There’s 16 weights, eight 4.5 gram weights and eight more 1.7g weights. These can be used to make the mouse heavier or lighter depending on your gaming style. If you’re a “pick up the mouse and slam it back down” sort of person, you might want to load it up with the 4.5g weights to minimize that. If you’re a “quick jerk” kind of person you might make it lighter to make your left/right movements faster. I’m more of the latter. I actually prefer a “smooth” movement sort of style that lends itself to weight somewhere in the middle. I’m experimenting with different combonations to see what I like the best. At the moment, very light seems to be working.
The second unique aspect of the mouse is the sensativity settings. Using two buttons immediatly beneith the mouse wheel you can increase/decrease the sensativity of the laser and thereby change the “speed” of the mouse. By default the mouse uses three settings for high/med/low. 2000dpi, 800dpi and 400dpi. The real genious of this is that these 3 settings are available at all times, in-game or on your desktop. Meaning, if you play games with different situations like I do, you can switch back and forth on the fly. Here’s an example scenario, in BF2 of course. You start out as a sniper, running around, probably needed quick action so you set your mouse to the middle setting. You find a nice place to snipe from, zooming in for a shot, you dial down the mouse to make you movements slow and smooth. Having taken out your target you spy an vacant enemy tank nearby. Stealing it, you switch your sensativity all the way up because the turrent turns slowly and you need all the side-to-side speed you can get. That my friends, is a beautiful thing.
Logitech even provides a software interface for changing, customizing and saving these three levels into profiles that are activated when a perticular game is launched. That’s a handy little feature indeed.
All the while all these things are displayed ON the mouse, as almost a battery level indicator, with glowing orange LED display. Very handy when playing the dark (as I do with matches).
This brings us to the single short coming of the mouse: The wheel.
As a frequent wheel user, for scrolling as well as in-game menu navigation/weapon selection, I found that the wheel is a bit stiff. It’s not loose like the new MS mouse (thank goodness) but it’s a bit to hard to crank up and down quickly. It take a very deliberate movement. The worst feature is the combonation of tilt-wheel and scroll wheel button press. By adding the “feature” of a tilt wheel, which I’ve still yet to use, they’ve consequently made it VERY hard to push strait down on the wheel as a button. 99% of the time you end up inadvertently scrolling it or, if you finger aim is even slightly off, pushing it from side to side. The tilt over-powers the button. I had to physically press extremely hard to even get the button to work. Using for a “zoom” as I normally do is now no longer an option. I’ve considered mapping “zoom” to the thumb button but have yet to play with it. It seems a waste to have not only the wheel button but the two tilt sides (which are considered seperate buttons) completely unused in a game situation. This will probably require me to “break in” the mouse a little and keep working at the middle mouse button until it meets my satisfaction.
As a whole, this is a VERY solid mouse. Beautiful action, perfect “glide”, smooth, smooth, smooth. The speed features, the weight tray, it’s all gravy on top of a brillaint piece of hardware. If it weren’t for that middle button, I’d be praising this mouse from the rooftops. As it is, it’s gets a solid 9/10, and hopefully that button will improve over time.
Matt out.
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