Monday, October 19, 2009

Stereo to Surround in Panasonic SC-HT65

It turns out that no ffdShow setting is necessary. Using the following instructions of the page in SC-HT65 manual, I was able to get stereo to surround upmixing working.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B0ywocRL7KCFMTE3Y2UzMjYtNGRlNC00MDE5LWJlMWEtNDVlMTZjZjIxMjhk&hl=en

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Shark007 and HTPC

Audio woes with the Media Center PC are finally over with Shark007’s latest Windows 7 Codec Pack. In order to get all my music video files and movie files working, these are the customized settings I would need to apply:

 

Disabling AC3Filter

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Passing-through FFDShow and enabling Audio normalization

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Setting H264 to use FFDShow

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Using ffdShow is important for MP2/3 and disabling WMF so for TS files with x264 and AAC, no need to remux it using MetaFox to create a MKV file.

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We can upscale stereo to mirror the 2 channels in read left/right speakers using this setting:

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This does not work under SPDIF for some reason.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed!?

WHY???

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[Window Title]
Open Folder

[Content]
\\mike-pc\g$ is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again.

[OK]

Friday, May 22, 2009

Latest footage from my Vostro 1510

The DELL Tech Support person is coming today to replace the Motherboard, LCD and LCD Cable. What are the chances of this not happening again?

Never buy DELL again? or Never buy NVIDIA again?

Update: some experience problems when watching soapbox video, so here is the same video in YouTube.

Friday, May 08, 2009

Ideas for Windows 8

Use proper units

Rename “KB” to “KiB”

Rename “MB” to “MiB”

Rename “GB” to “GiB”

Rename “TB” to “TiB”

etc.

http://members.optus.net/alexey/prefBin.xhtml

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

 

Enhanced Windows Setup

Reuse Users folder

If Windows 8 finds a “Users” folder in the partition you are going to install Windows, it will attempt to reuse data inside this folder. For example, if the Users folder has a Mihajlo folder, then it will move all the folders other than the folders listed below, to a folder called Mihajlo.Old.

 

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Later on in the Windows Setup, when you create an account called Mihajlo, new %appdata% etc. folders will be created but all the data folders will be preserved and ready to be used from last install.

 

This means in other words:

  • Old D:\Users\Mihajlo\AppData is moved to Old D:\Users\Mihajlo.Old\AppData
  • D:\Users\Mihajlo\AppData will be created new.

 

The following folders will stay:

  • D:\Users\Mihajlo\Documents
  • D:\Users\Mihajlo\Music
  • D:\Users\Mihajlo\Pictures
  • etc.

 

Even better, if Windows 8 can give us an option to reuse the entire Users folder. Pretty much like how other Linux distributions do if we mount an existing \home during the Linux setup as \home.

 

Customize Users folder location in Windows Setup

Everytime I install Windows, I use Autounattend.xml to customize the Users folder location. So I have:

  • C:\Windows
  • D:\Users

Almost all the Linux distributions support this in the GUI setup. \home can be mounted to a different partition.

Why not let us format another partition and let us specify to have Users folder created there?

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

End of µTorrent usage

This is not the first time µTorrent refused to continue seeding completed torrents when my external HDD was temporarily unavailable. Its design makes the torrents take the ‘red cross’ which forces me to recheck each torrent. Having about 200 torrents with over 150 GiB of data, this is a very time consuming task.

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5342/torrent1822009050621405.png

With Vuze, this is not the case. A simple restart of Vuze after the HDD replugged, would make Vuze happily continue seeding torrents. No recheck is necessary.

http://i42.tinypic.com/2ikuvlu.png

Outlook mindfucks

Going from this view:

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to this view:

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has no hidden Outlook options involved.

It is simply a matter of moving the second vertical splitter leftwards until you see the above view. WTF.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Power button action not seen in Start Menu

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Why can’t WLM remember these settings in their servers?

Everytime I reinstall Windows, I have to go through a routine of customizing WLM settings…

image

image 

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If they can remember the Display Picture and the Personal Status Messages these checkbox settings can’t be that hard.