It’s an Early MKV to PS3 MP4 Christmas

So, once finished with the mpeg4ip fiasco (see here), I thought it was time to do some work on MKV to PS3 MP4. There is now an additional feature! Namely, the ‘Fix Audio’ option. You can grab it here.

Essentially, some people complained that with certain files the audio came out as static. I came across a reported solution to this problem and implemented it in the script. Basically, instead of doing mkv audio to aac, it does mkv audio to wav to aac. So, it takes longer and requires more HD space, but the audio reportedly comes out fine.

The other things that were done are under the hood (though it may help some people). What the Python people did was put out a warning that they are going to get rid of a function that I used. So, I changed that to the replacement. As such, people who had problems with ‘command not found’ errors (sorry, can’t reproduce the error means can’t fix it) should try this update and see if it works.

So, in summary, a new feature and increased longevity. Hope you guys like and let me know via the issues page if something goes horribly wrong.

Have a happy holidays!

mp4creator Resubmission

Update

Mpeg4ip is now back in MacPorts! So, a ’sudo port -v selfupdate’ should bring things in order. For those that used the tgz from the ticket or the project page, no further action should be needed. I did the same and no uninstall/install was required.

Thanks to jmr@ for committing the submission. My users and I appreciate it!

As you may know, yet again the Macports people have removed the port. A submission for its reinstatement is pending. For those that can’t wait, the port can be found here here. If you do install it from what is contained in the tarball, remember to uninstall it and reinstall it from Macports so that upgrades/etc will work in the future should they come.

To install from the tarball, decompress the tarball somewhere. Then in the terminal, enter that directory. The command, “sudo port -v install” (without quotes) is all that is needed at this point.

I will update this post when the Macports people have decided on the port submission.

Update

Corrupt files required moving the tgz file elsewhere. See above link to get it if you haven’t already. Instructions on using it are in the striked link if you don’t know how.

It’s a MKV to PS3 MP4 Christmas

Having some time, motivation and being the Holidays, I decided to do some more work on my MKV to PS3 MP4 script; I implemented my large file support tutorial. So, no more fiddling with the command-line getting things to work (expect for running the program itself… for now).

This marks a milestone in the scripts development. So, instead of having revision numbers, we’ve finally reached version 0.1. It can be downloaded here.

Hope you like your gift. Have a happy holidays.

Harper: Goodbye, Good Riddance.

So, Harper might be gone. I couldn’t be more thrilled than I am today. Well, except when that lying dictator is removed from power.

Canada’s Worst Driver Falls From Grace

So, today I was watching Canada’s Worst Driver 4. But, this season I’ve found it increasingly irritating as they have become more activist. Before, it was educational, but still funny. Now, they’ve gotten rid of some of the hosts sarcastic comedy and increased his teaching. This has thrown the show off balance, IMO, in this regard. They’ve also, in every episode, condemned in various ways, young drivers. Today was the worst. Quite frankly, I think that the usage of the shows location came with some strings attached.

Abusive Language?!?!

There seems to be some really big problems with Yahoo’s filter when it comes to comments posted on there news stories. Because, what I attempted to post in no way contained “abusive language.” Yet, Yahoo told me that it was. Sad.

Firefox 3 random freezes

This has been one of the most annoying things for me lately. As in, randomly, Firefox would just freeze and trash the HDD. Or it would take forever the log back in after the screen saver kicked in. The result would always be that I had to kill the process and restart Firefox. But, now there seems to be a solution. So, I’m documenting it here so it remains where I can reach it. We’ll see if it works after some testing time.

From the address bar, goto: about:config. Then use ‘urlclassifier’ for the filter. What we are looking for is ‘urlclassifier.updatecachemax’. Mine was set to -1 which means unlimited. Set it to 104857600 (100MB).

If this ‘urlclassifier.updatecachemax’ doesn’t exist right-click on any white-space and select new->integer. Put urlclassifier.updatecachemax for the name and 104857600 for the value.

Once one of the above is done a restart is needed to apply the changes. Hopefully, this will result in a freeze free Firefox. If not, either the fix doesn’t work or some tweaking with the value setting is needed.

UPDATE: Performance improved and it hasn’t frozen while being used yet. But, while returning from after the screen-saver kicked in, it did freeze. So, this is just a partial fix, or I need to lower the that number more. We’ll see.

UPDATE: I just had a total freeze of FF. Did nothing special beside switching windows. So, this doesn’t seem to fix the issue at all. All it does is give you some control over the frequency of the freezes.

XNA Creators Club

Now, I’m going to prefix this with the typical, I hate M$. They’ve done so much to damage the industry it isn’t funny. But, with XNA Creators Club, they’ve earn a lot of points in my book.

An Art Test

Now, I don’t typically take these on-line tests. But, I had some time to kill and it was about something that I don’t normally thing about; Art. Not that I think that Art is worthless or anything. It certainly has value in the education system, etc. But, I just normally don’t have practical value in it enough to go out of my way to appreciate it. In fact, I’ve had several arguments with the wife about how useless Abstract Art is, etc. Which is why I found this test so funny.

MKV (h264) File to PS3 MP4 Scripted (Updated 2008-12-25)

For the past little while I’ve been scripting my first tutorial and over the past little while its worked. It has advantages over other scripts that I’ve seen such as, proper identification of the video track and its FPS. I’ve also compensated for ffmpeg’s multiple naming of the aac codec name and taken this whole process off the command line into the realm of the GUI.