Recent Posts

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General Software Discussion / Re: DriveAlive 1.1

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 03:46 PM »

DriveAlive 1.1  Removed error message caused by launching a 2nd instance of the program.  Now the 2nd instance is just closed without popping up an error dialog.

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Post New Requests Here / Re: Recycle Bin Configurator

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 11:40 AM »

My memory is lousy lately but I could swear I saw something like that for Windows on one of the big download sites.  Maybe Softpedia or another. Thing is I do so many searches it all get muddled up.  But I know out there somewhere is a Windows auto-deletion tool for recycle bin.

You might also try the Windows7 Forum as that has pretty good traffic(on the sister Vista forum, as you can imagine, the stream is becoming a trickle.)

http://www.sevenforums.com/

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General Software Discussion / Re: HCenc beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 11:28 AM »

Yeah, I have DVDRB Pro.  It is nice to have an instance per core running.  I like my WD set top box but the real piss off is they abandoned the 1st generation box(which is what I have) and pretty much said, "well, if the stuff you don't like ain't fixed in the Nov 2009 firmware update, guess you got to buy Gen. 2."  That's really annoying.

One online user review claims the Gen 1 box has better upscaling of SD content(the user says he has both a gen1 and gen2 box to compare the output.) So I guess it's a mixed bag.  The other thing, for these big video files, the next version has to support USB 3.0.  Then I bet a lot of that audio out of sync and subtitle out of sync because you hit FF will go away.  Maybe in a year or two it will be worth going with a new version of it, or another box.

I do have to say I was a bit surprised how good avi HD looks.  Some 720P a bit over a GB for a 45 minute TV show looks crystal clear.  The main annoyance there is the lack of subtitle support.  It won't display AviAddXSubs type subtitles as a stand-alone divx dvd player will.  You have to use external .srt or burn the subs in. And of course any non-text subs or PGS subs, well forget it!!  I have to convert the PGS to .srt.

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General Software Discussion / Re: updating Firefox plugins sucks!

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 11:23 AM »

Yeah, the ribbon thing is a bit annoying.  But stuff that would be mostly in the File Menu on an ordinary menu bar is under the "Page" icon and Settings/Extensions type stuff is under the "Wrench" icon.  The settings does seem a lot cleaner than Firefox.  I just watched a video how to do Chrome bookmark sync and as I figured, it's an online google account that's used.  If it let you do your own ftp site I'd like it better. I'll have to figure how to handle that.  Depends how much I'll use Firefox I suppose.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: New MakeMKV beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 11:19 AM »

What it does is analyze and show a tree of titles.  You select each title, which audio you want, subtitles etc.. and it makes an .mkv file for each title.  It's fast because it just remuxes.  It doesn't do any conversion.  If the best audio for the title is DTS(the next best is only 2 channel stereo say) I select that, then use Popcorn audio converter to convert to AC3 since my set top box doesn't handle DTS.

Afa conversion to DVD you can use any converter that can handle .mkv input.
The other main strong point is it is set by default to eliminate "titles" less than 2 minutes in duration. That should get rid of warnings, dumb motion menus etc..

I excels with discs with a main movie. It can still get confused with episodic discs such as TV show episodes.  But the author is working on that aspect.

I've gone along with 4 or 5 beta versions and I've never had one do anything rude like lock up my machine or anything so I would definitely say to try it.  There's a free temporary registration key that gets updated on the forum.  He says as long as it's in beta he'll keep updating the reg key.  It works well enough already that I paid the $50.  He promises a one shot charge... no update fees, subscriptions etc..

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General Software Discussion / Re: updating Firefox plugins sucks!

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 01:09 AM »

hmmmmm, curiosity got the better of me so I tried Chrome for a bit.  Since it seemed usable, I took it off and installed the Chrome Clone SRWare Iron

Supposedly it's Chrome without the tracking bits.  I did find an AutoCopy for it.  It does have some password autologin management, but doesn't support the multi-accounts on one site like Opera and Secure Login for Firefox does.

I'll say one thing though. It loads off the dime!!  I got tired of running Firefox out of a Ramdisk.  Took all that crap off.

Other than the substandard password management, the main thing I don't like is the Ribbon.  I like the old standard menus.  But I guess I have to bite the bullet because Ribbons are sexy now. I guess hunting for commands is part of the mystique or something.

The other thing I haven't tried yet that's major is bookmark sync.  But it is good at pulling your settings from another browser.  I siphoned the settings from Firefox and visited Twit TV and it played the vid with no intervention.  I set up the bookmark toolbar by hand before I found the button to draw in the Firefox settings so I don't know if that part is automatic or not.  Guess I'll find out by installing on the other machine.

The last 4 or 5 new browser I've tried I uninstalled after about an hour.  This one I think I may keep. It loads too fast off the HD to just chuck it.

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General Software Discussion / Re: HCenc beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 12, 2010, 12:54 AM »

I think overriding to use HC Enc in AVStoDVD using 2 pass will work fine.  I tried to do it with 1 pass.  That's likely why HC prompted that the settings didn't make much sense. Now I'm just going with HC Enc using the gui and straight 2 pass mode.  The couple of DVD9 I've made so far using that method, lateral motion in the result seems quite fluid.  QuEnc seems to be ok for avi=>dvd but for sizing down with one pass it's probably less than ideal.

For some reason too it seems kind of fun to peel off the audio stream and just use it the way it is after processing the video stream.  I've had a lot of "one click" tools give me problems processing the audio, or muxing at the end.  Seems like if I do it myself and author with DVDAuthorGui everything runs smooth.  Esp. reading from one drive and writing to another sometimes I'm on the other PC surfing and I'm surprised the job is done already. It's so much smoother when the storage load is distributed.

edit: In a way I almost feel silly doing this DVD9 stuff because the 264 is going to blow it all away.  A little bit of evolution and more reliable/stable tools and it's gonna' just blow everything else out of the water.  I had an .mkv that was about 16 GB and put it through Handbrake.  It produced a 5 GB .mkv and I couldn't tell the difference afa color, motion, anything.  It looked just as good.  Only thing it took about 4 hours to do it.  A few more iterations of tools and an Octocore PC and I'll be rockin'!!

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General Software Discussion / Re: HCenc beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 11, 2010, 12:44 PM »

Thanks for the info.  One thing I have noticed is with some .mkv to dvd conversions is some slight choppiness in lateral motion scenes.  I'm wondering if it may be due to QuEnc constant 1 pass high quality as AVStoDVD does by default for high bitrate. I want to put some through HC full 2 pass manually and see how they come out.

What I could really use is a free, easy to use, stable .mkv tool to get short clips for testing.  I have done a couple with HC 2 pass and they don't seem to have that lateral chop.  When the actor is walking across the room it's almost like 1 frame is missing here and there.  I usually do Spline16Resize to size down.  I tried Spline64Resize and it was even more noticeable.

Next thing is to get more into subtitles.

But in cases where you can use the audio stream as is, there's not that much to just processing the video with HC.  At least when using the vanilla settings.  Another reason to have short clips so I can play with lumengain and some of the other settings.

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General Software Discussion / Re: HCenc beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 10, 2010, 06:03 PM »

Hmmmmm, not so bad with the Gui.  After demuxing the audio I just run in through ac3fix to check for bad frames.  Use a bitrate calculator to set the bitrate range.  Make a 2 line .avs script to load the video and apply a resize filter. For the time being I'm using DvdAuthorGui to author the DVD.

Now that I at least can do basic conversions I can read up on all that lumens jazz.
Of course this first one was easy because I didn't have to mess with subtitles.

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General Software Discussion / DriveAlive 1.2

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 09, 2010, 02:42 PM »

I recently got a couple of USB 3.0 docking stations.  They work well but they have an idle time-out to spin the drives down that's not adjustable afaict.

I wrote a small AutoIt3 program to sit in the tray to keep the drives alive.  It's useful in situations when you know there may be a lag before some program you are using outputs to the drive and you want to avoid the drive spinning down, only to spin back up again a minute or so later.

The way it works is simple.  Through the shortcut Target line or via the command line, you specify drive letters, with colon, for the drives to keep alive(e.g. DriveAlive x: y: z: etc..)  It does this by creating an empty file named drive_alive_dummy.txt in the root of each drive, and overwriting it every 5 minutes.

The Tray Icon Tooltip shows the drives currently being kept alive.
Select Exit from the Tray Icon Menu to kill the program.

Running DriveAlive with no params shows a usage dialog.

Note that DriveAlive does not support UNC pathnames.
To use it with a mapped network drive, make sure you
have file creation/modification privileges on the share.

The dummy file on each drive is deleted on program exit.
DriveAlive does not create any Registry settings or .ini files.

The latest version is currently available for download:
http://www.favessoft.com/downloads.html

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General Software Discussion / Re: HCenc beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 09, 2010, 01:57 PM »

Now I'm using it through AVStoDVD latest alpha.  But what I'd like to do at some point is devise some simple system to demux the audio and just put the video through HC Enc, then remux at the end.  Only thing is I'm not sure how to tell if the audio needs to be "fixed."

Esp. if you have an HD source a lot of audio is AC3 640 kbit.  Not "compliant" so it triggers audio encoding when, from what I hear, most players manufactured recently will play DVD with 640 kbit AC3.

That and trying to cut clips of .mkv and .m2ts to try, are a couple of the stumbling blocks keeping me from using HC Enc without a front end. Plus I'd have to read up on all those settings of course.

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Post New Requests Here / Re: GUI for XXCopy

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2010, 07:30 PM »

The XCopy Gui just produces a command line.  It's a crutch until you learn the command line stuff, or if you just aren't going to create that many command lines.  Use it to figure out the command lines, then make your batch files.

Learning the command line switches is faster of course if you use it all the time.  I use stuff like FitCD because I don't write enough AviSynth scripts to remember the stuff.

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Post New Requests Here / Re: GUI for XXCopy

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2010, 04:01 PM »

See this thread for a Gui made using an .hta script:

http://www.sevenforu...a-93.html#post656362


The Gui is for standard XCopy but it could serve as a template for what you want.
It has nice mouse over help that you could edit for xxcopy.  I don't remember using xxcopy.  Like you say, I've looked at it on their site but a zillion switches and I revert to RichCopy.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Sharkoon USB 3.0 QuickPort Dock

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2010, 03:55 PM »

Yeah, this was a good move.  Makes using this quad core fun again.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Sharkoon USB 3.0 QuickPort Dock

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 08, 2010, 10:37 AM »

Nice to see a man having fun with his toys  

I've managed to curb the urge to run out and get some. I'll play vicariously, with your help.

-cranioscopical (April 07, 2010, 06:15 PM)

I feel the same way every time I see a guy drive by in one of those Italian sports cars.  

Right now just tapping my finger waiting for the delivery van.

edit: got the 2nd one set up.  Everything is pretty much as expected.  Doesn't seem to bog at all copying from one dock to the other through the ports on the same card.  The speed is more dependent on what HDs you happen to have in the docks.

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Living Room / Re: Deceitful Software Awards

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2010, 09:04 PM »

The only ones I have left on my site are on the ActiveX page.  Only used by programmers anyway. I could delete 'em, but the graphic breaks up the text.

They have inertia on their side if nothing else.

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General Software Discussion / HCenc beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2010, 09:01 PM »

New HCenc beta

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HC

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Living Room / Re: File Size vs. Size on Disk: Why such a difference?

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2010, 08:55 PM »

Just open a dos prompt, change to the usb drive and run
chkdsk

It will show the bytes per allocation unit.
My usb stick is formatted NTFS and shows 4096

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Living Room / Re: File Size vs. Size on Disk: Why such a difference?

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2010, 03:35 PM »

wraith808 is right.  The file system has a cluster size that's set when the partition is formatted.  Here's some basic NTFS info on cluster size:
http://www.softwaret.../1/NTFS-Cluster-size

Since the last cluster allocated is rarely perfectly filled, on average you waste 1/2 the cluster size per file on that partition.  It's a trade-off. If you use the minimum cluster size you save space, but you lose performance since you will have to expend more resources tracking a greater number of clusters for the storage space used.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Sharkoon USB 3.0 QuickPort Dock

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 07, 2010, 12:41 PM »

I got the WD 640 GB Caviar Black 64 MB cache.  Initial benchmark in the Sharkoon with Crystal Disk Mark shows sequential read/write scores in the mid 130s MB/sec.  Still waiting on the 2nd Sharkoon.  It will be interesting to see how the SIIG card handles 2 USB 3.0 docks simultaneously.

I'm doing a slow format on it the HD now.  The next video muxing job should be fun with this as the source drive! It seems to read a tad faster than write.  My internal drive may need to be defragged just to keep it fed though.  That's more likely the reason for the difference.

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General Software Discussion / Re: ReOpen 3.6

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 06, 2010, 02:04 AM »

ReOpen v. 3.6

ListBox selections are now cleared when tabbing out of them.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for an addon - Firefox

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 05, 2010, 02:44 PM »

If you're talking a few machines I'm with Musubi on FEBE. On a new Firefox setup the first AddOns are FEBE to get my other AddOns and SyncPlaces to download bookmarks and passwords from my ftp site. The nice thing about it is the Personal Toolbar handling.  One download with SyncPlaces and the Personal Toolbar is there with all my folders and bookmarks in the proper positions.

In Firefox 2.x I used MozBackup.  But SyncPlaces and FEBE seems a lot smoother.  I'm not sure, MozBackup may be improved in FF 3.x versions.

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Living Room / Re: Deceitful Software Awards

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 05, 2010, 02:27 PM »

I wonder how downloaders would react if there were no stars on the badges("Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!") but just the "spyware free" emblem?  The virus paranoia is so high I think many people want an easy way to stick something on there that says the downloads are not infected.

The other thing that strikes me curious is the preponderance of software reviewers/testers/spyware checkers with names like Mortimer Slotnik(sorry Mortimer if you are really out there. I just made up a name.)  I mean, it should at least be a hot Asian babe named Lotus Knowts or something.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: New MakeMKV beta

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 05, 2010, 01:57 PM »

MakeMKV 1.5.3 beta released:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MakeMKV

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Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Sharkoon USB 3.0 QuickPort Dock

« Last post by MilesAhead on April 05, 2010, 01:56 PM »

Hmmmmm, this setup is working better than I expected so far.  When I ran Crystal Disk Mark on the partition at the front of the WD 750 GB Caviar Black 32 MB cache, it showed sequential read/write of 103 MB/sec.

It will be interesting to see how it functions with 2 docks.  I should have the new hw by Thursday.