Recent Posts

6601

Living Room / Re: A different perspective on the failure of a Kickstarter

« Last post by wraith808 on December 09, 2012, 08:07 PM »

I think its a combination of the two, just like any other speculative venture.

1. Good idea with need
2. Good plan/proposal
3. Good stretch goals for incentive
4. Good marketing (which might not necessarily be your own)
5. Good communication

I think you can fall down on any two of these points.  But more than that, and you are stretching it.

6602

Living Room / A different perspective on the failure of a Kickstarter

« Last post by wraith808 on December 09, 2012, 03:22 PM »

Why I'm Glad My Kickstarter Failed Miserably

From someone who had an idea and the funds to produce it through normal channels.  But didn't.

Just a little bit over a month ago I started the OSR Calendar Kickstarter with a goal of $7,500 (or roughly 375 backers). It's over now with a grand total of 5 backers and $130 raised.

This, I believe, qualifies as a substantial and miserable failure.

More at link.

6603

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Release: sImgurUploader

« Last post by wraith808 on December 09, 2012, 01:00 PM »

I'd definitely like it to work with an account if possible...

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Living Room / Re: Apocalypse: Advice Issued For End Of The World

« Last post by wraith808 on December 09, 2012, 05:17 AM »

...I also take paypal...

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) - Mini-Review

« Last post by wraith808 on December 08, 2012, 08:50 AM »

I am waiting for the prosecution in the EU given that it is included in Win8 and switched on as standard.

-Carol Haynes (December 08, 2012, 06:41 AM)

If they do, they're shortsighted.

I suspect one of the reasons MS didn't do it earlier is because of all the anti-trust lawsuits they were facing - which makes it all the odder that the included it with Win8 ???

-Carol Haynes (December 08, 2012, 06:41 AM)

Probably because of the fact that many people don't know what they should get for AV, and the companies are taking advantage of that on Windows.  And since the firewall thing flew, I don't see any reason why this shouldn't.

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N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Pledge - Skyrim Character Manager

« Last post by wraith808 on December 07, 2012, 10:50 AM »

Congratulations Wraith 

Are you posting about this at some skyrim sites I hope?

-mouser (December 07, 2012, 10:35 AM)

I haven't yet, but I will

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Living Room / Re: Where Is Windows 8.1?

« Last post by wraith808 on December 07, 2012, 06:36 AM »

I've used it with a touch pad in the store, and its not as bad as it seems, at least to me.  You don't have to make the same gestures you do with a touch screen if you are using a non-touch interface.  When you reach the right side of the start menu, it automatically scrolls.  The same with the left side.  And there are scroll bars that appear when you get over the appropriate area of the screen- they just don't show them in the images because they autohide.

6608

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Pledge - Skyrim Character Manager

« Last post by wraith808 on December 07, 2012, 06:32 AM »

There was a question in regards to "importing" characters into SCM.  Yes, you can use existing characters; the save game files can be there or not when you first create the character in SCM.  The first time you create a character in the application, all it does is save the relevant information to the database and create an associated directory in your save game files location and in your backup files location.  Then initialize copies the character's files to the save game location without actually deactivating the character.

So, if my skyrim save files are in C:\Users\wraith808\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves, and I decide to make my backup directory C:\Users\wraith808\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Backups (note that the backup directory needs to be manually created), then when I create the character Demo as I do in the video, the application will create the directories C:\Users\wraith808\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\Demo and C:\Users\wraith808\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Backups\Demo, whether Demo has any skyrim saves or not.  Then, when I press initialize, any files with the name Demo in the save file name will be copied to C:\Users\wraith808\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\Demo.

6609

N.A.N.Y. 2013 / Re: NANY 2013 Pledge - Skyrim Character Manager

« Last post by wraith808 on December 06, 2012, 11:17 PM »

Added first version of the application (portable zip file and installer), and a youtube tour video.

6610

Living Room / Re: Where Is Windows 8.1?

« Last post by wraith808 on December 06, 2012, 07:30 AM »

I disagree with one point John made. Which is a record since I usually take issue with about half of what he says most times:

 "And why would anyone want to run any application full screen ever? The only time you do it is perhaps to watch a movie on the computer. This incorrect notion obviously came from people who do not actually use computers."

Well...I "actually use" computers. And I do most of my writing/scripting using a "distraction free" (as in full screen) text editor. And I'm far from being alone in doing that.

-40hz (December 05, 2012, 03:16 PM)

The point is, I believe, that it is wrong to impose one use pattern over the other. I am a translator and 90 percent of the time I look into one window (foxit reader), and type into another (word). Metro interface is abso-loving-lutely unusable to me as a concept and practice. But I can think of others who do not want to be distracted when typing in a novel or a report. If you imposed a multi-window interface on them, that wouldn't be ideal as well.

-eleman (December 06, 2012, 03:19 AM)

Actually, not.  The metro interface does allow dual windows.  I've just done that exact thing in the store, and it's pretty seamless.  It's very apparent that the metro interface is a touch screen/non-desktop interface.  I'll never disagree with that.  And as such, it's actually surprisingly useful on those (more useful than either iOS or Android from what I've seen of them).  It's also surprisingly useful in desktop situations, though I'll agree non-optimal.

But (still) what I disagree with is the FUD, and the spread of disinformation/assumptions by people who've never honestly tried to use the functionality.  It becomes less useful when you can't separate what you can do from what you can't, and what's right from what's wrong IMO.  There's enough wrong to concentrate on that other talking points don't have to be created.

6611

Living Room / Re: Where Is Windows 8.1?

« Last post by wraith808 on December 05, 2012, 02:35 PM »

Wow... Dvorak keeps getting more and more pointless.  (Pun intended... but still)

To see the correct Windows version, just open a Command Prompt, type "ver" and press enter:

Windows 2000: 5.0.x
Windows XP: 5.1.x
Windows Vista: 6.0.x
Windows 7: 6.1.x
Windows 8 (I didn't test, but I assume the above is correct): 6.2.x

Where 'x' varies with Service Packs.

So... yeah.

6612

General Software Discussion / Re: DropBox to drop support for Public folder (no more direct links)

« Last post by wraith808 on December 05, 2012, 10:50 AM »

That's been there.  You click the link chain beside a folder/file and it shares.  Maybe they're just doing an increased promotion of it.

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General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 04, 2012, 07:47 PM »

Is MKVTools recommended over MakeMKV?  And My WDTV Live HD does recognize my MKVs... so I guess that means that MakeMKV rips with decompressed headers by default?

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General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 04, 2012, 06:23 PM »

Technically:

• Change of container only: Remuxing - Demultiplexing + Multiplexing of the original media streams into a different container format, (eg. AVI->MKV, VOB->MKV).  You may need to decrypt contents to access them but the original encoding/bitrate remains unchanged.
• Change of stream encoding: Transcoding - you are changing the encoding of the original stream format, (eg. MPEG2->MPG4-AVC).  Doesn't necessarily mean a change of container, eg. MPEG4-ASP AVI -> MPEG4-AVC AVI.
• Change of bitrate: Transrating - you are reducing the bitrate of the streams while keeping both original container and encoding, this is what DVD Shrink, CloneDVD, etc do.

-4wd (December 04, 2012, 06:02 PM)

Thanks for that- I'd not heard the term remuxing before.  Good stuff!  So lossless transcoding still means that you are changing the encoding, is that correct?  You're just not losing any quality over generations?

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General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 04, 2012, 03:21 PM »

Well, there is an article on LifeHacker about using the MakeMKV/HandBrake combo.  That's pretty much the best and simplest approach I've found.  It doesn't help you understand all that much, but for a guide, it's a pretty good place to start.

http://lifehacker.co...r-blu+ray-collection

As in many cases, the Tom's Hardware of old has good information: http://www.tomshardw...uide-part-3,130.html

Of course, it's 13 years old.  I miss the old Tom's Hardware.

There's also an introduction by Mark Pilgrim.  Again, it's old.  But it's so good, that someone else archived it when the original site went down.

http://www.simonwhat...ng-container-formats

And another.  Again old.  But again, good, even though its aimed more at amateur video editors than those that want to archive their collections.

http://www.pcworld.c..._and_containers.html

Those are the most useful and non-biased ones I've stumbled across.  The others are either made by companies trying to sell their software, or just confusing and/or wrong.  At least the ones I've found.

6616

General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 04, 2012, 02:05 PM »

Guess what, I have never in my life try to run MediaInfo (or other video format identifying program) against a VOB file. I always assume the VOB is a video format (rather than container) and those IFO, BUP files are storing non-video materials like menu and subtitles.

Man... after reading your explanation, I MediaInfo one of my VOB file and see all the various audio tracks, subtitles and of course the Mpeg version 2 video itself.
Thank you.

Btw, what program do you use to do your transcoding?

-tslim (December 04, 2012, 12:10 PM)

It's taken me a long and painful time coming to that, as there's so much conflicting and just plain wrong information out there.  It probably needs some refinement- Oh, look!  Here comes f0dder, I'm sure he'll clean it up...

Nitpicking: if you simply copy (untouched) streams from one container to another, are you really transcoding? One might be able to argue so from the wiki definition, but personally I'd expect transcoding to involve de- and re-encoding of the actual streams.

Are there any better terms that could be used when you're simply copying streams from one container format to another?

-f0dder (December 04, 2012, 01:01 PM)

I don't know.  I know that MakeMKV does do something (has to really) in order to break the encryption.  And I also cleans up the stream; looking at the mess that comes up when you look at a DVD shows some stupid stuff they do in the name of 'copy protection',  So maybe it's still transcoding because of that?

And I use MakeMKV.  I did use PowerISO to make ISOs, until I found that I had problems with less hardware with MKVs than ISOs.

6617

General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 04, 2012, 10:59 AM »

I don't know about the "transcoding" of movie, my main concern is to store my DVD movies as original as possible. Particularly when I have a DTS movie, no matter how hard I try to convert it from VOB format (I have tried various formats), I always find loss of DTS quality and I finally decide to store the original image of the DVD.

-tslim (December 04, 2012, 08:46 AM)

from Wikipedia^w

Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital data conversion of one encoding to another,[1] such as for movie data files or audio files. This is usually done in cases where a target device (or workflow) does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size,[1] or to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format. Transcoding can be performed just while files are being searched, as well as for presentation. For example, Cineon and DPX files have been widely used as a common format for digital cinema, but the data size of a two-hour movie is about 8 terabytes (TB).[1] That large size can increase the cost and difficulty of handling movie files. However, transcoding into a JPEG2000 lossless format has better compression performance than other lossless coding technologies, and in many cases, JPEG2000 can compress images to half-size.[1]
Transcoding is commonly a lossy process, introducing generation loss; however, transcoding can be lossless if the input is losslessly compressed and the output is either losslessly compressed or uncompressed.[1] The process of lossy-to-lossy transcoding introduces varying degrees of generation loss. In other cases, the transcoding of lossy to lossless or uncompressed is technically a lossless conversion because no information is lost, however the process is irreversible and is more suitably known as destructive.

As I'm using lossless transcoding, it is a direct digital-to-digital translation, moving the mpeg2 file from the DVD to the MKV container.

An ISO^w is much the same thing - it is a container that represents an image of a file system.  You seem to be getting hung up on the container, and equating it to lossy encoding.  I'm copying the files I need from one container to another, as the other container is better for my workflow.  I don't care about being able to recreate the DVD in it's entirety; if I decide to archive the films, it won't be on optical media in any case, and for the ones I really care about, I'm keeping the optical media intact.

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General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 04, 2012, 08:04 AM »

Ended up doing simple junction points on the server...now a 250GB HDD apparently holds 4.5TB of files.  Saves a bit of navigation from the media player.

-4wd (December 04, 2012, 12:03 AM)

That's actually a very cool idea!  I'd not thought about using junctions, even though they've been very useful to me in the past.  I've been bitten by having one volume before- things spread among disks, and the controller failing, and not being able to get another controller to work with the array, so losing everything on all the disks, because of not knowing where things are.  Not sure if it's better these days- but once bitten, twice shy.

6619

General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 09:49 PM »

I guess I could... the only problem with this (and the others I've seen on the web) is that a lot of this is player specific.  Even though I have my setup done... I have three other devices that can't work with the setup I have.  There's so much out there in the way of hardware and software that it just changes too fast.  I think the others sort of ignore that X factor, and speak as if their way is the correct way, when the correct way is actually what works for you.

Oh... and if you want an idea of how big mine actually is- this is mine as of 5 years ago.

http://invelos.com/D...ction.aspx/wraith808

I've slowed down since then, and just got tired of entering DVDs into DVD Profiler. 

6620

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 07:44 PM »

I never knew about Simplenote.  Looks very cool, definitely would consider it vs the current Evernote.

-superboyac (December 03, 2012, 05:53 PM)

The essential part of my workflow is ResophNotes.  I could find/make something that does what I use ResophNotes for, and probably will.  But it syncs up with Dropbox, and syncs each note as a separate file.  That lets me use a wider variety of applications with it than I normally would be able to.

6621

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 01:31 PM »

I use Evernote and Simplenote/Resophnote/everything that syncs with simplenote.  I guess it really is a matter of what you need and your priorities, and since Syncing across platforms is my number one priority, those are the ones that I continue to go back to.

-wraith808 (December 03, 2012, 01:10 AM)

I agree with that; it is very much about individual need and preference.
I was intrigued by your using Simplenote. Why do you use that as well as Evernote?

-Dormouse (December 03, 2012, 01:47 AM)

A lot of the notetaking I do is in Markdown, rather than something heavy, and doesn't need images, nor formatting other than that.  Simplenote is aces for that, and very lightweight.

6622

Living Room / Re: Is the age of unlocked cell phones upon us? Pretty please??

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 01:30 PM »

I'm not paying any more for service now than I would if I didn't get a subsidized phone.  But I would pay more for the phone.  So ... why?

-wraith808 (December 03, 2012, 01:14 AM)

That depends purely on your phone usage pattern, I know I'd be over $800 better off if I chose an unlocked iPhone5 over a carrier locked/contract version....so why would I choose locked?

-4wd (December 03, 2012, 04:49 AM)

True... that's why I said I. 

6623

General Software Discussion / Re: How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 01:28 PM »

Just curious, why don't you rip your DVDs and keep them in ISO format (like I do)?
If you convert them into mp4 format, you tend to loss quality, further more what about the DVD startup menu? Are you doing your own authoring work?

May I also ask this, what is the advantage of keeping a movie in mp4 format contained in a mkv file than directly keep it as mp4 file? (Isn't mp4 file sort of container by itself?)

-tslim (December 03, 2012, 07:36 AM)

1. All players don't support mounting ISOs.  MKV is the format that I chose that works on everything I want to use it for.  
2. I'm not encoding it- I'm transcoding it (and that should be mpeg2, not mp4).  There is a small difference in size because MakeMKV strips out the extraneous information.  But it's not compressed.  
3. There's also a difference in size because I don't get audio and subtitle tracks I don't need.  I only speak English, so I don't need spanish, chinese, etc... this lets me do that.
4. I don't have the menus- in fact, I don't want them.  I just want to click a file and it start playing.

6624

Living Room / Re: Is the age of unlocked cell phones upon us? Pretty please??

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 01:14 AM »

Then, I think more people would be inclined to get non contract phones which would affect the pricing eventually.

-superboyac (December 03, 2012, 12:54 AM)

I think, perhaps, you're a bit too optimistic.  I don't see the why there.  At one time, I was quite determined to get the best signal/deal possible.  I cycled through every carrier available at the time.  And in the end, I realized that none of them were good.  They all had their positives and negatives.

If you get to that point, and you're going to get the service in any case, why would you bother?  I'm not paying any more for service now than I would if I didn't get a subsidized phone.  But I would pay more for the phone.  So ... why?

6625

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by wraith808 on December 03, 2012, 01:10 AM »

All of those fall short for me in the area that I need most- syncing across devices, and the ability to use them there.  Rightnote is the closest for me of those, but I haven't given it a good trial.  Because my primary concern is having my notes where ever I am, I use Evernote and Simplenote/Resophnote/everything that syncs with simplenote.  I guess it really is a matter of what you need and your priorities, and since Syncing across platforms is my number one priority, those are the ones that I continue to go back to.