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General Software Discussion / Re: What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 23, 2009, 02:12 PM »

You're welcome.  I tried one with the beta hank posted, but it was a dvd from a single .avi file and came in on target.  I need to make a dvd with a few titles to see if FAVC comes in undersized.

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Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 23, 2009, 01:05 PM »

One thing I was wondering about concerning the rack... aren't the new drives like WD Caviar Black etc, designed to be mounted vertically?  Does it mess them up to be running mounted in a horizontal position?  I'm thinking the power down landing zone bit might not work as designed if the thing is running flat?

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Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 23, 2009, 12:52 PM »

You can use any software that does an md5 checksum. I have one here:
http://www.favessoft.com/crc.html

Many file managers like FreeCommander have them built in.  I designed mine to allocate a large file buffer depending on the amount of physical ram in the system.  It can process like a 9 GB iso file without choking.

You can get portable ones I'm sure from places like Softpedia.  Mine is called FileCRC32 and it does either a CRC32 or MD5 checksum.  You can use it on the file right after you make the backup, if your backup program creates a single file.  It's not designed for computing a checksum for a folder.  I wrote it to check downloads.  It has a shell extension but I believe it will still work if you just copy the .exe file without the install.  If it cannot register the shell extension you may get an error msgbox, but it should still work. I just looked at the source and unless you select the radio button to enable the shell extension I don't think it checks for it.

There are plenty of them out there. My main emphasis on this one was processing large files, so it may not be that bad for checking those 20 GB files that Macrium Reflect makes.

Hmmmmm, I'm doing one now from 20 GB Macrium image file.  Looks like it will go through ok, but if you have a 64 bit OS you might want to try for one with 64 bit assembly algorithm.  Mine is 32 bit Delphi with 32 bit asm code and a few years old.

It's pretty dependable if not the fastest.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 23, 2009, 12:18 AM »

I used topic search and didn't find this AddOn so sorry if it's been mentioned.  I just found a bookmark checker that seems to work.  It's called CheckPlaces

Seems it's been around for a bit but I never noticed it.  Anyway, if that's old news at least I can verify it works with Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 if you have FF set to ignore version checking.  The AddOn popup window says it's not compatible and the Option Button is grayed out, but the Check Button is put in the status bar and it works.  I had recently done a lot of bookmark cleaning but still it went through about 218 bookmarks in 10 or 15 seconds, then waits for the ones that aren't responsive(I suggest using the time-out setting of a minute or so.)  It found 3 that were dead.

Supposedly it has enough intelligence not to accept a 404 substitute page as a valid page.  Maybe if anyone is using it or tries it they can report how effective it was for them.

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Living Room / Re: What's required for Aero in Win7?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 22, 2009, 05:00 PM »

Hmmmmm, I wonder if there's an option to manually force it after install? The only machine I had that refused to run Aero was an HP with the Intel onboard graphics chips that used system ram for video(no dedicated video memory whatsoever.)  Just dragging windows around on the screen even in XP and the frames would jitter on that thing!!  Not sorry to say I put that one out to the curb!!  

I would try the video card manufacturer site for a forum.  Somebody prolly has it running Aero on W7 and may be able to tell you the trick to forcing it.

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Living Room / Re: You have a computer backup plan.. but does it work?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 22, 2009, 04:52 PM »

Unfortunately I have HP systems and they aren't all that friendly how they set up the HD.  At the moment I have external USB drives and a USB docking station for storing backup images.  I looked at some of the drive racks on newegg and I'm definitely in favor of tools-free R&R.  I'm wondering though, since HP insists on putting the standard HD inside this internal cage that's pretty inaccessible, if it's possible to install the HD rack using the unoccupied optical drive bay?

On another board the guy who talked me into getting the docking station says he just plugs in a drive every so often and dupes his current system onto it.  If he gets a failure just R&R the drive(he assembles his own systems so I assume he either has a rack or a setup that's very easy to get at the HDs.)

So for us unfortunate off-the-shelf customers, is there salvation? 

afa physical drive failure, I've been relying on the fact that the PCs I buy aren't super high performance, so they become obsolete before the hw malfunctions.  Unfortunately I don't have room to line them up in a network along a big work bench as I'd like to.

btw-afa image backup and restore to a physically ok HD that's just had the boot info or partition info hosed, my recommendation, if you are going to use the image backup method to a compressed file as Macrium Reflect type of deal, if at all possible download the fully functional trial, make a backup image and try to do the restore using the boot/rescue CD.  Chances are if the driver for your disk controller is not on the rescue CD, when you enter the program you'll notice it right away.  One example is Paragon Drive Backup. I booted the rescue CD, but when I entered the restore program, my video went screwy and I had to hard boot.  I was able to restore using "compatibility mode" but an hour restore job took me 9 hours.  I basically had to just let the thing run all night. This program worked fine on my machine with the vanilla Sata controller, but with HP's new AMD Raid, it couldn't see the HD except in super slow motion mode.


Don't assume because it says "raid support" or whatever in the ad copy that it will work with your controller.  In this case I downloaded the Macrium Reflect Trial, went through the entire image creation and restore and it worked flawlessly, so I bought it.  btw the new free version has the updated Linux Restore CD so that may be worth a look if you are lazy like me an buy your PCs to run OOTB.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 22, 2009, 03:16 PM »

BTW, WinX DVD author is free for a few days (until Oct. 31st).
http://www.winxdvd.c...ecialoffer/oct09.htm

[I have not tried it]

-MerleOne (October 22, 2009, 04:08 AM)

I have the download.  According to their site there's no registration required.  You just have to download it from their page during the giveaway period. I haven't tried the install yet.  One thing I did notice though, the ad copy says some stuff about .wmv but the spec page doesn't have .wmv in the list.  Guess you have to install and try a conversion to know for sure.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 21, 2009, 09:58 PM »

@MilesAhead: No idea about QuEnc
...

-sajman99 (October 13, 2009, 05:52 PM)

Just thought I'd mention it since AVStoDVD comes with QuEnc 0.75 alpha and we were substituting encoders in other tools.  I read someplace on DOOM9 a note by the author of QuEnc that in the 0.75 Alpha, the option for Trellis Quant actually has nothing to do with Trellis.  But it's to signify something to do with multi-threading.  It's difficult to find much info but if you use Trellis Quant with QuEnc then I wouldn't plug 0.75 into other tools.  Something like FAVC you might get multiple instances running multiple threads.  Might end up with a kaleidoscopic video.

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Found Deals and Discounts / Free WinX DVD Author for download

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 21, 2009, 09:51 PM »

I havn't tried this program yet.  It's supposed to be full version no restriction other than you have to download it from the source page before the deadline:

http://www.winxdvd.c...ecialoffer/oct09.htm

Yeah, it's the same people that did the WinX DVD Ripper that was given away a bit ago.

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Post New Requests Here / Re: Idea: RocketDock icon order flipper

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 21, 2009, 05:03 PM »

btw if it can be done easily I still thing the flipper is a good idea.  But the thing that was bugging me was the Taskbar Thumbnail in W7.  Every time I let the mouse wander over a running program in the taskbar, it covered over the RocketDock.  Just annoying.  And the policy editor disable doesn't.

I found this hack.  So far it seems to work ok.  Use at your own risk though.

http://www.sevenforu...ff-2.html#post319763

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Post New Requests Here / Idea: RocketDock icon order flipper

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 21, 2009, 03:48 PM »

When you change the orientation of RocketDock from Top or Bottom edge of screen to Left or Right edge, what was the leftmost icon becomes the topmost.  Meaning the position that was easiest to click when the orientation was horizontal, is the furthest away when the orientation is vertical.

Manually reversing all the icons would be a big pain, esp. if you decided to change the orientation back to the original.  It would be nice if there was some automatic way to reverse the order of the RocketDock icons with a click.

Seems like it should be a feature in RocketDock but since it's already stable on W7 I don't think they'll be updating it soon.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 19, 2009, 07:48 PM »

@MilesAhead: No idea about QuEnc--HCenc is fast enough now so I haven't played around with QuEnc at all. On my dual core machine each pass took about 25 minutes encoding a 1 hour 45 minute DivX movie. So 50 minutes plus about another 15 minutes for additional muxing to generate a fully compliant DVD in 1 hour and 5 minutes. Amazing--older versions of HC were apparently much slower.

-sajman99 (October 13, 2009, 05:52 PM)

Curiosity got the better of me.  I had a job for DVD-RB. I ran it using 2 pass best profile HC 0.23 4 instances on my Quad Core.  Then I substituted the May 0.24 HC beta.  Any difference in processing was negligible.  Then I substituted the September HC 0.24 beta.  I looked at the fps and it looked about the same.  However when I checked the video processing stage elapsed time it was 50 minutes instead of 55 as the previous 2 runs were.

I deleted all intermediate files between runs. It appears the September has enough of a speed advantage to make it worth the substitutions.  Eventually I'll try it in FAVC.  I didn't notice any qualitative difference in any of the output.  Unless there's some instability I'm unaware of, it looks like the September beta is the way to go.

edit: I haven't done any comparisons yet on single instance multi-thread scenario as would be produced with AVStoDVD.  I've been using the May beta, but I just changed to the Sept. HC beta.  Haven't done a run with that setup yet.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 18, 2009, 04:30 PM »

To me the main inconvenience was getting a notice to restart.  At least googling brought up information to fix it right away. At first I thought it was because I updated to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, but I still had a Minefield 3.6Pre installed and got the same issue.  Otherwise I probably would have run around removing the 3.6 betas for nothing.

The other thing disquieting is because of PatchGuard things like Sandboxie won't work.  They say 64 bit is already protected so you don't need Sandboxie.  But it's funny how Registry hacks seem to get through easily enough.  I had one earlier something about ShellNoChange or something where I couldn't delete files even with one of those unlocker delete on next reboot utilities.  And now this one puts those CLSIDs in the registry without notice.  Doesn't seem all that secure to me.  Don't recall getting those registry hacks when browsing sandboxed.

Lately I've been making image backups closer together.  About the only thing to do at this point.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 17, 2009, 06:43 PM »

Yeah, that's it.  I found out how to disable it.  Only thing is I'm cleaning my restore points and image backups to make sure I don't put it back on if I do a restore.

The weird thing is in FF beta it doesn't even show in the AddOns list.  Creepy.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 17, 2009, 03:33 PM »

I did the Pentium 4s in a string. I didn't really comprehend the multi-core thing or I would have gone quad a lot sooner.

btw anyone getting weird errors about having to restart Firefox because of Microsoft Presentation Foundation? All of a sudden I'm getting this on installs that have been stable for months.  I read the GHacks and MS articles how to remove the Firefox Agent thing that causes the problem, but there's no indication it's there.  The registry setting they tell to look for is not there. The folder in the .NET structure they say to look for is not there. It's not in the AddOns list.  It just pops up whenever it feels like it to make me restart Firefox.

Something is weird. I'm getting it on XP SP2 and I know I don't have any .NET 3.5 on that!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 16, 2009, 10:48 PM »

Some stuff will work with Half Shell that you can download here:
http://www.favessoft.com/hotkeys.html

Just scroll down the page until you see the entry for Half Shell.

(The fast way to try it is if you have a shell extension that works on folders, open a 32 bit shell using Half Shell and navigate to the folder in question and right click or whatever.  Same with files of a file type handler or whatnot.  If the command shows up there's a good chance it will still work.)

It just opens a 32 bit explorer shell as suggested by MS in one of their KB work-arounds. I mostly use it because I have an Imgburn shell extension written by the author of SVCD2DVD where you can right click a VIDEO_TS folder and you'll get a "burn with Imgburn" command in the menu.  A cool freebie.

All my shell extensions were done in VC++ 6.  I don't know of any practical way to redo it as 64 bit compiled code.  And to be honest, I worked those for so many years I don't want to look at any of that source ever again.  Every time you do something you have to log off or kill explorer.exe to get the shell to let go of the dll (library already in use so the compiler won't write over the file etc..)  it's almost as bad as coding device drivers or TSR assembler gadgets.  Generally a pita.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 16, 2009, 05:38 PM »

Yeah, that's the thing that makes me reluctant to do too much with AddOns, PlugIns, extensions etc.. if the software they depend on changes, all bets are off.  I did a few 32 bit windows shell extensions but the design wasn't the best.  I reworked some of them, but just as I get them perfected, 32 bit shell is going obsolete.  So all that work is pretty much unusable on my primary machine.

I have to investigate 64 bit registry settings because I suspect most things that were done with DLLs for the shell can really be done with an .exe program if you know what key to put in the registry to make the app fire off from the appropriate menu.

Oh well, live and learn.

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Find And Run Robot / Re: Quickly go to any directory

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 16, 2009, 05:31 PM »

SlickRun has autocompletion but I think it's only for stuff in the history. Otherwise it's sort of like hitting the Tab key in a cmd.exe prompt.

I would take a look on Softpedia.com.  There must be some launcher that has folder indexing to do something like that I would think.

Another resource is Sourceforge.net
If you cannot find the exact feature you may find a similar utility that may accept feature requests.

SlickRun you can set up "magic words" or aliases really, and they could be a couple of characters.  The drawback is you have to create them yourself.  A new version of it was just released and I'm not sure what enhancements were made to it.

I've been using FreeCommander for a long time.  I like to set up "Layouts" where a bunch of tabs in each pane are open to particular folders.  You save the layout to a name.  Click a layout in the list and all tabs are opened as saved in the layout.  But I think you want an auto search type thing.

One other thing comes to mind.. I don't know if you used Xtree Gold in Dos but I think there's a freeware project to do an Xtree file manager app for Windows.  Might be worth a look.  I don't recall the name but if you google the terms it should come up.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 16, 2009, 05:16 PM »

I got a reply from MrC, the author of AVStoDVD.  His advice is just to use the latest Imgburn to manually enter an address for the layer break. (When I set the option in Imgburn 2.5 to manual instead of auto layer break selection, it popped up a box suggesting ranges where the address should be.. I entered a number in the range and it adjusted it.  All I know is the disc played ok afaik.. didn't have time to play the entire 2 hours yet. But it jumped chapters from before the layer break to after and they played so I'm assuming it's ok like that.) Rereading the help file in more depth it appears the authored VIDEO_TS folder has nothing to do with DVD-DL or DVD+DL it doesn't put any layer break info.

The reason Imgburn picks up layer breaks from rips is that there's layer break info to work with or the chapters are laid out in such a way that it's easy for Imgburn to choose it.  AVStoDVD doesn't put any.  Trial and error with Imgburn guidance I guess is the preferred method in this case.

edit: btw I haven't tried the built in burn mechanism of AVStoDVD since the burner on my dual core actually burns double layer a lot better than the burner on my quad core.  So integrating the whole operation would cost a lot of time.

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Living Room / Re: Can someone remind me why are we using email ?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 15, 2009, 09:36 PM »

Because F-Mail hasn't been declassified?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 15, 2009, 09:28 PM »

It's sort of a crap shoot.  Some will say "not compatible with yadda yadda" but often I found an older AutoCopy will work when a new one won't, as the FF versions change... about half of mine have that "not compatible" in the list and half don't.  Only way to know is to try 'em.

Although often the new ones have correct info when you go to the AddOn page itself if it specifies some "pre" support.  I'm still using AutoCopy 0.8.  It says it ain't compatible but it works fine.

edit: all I can say is the Aug05 3.6Pre and the beta 3.6 just released seem more solid than any previous FF 3.x I've tried.  Way better than so called 3.0x or 3.5x "stable" versions. When I first started messing with 3.6Pre I would remove it pretty shortly because AddOns I've used to a long time didn't work.  After looking around though, often I found a newer AddOn that did a similar thing often with a better design or implementation.  I'm actually better off because I was clinging to old bookmark and profile utilities that were going obsolete anyway.

That's just me.  When I find something that works I hate to change it unless the new thing is really snappy and I can depend on it. Now and then I have to drag myself into the next decade with an effort.

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General Software Discussion / Re: What is best program to create a DVD from any video file?

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 15, 2009, 08:24 PM »

AVStoDVD and double layer?

Hmmmm, tried making a DVD9 tonight, but Imgburn didn't like it very much. The old "no suitable cell for a layer break" routine.  Has anyone tried AVStoDVD for DVD9?

I'm using Verbatim Double Layer and it looks like AVStoDVD only knows about Dual Layer.  I'm burning one now anyway with Imgburn.  See if it plays.

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Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA:Check for program exit and offer to close other programs

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 15, 2009, 03:49 PM »

Updated to v. 1.06.  Only change is it kills it's own tray icon before calling the Tray Refresh function.  This should improve cleaning off dead icons.  Note that if you quit RunGroup via the Tray Menu it does not kill any of the apps it launched or clean the tray menu.  It just kills its own icon then quits.

edit: just more info, the "Tray Refresh" function that cleans off dead tray icons is just a function written by one of the programmers on the AutoIt3 Forum that moves the mouse over the tray to simulate doing it by hand to kick the dead icon off.  Since it moves the mouse I'm not sure if your chances of cleaning the tray are better or worse if you happen to be moving the mouse yourself at the same time.  It's just a macro thing and won't work in every case.

Just from messing with it myself, the way I have it set to call it twice with a pause in between, it seems to work at least 90% of the time.  I get the impression maybe one out of 20 it will leave my GigaGet dead tray icon still visible. Not bad for a macro gadget.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 15, 2009, 02:36 PM »

Yeah, with 46 I think I'd wait until I was forced to change. I used Opera 8.51 and FF 2.x for a long time.  Hung onto Netscape 4.x as long as I could too.  When I first got Netscape 7.2 it was total bloatware.  But I hung onto it long enough that it became a relatively light browser.

Strange how stuff can change so fast.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by MilesAhead on October 15, 2009, 12:20 PM »

Just a heads-up, the 3.6 is finally beta or beta rc1 or something.  Anyway, I just installed it and I haven't found anything broken yet.

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