Posts By: Jon Scaife

0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoDecoding Interlaced VC‑1 with DXVA

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

A couple of days ago ver­sion 1.6 of Media Play­er Clas­sic — Home Cinema was released.  Although I don’t use MPC-HC, I do keep an eye on the releases as it can be a use­ful back-up when a file wont play.  It’s been quite a long time since the last offi­cial release so I had a quick scan of the changelog and one thing imme­di­ately leaped at me: “VC‑1 DXVA Decoder now decodes VC‑1 inter­laced mater­i­al”.  Until now there has been no open source x64 codec that will decode inter­laced VC‑1.  Finally hav­ing this avail­able com­pletes cov­er­age for all the media files I have ever tried to play.  Hope­fully this will also get added to ffd­show try­outs and LAV Video in the near future.

0VLC logoPlaying BluRays with VLC

Posted by & filed under News.

There have been a couple of inter­est­ing art­icles on Anandtech in the last couple of days. First was a review of a cheap CEC device by Pulse-Eight which hope­fully sig­nals the arrival of more choice for HTPC remote con­trols. Of great­er interest is the news of a “hack” for VLC which enables the play-back of com­mer­cial (encryp­ted) BluRays. Nightly builds of VLC since 1.2 include sup­port for BluRay play­back. All you need for it to fully func­tion is an AACS keys data­base, a quick google should provide one.

0DIYMediaHome is now available on social media

Published by & filed under News. Last updated .

Fol­low­ing the recent restyl­ing of DIY Media Home we have been work­ing on con­nect­ing to the lead­ing social media sites. We can now be found on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google+. Our new con­tent will auto­mat­ic­ally be shared to these 3 lead­ing social plat­forms so you can fol­low us through these as well as through the exist­ing RSS Feeds or e‑mail.

22Wordpress LogoRich Snippets Code for Thesis Theme

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

In response to a query by Darko Kovan­cives on my pre­vi­ous art­icle about [int­link id=“1520” type=“post”]fixing Rich Snip­pets code for the Mys­tique theme[/intlink] we have resolved the same issues with the Thes­is theme.  Details of the changes required are below.… Read Full Article

0Haali Matroska logoHaali Media Splitter: Official Site Down

Published by & filed under Codecs, News. Last updated .

HTPC related sites and resources seem to be drop­ping like flies at the moment.  First [int­link id=“1918” type=“post”]Media Cen­ter Stu­dio disappeared[/intlink], then [int­link id=“2141” type=“post”]TheHTPC.net developed problems[/intlink], and now the offi­cial site for Haali Media Split­ter is down.  For­tu­nately the media split­ter can still be down­loaded from lots of oth­er sites, and we will keep a mir­ror here in case oth­er sites drop it.  There are also altern­at­ives, includ­ing the MPC-HC stan­dalone codecs and LAV.  Links to these are avail­able on our [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads[/intlink] page.  Lets hope that this is the last in the recent series of HTPC related losses.

0AMD Vision Fusion Premium LogoBrazosTweaker: AMD Brazos E350 tweaker

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware. Last updated .

As reg­u­lar read­ers will know, my main HTPC is cur­rently based on an AMD Brazos E350.  I’d like to say a quick thanks to Semi­Ac­cur­ate for their recent art­icle high­light­ing the excel­lent BrazosTweak­er by Sven Wit­tek.  This tool (and its sib­ling FusionT­weak­er) enable the tweak­ing of P‑States (the voltage in low power mode) of Brazos and Llano chips, just like K10Stat, Phe­nomMs­rTweak­er, RMC­lock, Crys­talCPUID and oth­ers have done in the past.  To quote Semi­Ac­cur­ate, “the main pur­pose of both these tools is to modi­fy the voltages and clock dividers of the built-in P‑States on these chips.”

The FusionT­weak­er util­ity is still some­what buggy by all reports, but BrazosTweak­er seems reli­able to me.  I highly recom­mend read­ing the Semi­Ac­cur­ate art­icle and then grabbing the tool if you have a Brazos HTPC, or laptop.

0Storage SpacesMicrosoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

Microsoft’s Steve Sinof­sky has writ­ten a detailed art­icle about a genu­inely excit­ing new fea­ture of Win­dows 8 — Stor­age Spaces.  I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth.  How­ever I will point out a key line from a home media serv­er point of view: “There’s anoth­er resi­li­ency attrib­ute, called par­ity, which dir­ects Stor­age Spaces to store some redund­ancy inform­a­tion along­side user data con­tained with­in the space, thereby enabling auto­mat­ic data recon­struc­tion in the event of phys­ic­al disk fail­ure.”  To me, this sounds a LOT like a soft­ware RAID5 sim­il­ar to that provided by UnRAID.  Until Win­dows 8 is released and the tech­no­logy is fully reviewed the details are of course some­what spec­u­lat­ive, but my read­ing of the art­icle leads me to believe that Stor­age Spaces will enable the strip­ing of disks, with a par­ity in the event of single disk fail­ure.  Fur­ther, it is reas­on­able to assume that this sys­tem will work with stand­ard non-enter­prise drives without suf­fer­ing any [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]compatibility issues[/intlink].  Finally, it is reas­on­able to assume that Stor­age Spaces will offer some of the per­form­ance bene­fits of hard­ware raid‑5 too.  If you have a home serv­er with a lot of media and you want some redund­ancy, without huge cost, then this tech­no­logy sounds like it might be the per­fect solu­tion.  Thanks Microsoft!

11Windows Update IconFix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I vis­it the fam­ily over xmas there are vari­ous PC issues to resolve.  This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 prob­lem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve.  One of the fam­il­ies PCs was fail­ing to install Win­dows 7 ser­vice pack 1.  It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Win­dows 7 x64 Home Premi­um, all legit and activ­ated.  It also has up-to-date anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, and oth­er than the SP1 install prob­lems it seemed to be in excel­lent work­ing order.… Read Full Article

0PSU LogoEfficient PSU Upgrades: HuntKey Jumper update

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I spot­ted a much cheap­er 80+ gold PSU in the ebuy­er xmas sales, and decided to look up some reviews.  I found a review on anandtech which I must have some­how missed in the past.  In light of this dis­cov­ery, I’ve updated my pre­vi­ous art­icles about PSU effi­ciency to include the HuntKey Jump­er 300G (aka R90).  The price of this PSU changes the con­clu­sions of 2 of the 4 scen­ari­os I’ve pre­vi­ously detailed, and I have in fact ordered one at the dis­count price of £20, for use in my cur­rent serv­er!  After tak­ing into account that my cur­rent serv­er PSU (an Ener­max Nois­e­Taker 475 from 2004) is approx­im­ately 80% effi­cient rather than the 70% worst case I use in the art­icles, I’m hop­ing to net sav­ings of around £20 per year.

… Read Full Article