Posts By: Jon Scaife

8Warning: Not foundTheHTPC.net — Down for the count? No

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software. Last updated .

Sad news — for the last few days TheHTPC.net has been show­ing a Serv­er 500 error.  Now the own­er (anoth­er Jon) has put up a mes­sage say­ing the site is broken and he may not be able to find time to fix it.  I for one am very much hop­ing to see TheHTPC.net back in the near future.  If that is not to be then I hope we will be able to source and provide a mir­ror of some of the out­stand­ing resources that were pre­vi­ously avail­able there.  RIP.

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2FFmpeg LogoFFDShow DXVA H.264 corruption resolved

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

I have recently been suf­fer­ing cor­rup­tion play­ing back some H.264 files with FFD­Show try­outs.  After a bit of exper­i­ment­ing I’ve found that the last build without this issue is build 3949 from 24th-July.  I pre­vi­ously had issues with earli­er releases of FFD­Show that [int­link id=“1414” type=“post”]didn\‘t work with DXVA[/intlink] at all — for­tu­nately build 3949 does­n’t suf­fer this issue.  I also [int­link id=“919” type=“post”]previously had a problem[/intlink] where some builds of FFD­Show were less effi­cient on my HTPC and were unable to smoothly decode some high bitrate movies, e.g. a rip of the Inglori­ous Bas­terds Blu-Ray, which has forced me to con­tin­ue to use an old build from mid-2010 until now.  Build 3949 does­n’t suf­fer from these issues either — so in terms of the 3 prob­lems I’ve had over the years with ffd­show, build 3949 does­n’t suf­fer from any of them, mak­ing it my build of choice for the fore­see­able future.

0fonera simpl2Broken Fonera ruins Freeview reception

Published by & filed under Freeview. Last updated .

For the last 3 days I’ve had ser­i­ous prob­lems receiv­ing Freeview. Until now I’ve had no prob­lems, but as we’d had some very strong winds loc­ally, I thought a likely can­did­ate was the aer­i­al being knocked off align­ment. I car­ried out vari­ous oth­er checks of cables, amp­li­fi­ers etc. and could­n’t find any issues, and con­sequently decided to invest­ig­ate issues with the aer­i­al. I have a large high gain aer­i­al spare, and as I’m cur­rently in ren­ted accom­mod­a­tion I decided to try my aer­i­al in the attic space, rather than attempt­ing to get onto the roof of the house. I lugged my aer­i­al up, and thanks to a com­bin­a­tion of aer­i­als­andtv, google earth, and mega­lith­ia ter­rain was able to line up on the nearest major trans­mit­ter — Emley Moor. I con­nec­ted the aer­i­al dir­ectly to the TV card in my TV serv­er and used my laptop to check that everything was fixed. It was­n’t!… Read Full Article

0Wordpress LogoMystique 3 Theme: Full-post and Excerpts

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to dis­play full posts on the home page, and excerpts on all archives for about 3 days.  This is nice because it means a decent amount of each post is shown on the front page, whilst archive pages con­tain a much more con­cise sum­mary of each post.  This is bet­ter both for humans, and also for SEO — my archive pages now don’t have duplic­ate con­tent from my home page!

I’ve finally pro­duced a solu­tion.  It’s not espe­cially eleg­ant, but I’ve been at the very lim­it of my PHP know­ledge just to achieve this meth­od.  This applies spe­cific­ally to the Mys­tique 3 theme, oth­er themes are likely to vary, although some of this inform­a­tion may or may not prove rel­ev­ant.  If you are try­ing or suc­ceed in doing the same to a dif­fer­ent theme do drop a com­ment in.… Read Full Article

32Windows Icons: Full list with details, locations & images

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Good qual­ity icons and images, espe­cially ones with an alpha trans­par­ency can be time con­sum­ing to make, and are often also hard to find.  One source of lots of high qual­ity icons in a range of sizes is Win­dows.  Win­dows 7 includes lots of icons which can be use­ful as the major­ity are avail­able in sizes from 16×16 up to 256×256, and come with alpha trans­par­ency.  You may have noticed that we use some on our down­loads page — they’re handy to quickly indic­ate file type. Win­dows stores most of its icons inside exe and dll files which makes them inac­cess­ible to stand­ard image manip­u­la­tion applic­a­tions like Pho­toshop.  How­ever, once they have been loc­ated they can eas­ily be extrac­ted with the free­ware util­ity IcoFX. Track­ing some of them down seems to be the trick­i­er part. Below is a quick ref­er­ence for the loc­a­tions of many of the icons avail­able on Win­dows 7. I will peri­od­ic­ally add more details and any extra icon lib­rar­ies I dis­cov­er to this list.
… Read Full Article

0HTC Desire Android LogoSamsung Galaxy Nexus Prime v Apple Iphone 4S

Published by & filed under Android, Misc Mobile. Last updated .

With the recent release of the Sam­sung Galaxy Nex­us Prime and the Apple Iphone 4S, I thought I’d do a quick com­par­is­on of the 2 devices.  I’ve also included data and specs for 2 oth­er high-end recent smart­phones, the HTC Sen­sa­tion XE and the Motorola Atrix 2.

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5android logoHow to Root the HTC Desire HD & install a custom ROM

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

I’ve recently been asked to root a HTC Desire HD and put a cus­tom ROM onto it.  I agreed to, des­pite some reluct­ance — hack­ing my own HTC Desire was quite a hassle and involved lots of research and con­sid­er­able time.  … Read Full Article

2Home Theatre RoomDesigning a Home Theatre Room & Lounge

Published by & filed under Misc Audio, Misc TV. Last updated .

I have been look­ing to design a new home theatre room, and research­ing this top­ic has led me to a few pre­lim­in­ary con­clu­sions.  First of all, there are lots of dif­fer­ent ideas out there about home cinema room shapes!

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0Google+Google+ for Apps Accounts

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Google have finally enabled Google+ for apps accounts (as of the 27th Oct)!  Now those of us with an apps account can finally get an account and +1 pages etc.  Google have also enabled “pages” on Google+ for organ­isa­tions.  For the DIY Media Home Google+ Page just click on the Google+ icon at the top right of the page.  If you need to migrate a tem­por­ary non-apps account Google prom­ise there will be a migra­tion tool com­ing very soon.  Happy +ing

2media center studioMedia Center Studio

Posted by & filed under Windows Media Center.

It seems that the Media Cen­ter Stu­dio site is per­man­ently down.  For­tu­nately sev­er­al people have man­aged to archive the files needed to install it, and have provided them, along with some instruc­tions.  I have improved upon their manu­al instruc­tions by mak­ing a self-extract­ing installer with short­cut.  My ver­sion of the installer can be found on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads page[/intlink]