Posts By: Jon Scaife

0Media Browser LogoTweaking Media Browser Performance again

Published by & filed under Media Browser. Last updated .

Last year I pos­ted about [int­link id=“41” type=“post”]improving the per­form­ance of Media Browser[/intlink].  In the end that attempt yiel­ded dis­ap­point­ing res­ults.  How­ever, I’ve recently been exper­i­ment­ing with vari­ous ways of improv­ing per­form­ance as my lib­rary size increases.
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1Mozilla Minefield x64The case for x64 browsers?

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I’ve recently been using Fire­fox 4 64bit pre­b­eta, also known as Mine­field.  I thought it would be inter­est­ing to com­pare vari­ous browsers to see if this sup­ports my feel­ing that Mine­field is the fast­est browser I’ve used.  The con­clu­sions are quite inter­est­ing.  I will con­tin­ue to update this table as new ver­sions are released
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0PC Hardware CPU RAM UpgradeSimple ways to make your PC much faster

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

There are lots of tips and advice out there on the inter­net about how to tweak the per­form­ance of your PC. Some of them have some use­ful tips, but the vast major­ity are of very little use, either because they are for the wrong oper­at­ing sys­tem, or they don’t apply to your setup, or because they’re just plain wrong. When someone brings a PC to me and says its too slow, before I advise them to upgrade it (and that is always an option) I have a quick look for sev­er­al things that are the lead­ing cause of slow PC per­form­ance. Over 90% of the time car­ry­ing out the vari­ous steps detailed below res­ults in a sub­stan­tial improve­ment and a happy PC user.
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0Alarm Clock LogoPHP / JavaScript to wake a PC remotely

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I have an HTPC and a net­work serv­er on my net­work.  My serv­er is always on, but the HTPC sleeps when it is not in use.  If I want to sched­ule record­ings remotely I need a way to wake the HTPC.  The solu­tion I came up with is to provide a webpage on my serv­er (pass­word pro­tec­ted) that wakes the HTPC and then redir­ects to the web inter­face of the remote con­trol app of the HTPC.  Below is the code for any­one interested…
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2Windows Media Center eHome LogoFull 7MC codec setup

Published by & filed under Codecs, Misc Media Software, Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve pre­vi­ously pos­ted sev­er­al times about codec issues on 7mc, but I’ve now got a solu­tion that is com­pre­hens­ive, fairly simple and works con­sist­ently.  With a few free codecs and util­it­ies you can have full decod­ing sup­port, DXVA, sub­titles and fant­ast­ic flex­ib­il­ity work­ing in 64bit (or 32bit) Media Cen­ter.  The fol­low­ing instruc­tions are spe­cif­ic to the x64 edi­tion, but should work just as well on the 32bit edition.
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0Quizdom LogoQuizdom tablet “video capture” not working

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I was asked to invest­ig­ate why some video cap­ture util­ity which is part of the soft­ware pack­age for the Quiz­dom Tab­let was­n’t load­ing cor­rectly on a par­tic­u­lar laptop. Invest­ig­a­tion revealed that quiz­dom used the XviD codec and installs it as part of its setup routine. The laptop in ques­tion already had a video codec installed that was cap­able of decod­ing XviD videos, and this pri­or codec had a high­er mer­it than the XviD nat­ive codec installed by quiz­dom. Dis­abling XviD sup­port in this codec proved to be the solu­tion. Any­one with the stan­dalone MPC-HC codecs or ffd­show installed may come across this problem

0GATSO Speed Camera LogoTomTom speedcam alerts — inc eurozone

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Like many people I use a TomTom sat nav, and I’m a big fan of the speed cam­era data­base provided by Pock­et­G­PSWorld.  It is also pos­sible to down­load some nice alerts from PGPSW, but I find the beeps are rather annoy­ing, and the max­im­um speed sup­por­ted is 70, which is fine for the UK, but isn’t very help­ful for maps of Europe.  As a res­ult I have mashed togeth­er an altern­at­ive set that I think are much nicer.  Get them from the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads[/intlink] page.  They work for both UK and Euro maps.  The Euro ones go up to 130.  Both sets have a nicer voice (female) and a nicer alert beep.  By all means try them out.  They install and oper­ate exactly the same as the ones offered by PGPSW, if you need help installing them have a look there.