Posts By: Jon Scaife

0FLAC LogoFull Flac support in Media Center x64

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

Fol­low­ing on from an earli­er art­icle, I have been con­tinu­ing to work on get­ting my music col­lec­tion work­ing in Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter. The prob­lem I have had is that although there are codecs from xiph which sup­port play­back of flacs in 64bit play­ers (see this post) there are (as far as I’m aware) no tag extenders com­pat­ible with 64bit.  After banging my head against a wall for ages I even­tu­ally had a breakthrough.
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0Inside HDD LogoSpeeding up Media Browser

Published by & filed under Media Browser, Storage. Last updated .

An art­icle on Hack7MC caught my eye a couple of months ago, but I have only just got around to fol­low­ing up on it. The idea is to speed up the Media Browser plu­gin for Media Cen­ter by mov­ing its lib­rary to a Cheap USB Flash drive, which hope­fully offers much bet­ter per­form­ance than nor­mal hard-disk drives. The first thing I did was test a couple of flash-based devices that I have against my desktop HardDrive…
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1Windows Media Center eHome LogoSpeeding up WMP12 & 7MC media library database

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

One of the prob­lems with my HTPC that I have only just star­ted look­ing at is how to use it to play and man­age my large col­lec­tion of audio CD’s which I have painstak­ingly ripped to FLAC’s. The Xiph codecs (see pre­vi­ous art­icles here and here) make it pos­sible to play FLACs in 64bit media cen­ter, but the media lib­rary was incred­ibly slow.
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0Haali Matroska logoHaali finally release official x64 splitter

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

Haali Media Split­ter is now “offi­cially” avail­able for 64bit. To down­load simply go to the Haali site and down­load from the link at the top right. Both 32bit and 64bit split­ter are included. Vari­ous fixes are men­tioned altho I haven’t yet had oppor­tun­ity to test them.

0Xiph Codecs Logo64bit Xiph codec breaks file-type dialog in WMP12

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

In an earli­er art­icle I recom­men­ded installing the Xiph codecs to sup­port FLAC files in 64bit Media Play­er and Media Cen­ter. One of the com­ments (my thanks to thom007) on that post poin­ted out that the Xiph codecs break the “file type” dia­log box in Media Play­er 12. Below is a work-around which restores the file-type dia­log box. The pos­sible side effects are as yet unknown, so exper­i­ment at your own risk.
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4LG Viewty KU990i LogoPC Suite for LG Viewty Lite KU990i

Published by & filed under Misc Mobile. Last updated .

One of my fam­ily owns an LG Viewty Lite KU990i (note: the ori­gin­al Viewty is a KU990 which includes a stylus that the Lite ‘i’ ver­sion lacks) and asked for my assist­ance in con­nect­ing it to their PC. The prob­lem is that LG seem to sup­port the KU990, but not the KU990i. The phone was not sup­plied with any soft­ware or cable, but my fam­ily mem­ber had obtained a cable in the expect­a­tion of down­load­ing the soft­ware from LG. Appar­ently this is too much to ask. The KU990 was appar­ently provided with LG PC Suite ver­sion 2, and I found vari­ous posts around the net stat­ing that LG had said that ver­sion 2 would also work with the 990i, how­ever, des­pite obtain­ing a copy of LG PC Suite 2 I was unable to com­mu­nic­ate with the phone suc­cess­fully. Even­tu­ally I was led to try LG PC Suite 3, and with some fid­dling was even­tu­ally able to get com­mu­nic­a­tion working.
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0Dial-Up LogoWindows 7 dial-up connection autodial

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Over the xmas hol­i­days I was asked to look at a few issues with a fam­ily PC. One of the prob­lems was a minor annoy­ance related to the modem-based DSL inter­net con­nec­tion. The dial up box has a tick box which says “con­nect auto­mat­ic­ally”. Although this box was ticked, when the PC was restar­ted when a con­nec­tion was required the same dia­log box would show up, with the option unticked.
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0Flash Flv LogoPlaying downloaded FLV’s

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

I recently had a prob­lem with 2 PCs which appeared to be con­figured identic­ally, but whilst one would play a FLV down­loaded from you­tube, the oth­er would fail. Some oth­er FLVs played OK on both sys­tems. After much fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion I dis­covered that the act­iveX ver­sion of flash play­er on 1 of the PC’s was up-to-date, but on the oth­er was not.
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0GigaByte Dynamic Energy Saver LogoAudio issues with gigabyte power saver

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve been suf­fer­ing from audio dis­tor­tion issues when play­ing back movies on my recently rebuilt HTPC. After much test­ing I dis­covered a solu­tion — dis­abling (in my case by unin­stalling) the giga­byte dynam­ic energy saver util­ity. I am not sure if this tool only causes prob­lems because of my spe­cif­ic con­fig­ur­a­tion of codecs, but it cer­tainly did cause prob­lems across a range of hard­ware and media play­ers. Dis­abling it imme­di­ately resolved the problem.