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.
2FFDShow DXVA H.264 corruption resolved
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 24ου-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.
0Broken Fonera ruins Freeview reception
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!... Διαβάστε ολόκληρο το άρθρο
0Mystique 3 Theme: Full-post and Excerpts
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.… Διαβάστε ολόκληρο το άρθρο
32Windows Icons: Full list with details, locations & images
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.
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0Samsung Galaxy Nexus Prime v Apple Iphone 4S
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.
5How to Root the HTC Desire HD & install a custom ROM
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. … Διαβάστε ολόκληρο το άρθρο
2Designing a Home Theatre Room & Lounge
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!
0Google+ for Apps Accounts
Google have finally enabled Google+ for apps accounts (as of the 27ου 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 Studio
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]
“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”