Search Results for: label/standalone

0DVB LogicPlanning a new networked home media setup

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware, Misc Media Software, Storage. Last updated .

In the com­ing months I will be buy­ing a new prop­erty, and to go with my new home, I’ve been read­ing up lots on how I might integ­rate a new home media setup. In recent months sev­er­al excit­ing new options have become avail­able, which finally makes the sort of setup I have always desired a real pos­sib­il­ity.… Read Full Article

0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoMPC-HC

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

Just a very quick note — The latest ver­sion of media play­er clas­sic home cinema and the stan­dalone codecs seem rather elu­sive. The place to go for alpha and beta releases is XvidVideo.ru

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

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.
… Read Full Article

0FFmpeg LogoThe Ultimate Codec Guide

Published by & filed under . Last updated .

How data is stored in a multimedia file

Files on a com­puter (or on an optic­al disk like DVD or BluRay) need to con­tain more than 1 type of data. A typ­ic­al movie will include at least 1 video “stream” and one audio “stream”. Most movies include mul­tiple lan­guages and sub­titles, each of which requires an addi­tion­al stream. Each of these streams is effect­ively a file in its own right, but they are all stored togeth­er with­in a “con­tain­er” which also starts each of them at the right time (sub­titles don’t start imme­di­ately at the start of a movie for example) and keeps them in sync as well as stor­ing meta-data about each of them – i.e. what lan­guage they are, what fram­er­ate and res­ol­u­tion the video is, and what com­pres­sion stand­ards have been used.

Video streams

Video streams con­tain only the video part of the movie. They are com­pressed using a par­tic­u­lar sys­tem and there should be meta-data about their res­ol­u­tion, fram­er­ate, if they are inter­laced or pro­gress­ive and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Audio streams

Audio streams con­tain only the audio part of the movie. There are usu­ally mul­tiple audio streams included with the movie and each has its own stream. They can be com­pressed in a range of ways or in some cases they are uncom­pressed raw audio. There should be meta-data about their bitrate, res­ol­u­tion, lan­guage, num­ber of chan­nels and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Oth­er streams (e.g. Closed Captions)

Many movies con­tain oth­er streams, most com­monly closed cap­tions (also known as sub­titles).  These come in sev­er­al formats, but are typ­ic­ally just text with time stamps. They are so small rel­at­ively that no com­pres­sion is used. There should be meta-data about their language.
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Con­tain­ers which bundle all the streams together

All of the streams that com­prise the movie are bundled togeth­er and kept in sync by a con­tain­er. The con­tain­er should con­tain (and provide) all the meta-data about each stream. The con­tain­er also enables the col­lec­tion of streams to be stored as a single file. The most com­mon con­tain­er formats are VOB (used by DVD) and M2TS (used by BluRay).  Oth­er com­mon con­tain­er formats on PC are TS, MPEG, AVI, MKV, WMV, WTV, DVR-MS and MP4. The obsol­ete HD-DVD format used EVO containers.

0Batch script to rename PC based on reserved DHCP name

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I use WDS on a stan­dalone serv­er to set up new PCs and to reim­age PCs when they have ended up mangled bey­ond repair. With a good num­ber of PCs in my own house it is use­ful to reim­age them oca­sion­ally when swap­ping or upgrad­ing hard­ware. Most of this pro­cess is now auto­mated by an unattend.xml file but one step the unat­ten­ded pro­cess does­n’t seem to sup­port is renam­ing PCs back to their ori­gin­al name.
… Read Full Article