Marc Roberts » Posts

Short URL

marcroberts — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:59:40 +0000

In celebration of Australia Day and thanks to a great, simple article by Sam Brown and Shaun Inman’s brilliantly simple Lessn, I now have my own lovely URL shortening service. Here’s the short link to this post http://ɔɹɐɯ.com/s/2

Jack Bauer Interrogates Santa

marcroberts — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:39:32 +0000

via @codinghorror

BBC iPlayer shifts 7 petabytes a month

marcroberts — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:37:08 +0000

As you can see below (click for full image) the BBC iPlayer shifted 7 petabytes in October in 70 million requests. That’s a lot of data !

BBC iPlayer October stats

Prepared by: CXO, Sources: BBC iPlayer Publicity Pack October 09, CNET iPlayer Q&A

Tea Cures All

marcroberts — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:37:31 +0000

Tea does indeed cure all.

If you are cold, tea will warm you.
If you are too heated, tea will cool you.
If you are too depressed, tea will cheer you.
If you are too exhausted, tea will calm you!

William Gladstone

My tea cup

Yes it may well cure everything, but if it can do this to my tea cup after a couple of days, what the hell is it doing to my insides ?

Cash in on your passion

marcroberts — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:22:43 +0000

Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk from FOWA London 2009, “Now is the time to cash in on your passion”.

Customer service is NOT putting a fucking tab [on your site] that says ‘feedback’

View on Vimeo.

URL ABC

marcroberts — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:20:38 +0000

Here’s a fun game from Tim Van Damme.

A simple game: Go to the address bar in your favorite browser, and type one letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”.

Here’s my list of sites:

I clearly don’t visit many sites beginning with O or K as both of these I was only looking at today briefly, but the rest are places I go fairly regularly

How NOT to get a date

marcroberts — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:31:57 +0000

My favourite excerpt

… If you’re phsycologically normal …

DXVA and MKV in Windows 7

marcroberts — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:31:11 +0000

The Microsoft WMF codec supplied with Windows 7 does a pretty good job of decoding most formats including VC1 and x264. Unfortunetly it doesn’t understand the Matroska container. So step 1 is get this recognised, for this we need the Haali Media Splitter. This will register splitters for Ogg (.ogm/.ogg), Matroska (.mkv) and MPEG4 (.mp4/.mov) containers.

Haali Media Splitter Installer

Once this is installed you will find that your Matroska files will play in Media Center/Player but not using DXVA, so will be using a lot of cpu (a 30mbit 1080p VC1 video I have was maxing out my Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz). So step 2 is to find and install a DXVA capable codec. Media Player Classic Home Cinema has such a codec, amongst many others which are available as a standalone filters (in 32bit and 64bit form). The one we’re interested in here is MPCVideoDec.ax. So copy this file to your system32 directory (~~Syswow64 on 64bit systems, i think ?~~ The 64bit codecs go in system32 on 64bit systems, if you need the codec to work in 32bit applications you’ll the 32bit version as well and that would go in SysWOW64) and run the following command from a command prompt (make sure to run the prompt as administrator if you have UAC enabled)

Now we’re close, sadly Media Player/Center will still use the Microsoft decoder as that is the preferred decoder so we need to change this. We could dive in to the registry and faff around with loads of CLSIDs ourselves, or we could use the Preferred Filter Tweaker for Windows 7 from clsid on the doom9 forums. Download and run this, and then select MPCVideoDec for H264/AVC and VC1.

Preferred DirectShow Filter Tweaker for Windows 7

Apply those changes and restart Media Center/Player (if its open), and try opening a Matroska file again. Now you should find the CPU much reduced thanks to DXVA. My CPU usage playing back the same 1080p file as before is now under 5% as you can see below.

1080p Playback CPU Usage

There is one downside to this however, because this codec requires the decoder to be connected directly to the renderer there is no way (that I can find anyway) to display subtitles within Media Player/Center. If you have a Matroska file with subtitles you’ll have to drop out and play them in MPC-HC, which can display subtitles and still decode with DXVA. If anyone has a way of enabling this in Media Center please let me know.

UPDATE 11/11
Added subtitle caveat and corrected the 32/64 bit file locations. Isn’t it somewhat ridiculous to put 32bit dlls in a folder with ‘64′ in its name, and vice versa ?

Spot the difference

marcroberts — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:21:32 +0000

I needed to purchase a new motherboard to go in my Silverstone LC11 based HTPC. This case is rather slim and therefore has quite complex requirements on the motherboard it can take, the expansions slots have to be in the right places (see FAQ 3) and it also had to accept the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU I have spare to go in there.

After some time consuming searching I finally found a motherboard that met all the criteria and was in stock, the Gigabyte GA-EQ45M-S2 so I went ahead and ordered one.

This is what the product image looked like when I ordered it:

GA-EQ45M-S2 Rev1

This is what I got when I opened the box:

GA-EQ45M-S2 Rev2

Can you spot the difference ?

Well, it turns out Scan ran out of stock of these at the end of October and ordered new ones, which turned out to be revision 2 boards, and had not updated the image on their website.

Thankfully the customer service was excellent at Scan and I’ve got an RMA number already. Now all I have to do is track down another motherboard that matches the criteria.

Who goes and moves the expansion slots around on a revision to an existing board, I wonder if anyone else has been caught out by this ?

Fish warning

marcroberts — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:35:47 +0000

Just in case you were unsure if the ‘Salmon’ you just purchased contains any fish. The Co-op have added a nice little allergy warning saying it contains fish.

Thanks

view on flickr