Getting mpeg video playback working on Windows 7
Jan 11, 2010 Misc
I recently took the plunge and bought a new PC after my ancient Athlon XP box became unstable. The new PC is using an Intel Core i5 CPU and ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU. I decided to use Windows 7 64-bit as the OS because I have 4G of RAM and Microsoft does not allow the 32-bit versions of their OS to use more than about 3G of RAM.
While things have gone pretty well I have had 2 major issues that have bugged me (no pun intended).
- No stable flash player for 64-bit browsers.
- Most mpeg videos would not show any picture when playing.
The flash problem has not been a big issue since it has prevented most of the annoying web ads from displaying and I always have the option of using the 32-bit version of IE when I need flash (eg, Youtube).
The mpeg issue on the other hand was quite frustrating because I couldn’t find a workaround for it for some time. As it turns out just because my new Windows 7 OS ships with DirectX 11 that doesn’t mean that older DirectX functions will work correctly, such as GPU accelerated mpeg decoding. Thanks to a helpful thread on the Boxee forum I found a DirectX update tool on the Microsoft website. Running this tool downloaded and installed some DirectX components and now video playback is working perfectly.
You’d think Microsoft would test that sort of thing before releasing the OS so it works without updates but I guess that is too much to ask for.
For those who are interested there is a 64 bit beta version of the flash player available here.
Tags: windows 7
We have hosting
May 7, 2009 Misc
I moved the site over to the new hosting on the weekend and updated the site theme at the same time. So far things are running much faster than they were before. I’ll post an updated speed graph from the Google webmaster console in a few weeks when it has updated.
I’m still in the process of clearing out the link rot but I have cut down the number of broken links to around half as many as when I started.
That’s all for now.
Time to get some hosting
Apr 7, 2009 Misc
For the last 4 or so years this site has been hosted at home over my DSL line. In that time period I’ve been through several ISPs and physical addresses and numerous versions of WordPress.
Recently my provider had an outage that dragged on for well over 24 hours and resulted in me churning my DSL service to a new ISP. It took a while to update the routing following the move so this site was down for the better part of a week. I think it is finally time to move this site over to dedicated hosting where it is less prone to these sorts of problems.
I have some issues with most my current hosting provider not allowing me to have SRV records in my zonefile (needed for jabberd) but moving the web side of things over shouldn’t be much of an issue. I’m also going to take the opportunity to go back through the old posts and clean out ones with link rot.
Here are my current response time stats from the Google webmaster console:
Let’s see how they look after the move.
Annual updates
Mar 1, 2009 Misc
Kylie requested an update for the blog, so here it is!
Looks like I have accidentally fallen into an annual update schedule. It might be time to tidy up some of the old content and return to more frequent updates.
An old saying..
Feb 14, 2007 Misc
Back in the 1800s the Tates Watch Company of Massachusetts wanted to produce other products and, since they already made the cases for watches,they used them to produce compasses. The new compasses were so bad that people often ended up in Canada or Mexico rather than California.
This, of course, is the origin of the expression, “He who has a Tates is lost!”
Software to improve train scheduling
Aug 10, 2005 Current Events, Misc
Test time for timetables ( Australian IT / Kelly Mills )
From the article: “STATE railways are testing revolutionary, locally developed software that may help the trains run on time.
[..]
Developed by the Co-operative Research Centre for Railway Engineering and Technologies (Rail CRC) and the University of South Australia in collaboration with consultants TMG International, the ScheduleMiser technology generates thousands of viable train plans in a matter of minutes.”
I wonder if this would help Melbourne’s train network run on time?
Why must cats stand on the keyboard?
Jun 22, 2004 Misc
What’s even more annoying is my cat likes to lick the keyboard too. I
guess that is why it’s important to wash your hands between eating and
using the computer.
Ready to roll
Apr 26, 2004 Misc
Ok.. I’ve got Blogger all sorted out now, links in place, and we’re ready to roll.
It was actually this Slashdot article that motivated me to get the blog up and running again. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of months now, but needed the Gmail account carrot dangled in front of me to lure me back to blogger.com. Sadly I didn’t score a Gmail account, but I’m sure I’ll get one at some point in the future.