I recently discovered that mkvmerge‘s 4.1.0 update broke the sound on the video streaming application PS3 Media Server. It all worked fine, but no sound! Appearantly the guys @ mkvtoolnix decided that its time to start using compressed audio headers to save a few kb’s on a 7GB file (700kb). This is their response:
The Matroska specifications know a feature called “header removal compression”. This allows a muxer to keep a certain number of bytes that are identical for each frame in the track headers removing them from the individual frames. This reduces the size of the tracks significantly without altering the content as a demuxer can add the bytes found in the track headers to each frame during demuxing.
Starting with v4.1.0 mkvmerge uses header removal compression for a couple of track types by default. These include AC3, DTS and MP3 audio tracks as well as Dirac and MPEG-4 part 2 (aka. XviD/DivX) video tracks. The user muxing a file may disable it by explicitely selecting ‘none’ as the compression scheme for such a track.
If your player has difficulties playing such files then it is a bug in that player or in the demuxer but not in mkvmerge. This feature has been part of the Matroska specification since more than six years, and there’s no excuse for refusing to add support for it.
The proper solution is to ask the vendor of your player to support this feature. A temporary solution is to re-mux such files turning off extra compression for all tracks.
Thanks to our friends @ the PS3 Media Server forum there is a way to fix this by getting the latest mencoder/mplayer files!
First change:
Replaced only mencoder.exe & mplayer.exe in the “ps3 media server\win32\” directory with the mencoder.exe & mplayer.exe from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-win32/files/MPlayer%20and%20MEncoder/revision%2031878. (MPlayer-p4-svn-31878.7z)
Result:
Transcoding with mencoder and “Enhanced multicore support for H264 HD” selected still lacks audio.
Transcoding with mencoder and “Enhanced multicore support for H264 HD” unselected works (not verified with subtitles though). One core used of course then.
Streaming with tsMuxer now also works !?! when “Switch to tsMuxer…” option is enabled under mencoder settings. (No mistake, the PS3 now can do the decoding fine (5.1 sound & h264) which I find strange.)
Second change:
Replaced mencoder_mt.exe in the “ps3 media server\win32\” directory with mencoder.exe (yes, renamed file to _mt.exe) from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-win32/files/MPlayer%20MT/revision%2031878. (MPlayer-p4-svn-31878-mt.7z) <– NOTICE this is a different link and file than the previous… “MT”
Result:
Transcoding with mencoder and “Enhanced multicore support for H264 HD” selected works! Both my cores are running at 100%, video and (5.1) audio works!
Transcoding with mencoder and “Enhanced multicore support for H264 HD” unselected works (not verified with subtitles though). One core used of course then.
Streaming with tsMuxer now also works !?! when “Switch to tsMuxer…” option is enabled under mencoder settings. (No mistake, the PS3 now can do the decoding fine (5.1 sound & h264) which I find strange.)
I have to admit that i’ve been busy watching a lot of new TV series lately. Not all are worth mentioning but some are. I recently started to watch a show called White Collar. Its about a con artist called Neal Caffrey who starts to work as a FBI consultant with the man who put him twice in prison. Each episode they handle a different case but there is a story in all episodes.
I’m currently half way season 1 and the show didn’t bore me at all. The show is really worth watching if you like a drama crime series, I am definitely going to finish the first season and then continue following the second season. The first season is already available on Blu-Ray and the second season is being aired in the US on the USA Network on Tuesdays @ 9pm. It premiered at 23 October 2009 and the first season has 14 episodes and the second season has 12.
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Since I post regularly about TV series on different sites on the Internet I will try to post it as well on my blog. The series im going to talk about today is the new NBC series, Persons Unknown. Persons Unknown is a Mystery/Sci-Fi series who is similar to the old TV show The Prisoner . It is about a group of strangers captured against their will in a deserted town some where in the world. Escaping this town is not possible since it’s borders are being protected by mysterious forces. Every episode adds new information about who the people are and why they are there and even more new questions.
I wont tell you more about it, just check out the trailer and if you like it, start watching 
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As I wrote before, I’ve been working on an OpenStreetMap application in .NET that renders directly to the screen instead of using pre-rendered tiles. I’ve been working on this for a few hours a week for the last 4 weeks and I’ve made big progress in the load times. It loads the ways & nodes in 20-30secs and renders the map on a 1650×1050 resolution in 0.6-0.8 seconds 
It still not real time but I am using the .NET GDI+ library which does not support any hardware acceleration, I have been thinking of moving to a different method of painting like WPF, OpenGL or D3D since those methods do have HW acceleration
As a side project I’ve been working on a little path finding as wel but that is still in a pre-alpha status
Thats it for today
Sony has recently released a new Firmware for the Playstation 3 that made all the effort in the Open Remote Play project for nothing. ORP is a project that allows you to control your ps3 via your PC/Laptop/PDA/Phone, seems interesting doesnt it? Well unfortunatly its not working anymore. Heres a quick note from the developers:
Sony! C’mon… For real?!
So if you’re able to quit and exit out of Fight Night Round 4 for a moment or two, you’ll see Sony has released PS3 Firmware Update 2.80. And despite what Mr. Lempel says —
The playback quality of some PLAYSTATION 3 format software has been improved.
Sony has also put a damper on Open Remote Play. Those tricky bastards have seemingly “poisoned” the video stream… If you start the ORP client and establish a Remote Play connection, you’ll notice the video quickly becomes garbled nonsense and eventually the client bails. The good news — you can still make the connection, meaning the authentication hasn’t changed any…
Last weekend I flashed my HTC Touch Diamond from the default ROM with Windows Mobile 6.1 to a custom ROM from XDA-Developers with Windows Mobile 6.5. XDA-Developers is a site where developers try to get the best out of their HTC Devices, mostly running Windows Mobile. My first impression of this custom rom and Windows Mobile 6.5 was… WOW! It really improved, okay its not Android or the iPhone but its a lot better then the standard WM6.1 Professional.
So whats new in Windows Mobile 6.5:
- The new start menu
- New today plugin
- New lock screen
- Menu’s have been redesigned
- Pocket Internet Explorer, its comparable to Opera Mobile now
- MyPhone, although its also available for other versions
I really enjoyed it, but since HTC didnt release an own Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM its still pretty buggy. Im sure it cause of the custom rom, not because of Windows Mobile 6.5
Last thursday I went to the cinema, to see theThe Hangover. I havent been to the cinema since The Dark knight so it was awhile ago for me. And i must say, its the best movie of 2009! Not that 2009 has brought us so many great movies though
For everybody who havent seen it yet, go to the cinema ASAP. Dont wait for the DVD/Blu-ray release since thats gonna take a few months.
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I have recently launched Plakbak, a simple pastebin written in PHP and is powered by Stikked. The reason behind this was that I couldnt find an easy to use and fast pastbin for simple code pasting. Instead of wasting my own time by writing one on my own, i chose to use Stikked which suits all my needs.
Check it out on www.plakbak.nl
After I finished some of my projects recently, I found a new project! It doesnt have any use yet but its going to be an OpenStreetMap parser for .Net. Ofcourse there are already OpenStreetMap applications written in .Net but I want to try out some for myself.
First of all, OpenStreetMap files are .osm files with XML markup. As we all know, XML can be pretty big and slow. At first, I thought it would be a nice idea to put all this info in a SQLite database. But after running some test I found out that it was even slower then XML. I searched abit on the internet and decided I could use binary files aswel. I wrote a small binary reader/writer and the 1.5GB XML of The Netherlands is now only 250MB. And its loaded in ~3seconds, depending on the amount of tags.
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ClipBoard2ImageShack
Small tool to upload an image in your clipboard to imageshack! It automatically makes a history.txt with all your uploaded image url’s. The ImageShack URL is copied to the clipboard when the upload is finished
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