Stealin ur Megahurtz » technology

No Video, Audio Only Fix for Miro

rfdeshon — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:48:03 +0000

I use Miro (http://www.getmiro.com) pretty much every day to download and watch media. Today on my Windows box, however, it decided to no longer play back video. The audio played just fine but I only got a blank screen for video. I did some extensive googling, all of which turned up the same thing, a fix that could be applied by installing VLC (the media player Miro uses), tweaking the video settings, then copying a certain file to a certain directory and restarting Miro. Unfortunately, everyone that posted about this fix linked to some Miro documentation that no longer existed for the specifics. After a bunch of trial and error, I finally figured out where everything needed to go for the fix. Please note, these instructions are based on a “standard” Windows XP setup in which the system drive is C and your profile is stored in C:\Documents and Settings… in other words ymmv.

Install the latest VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc)
Open one of Miro videos using VLC.
Go to Tools > Preferences > Video and change the settings until your video actually displays correctly (note: you will need to restart VLC between each change to notice any effects, the most common setting that causes problems is “Accelerated Video Output” being enabled.)
Once you have your video displaying correctly in VLC, go to C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\vlc and copy the vlcrc file
Open C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\PCF-VLC and paste the working vlcrc file here.
Make sure Miro is closed, launch a fresh copy of Miro and voila! Video should now output properly.

Also, I’d like to say to the people that make Miro, I love your product and think you are doing a great job. The documentation on your site, however, is hard to use and sorely lacking. Perhaps you should consider implementing a more traditional wiki for issues such as this and keeping an archive in place so links to common fixes don’t go bad in the future.

Comcast: The Bullies of the Internet

rfdeshon — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:47:46 +0000

So, we all know that Comcast throttles traffic and is generally averse to fair use right? Well, now they have added a new form of bullying to their repertoire. Recently, they decided to block an entire /17 network range. Why? We have no idea. However, the /17 in questions happens to be assigned to the hosting company I work for. We have submitted multiple requests to have IPs removed from the blacklist as we have verified that they are not sending out spam. Comcast has refused every request. Now they are telling us we have to filter the outgoing email for our entire network or else they will not take the range off their blacklist.

That’s right… they are demanding that instead of them doing their job by only blocking actual spammers, we have to police all outgoing email for two full data centers. Nevermind the fact that the cost of the equipment necessary to take on a job of that size would likely put us out of business, but the suggestion that we should be responsible for filtering all our customers outgoing mail is just ludicrous! Do we like spam? No, in fact it’s strictly against our Terms of Service and we terminate the accounts of any spammers we find. That said though, why should our customers not receive the benefit of the doubt? Also, why does Comcast think they have the right to bully other companies into policing the Internet? I, for one, will be canceling all my Comcast services as soon as I possibly can. I strongly encourage everyone else to as well for clearly they have lost their collective marbles.

Mass Effect and Nvidia

rfdeshon — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:27:23 +0000

After hearing soooo many good things about Mass Effect, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase it (via Steam, of course) this weekend. This game is massive, it took me upwards of 24 hours for Steam to finish downloading it. It doesn’t help that Steam likes to flake out mid-download, but that’s a different story. Anyway, after all that time downloading I finally get in to play it only to find that it crashes… ALL… THE… TIME. I couldn’t play the game for more than 45 minutes without it hard locking. I found this to be very frustrating.

Anyway, after a few Google searches I find people recommending downgrading Nvidia drivers to the 175 release. Apparently most people only experience these crashes with drivers 176 and above. So I pop on over to Nvidia’s site, grab the old drivers, install them, reboot twice and sacrifice a chicken to the dark lords of Microsoft. Okay so I made that last step up, but you get the idea. Bingo, I’ve had one crash since and I’ve put in a ton of time on the game.

Now then… for the point of this article. I don’t know whose fault this is considering that neither Nvidia or the makers of Mass Effect seem to want to acknowledge that there is a problem, much less fix it, nor do I really care. Both Bioware and Nvidia have been a massive disappointment lately in this department. Both companies have been releasing buggy software that never should of made it through quality control but somehow did. I mean, c’mon Bioware… people have dubbed your company Buggaware… what is it going to take to convince you that no matter how cool your games are, if they crash all the time people aren’t going to want to buy them?

As for Nvidia, just because you’re the dominant graphics card manufacturer doesn’t mean you can slack off on your drivers. I just hooked my computer up to my TV, expecting to use the video overlay that I love so much, just to find out it’s been stripped out of your drivers and/or my card. That kind of thing is completely unacceptable. If you don’t shape up, my next upgrade will be ATI. To be honest, the only reason I’ve given you so many chances is because of your superior Linux support. That’s not even going to be enough to save you though if you keep putting out drivers that strip out features and crash games.

I’m ashamed of both of you Bioware and Nvidia. This is the kind of crap that I’ve come to expect from Microsoft. That is NOT a compliment either. If I could ditch Windows completely, I would in a heartbeat, sadly I enjoy playing video games and WINE just isn’t quite there yet. The two of you don’t have that kind of grip on me though. I don’t have to buy your graphics cards or your games.