- Published:
- September 22, 2010 – 10:28 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Handbrake. After committing to copying my DVD collection to my storage array, I’ve tried and tested just about all software out there for converting video to H.264 with an emphasis on quality and speed. Many software packages have problems with quality or desynchronized audio, Handbrake is my hands-down favorite when it comes down to converting video — and that includes both free and commercial software.
One of the complaints I hear about Handbrake is that there are too many options. Well, the good news for someone looking for simplicity is that the built-in presets mostly take care of them for you. And for anyone who likes to dive into the nitty gritty of video compression, it also allows for a lot of tweaking to get the most out of your movie while maintaining small file sizes and high quality.
Read on for my full guide to Handbrake features.
Categories: Software,Windows
Tagged: dvd, encoding, video
- Published:
- January 24, 2010 – 3:32 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Canon’s site for the LiDE 50 does not list any Windows 7 drivers for download, nor Vista 64-bit drivers. However, I did find that you can use the CanoScan LiDE 60 drivers in place of the LiDE 50 drivers, and they do have options listed for Windows 7/Vista in both 64-bit and 32-bit varieties. Do do this, you download the appropriate driver (either the Windows 7 64 or 32 drivers) which is contained in an executable file. Use a program such as 7zip to uncompress this file into another folder. Within this folder, there are no drivers but further cabinet files. Use 7zip to decompress the _winzip_ file, which actually contains the driver you need to install. In your device manager, locate the scanner and select the option to update the driver. You will need to select the driver manually, then specify the device type and driver, then click the “Have….
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Windows
Tagged: canon, drivers, lide, scanners
- Published:
- January 22, 2010 – 2:39 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
EDID stands for Extended display identification data and is what many computer monitors and televisions with a VGA/HDMI use to tell the PC what resolution they support. Which, in theory at least, is great. However what I recently found out is that many LCD and Plasma televisions do not broadcast the correct 16:9 resolution via EDID, and therefore the computer doesn’t know what resolution to display and you have a stretched image.
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Windows
Tagged: drivers, edid, nvidia, windows-7
- Published:
- October 30, 2009 – 6:40 am
- Author:
- By Dave
I put this together for a project in a class I am taking, and thought it would be handy for others as well. The goal is to access a Windows filesystem and reset the password for a user, for example if someone forgot the Administrator password or the account is locked out from too many bad password login attempts. This works on all modern Windows Operating Systems: Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, Win7 etc. Make sure to create a backup if you want to make sure you don’t corrupt your Windows install, as it can happen. Tools used: Unetbootin Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop ISO One flash drive, 1 gig or larger chntpw Accessing the Filesystem First we use unetbootin to install Ubuntu 9.10 to a flash drive. The flash drive needs to be at least 1GB to install the image. Select “Diskimage” and then the .iso file we downloaded of the….
Categories: Other Technology,Software,System Administration,Ubuntu,Windows
Tagged: chntpw, livecd, password, Ubuntu, Windows
- Published:
- February 6, 2009 – 10:39 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Windows files and Unix files (Redhat, Ubuntu, etc) are encoded in different ways. Namely, the end of line that is a part of most files created in Windows is not compatible with Unix. You can usually see this because there is a ‘weird character’ at the end of each line. ‘cat’ does not show it, but ‘cat -e’ will show these characters: xx.xx.125.240 spc240.xx.xx^M$ xx.xx.125.241 spc241.xx.xx^M$ The ^M is a Windows ‘End of Line’ character. Fortunately there is an easy way to fix these for using them in a unix based system. Install ‘dos2unix’, and then run the file through them: dos2unix filename You can even run these on a bunch of files: [root@ns1 ~]# dos2unix RDNS-* dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.81 to UNIX format … dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.82 to UNIX format … dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.85 to UNIX format … dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.95 to UNIX format … dos2unix:….
Categories: Linux,Shell,System Administration,Windows
Tagged: character encoding, dos2unix, end of line, recode
- Published:
- January 8, 2009 – 10:28 am
- Author:
- By Dave
The Remote Desktop connection settings for Windows Server 2008, and I believe Windows Vista, includes 3 levels of service: Don’t allow connections to this computer Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop (less secure) Allow connections only from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (more secure) At first blush, you would probably choose the “more secure” option. Practically, this mainly means that it only allows connections from the latest Remote Desktop software in Windows Vista. It is probably another attempt by Microsoft to force consumers and businesses into upgrading to Windows Vista. But… I digress. When connecting with an older Terminal Services (TS) client in XP or even Vista, you will get this message: “Remote computer requires Network Level Authentication, which your computer doesn’t support” Not all is lost. There are two ways around this. The first and most obvious solution is to select the….
Categories: Configurations,Security,System Administration,Windows
Tagged: credssp, network level authentication, nla, remote desktop, Security
- Published:
- January 4, 2009 – 2:11 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I am currently copying my DVD collection to my PC for use in my media center downstairs. I have an generic process down, that works very well, but it requires a bunch of clicks to do. While figuring out how to Autoplay a DVD using ZoomPlayer rather than the built in Windows Media Player, I thought, why not add a “Rip DVD with Handbrake” option. This is actually pretty easy to do, so I thought I would share so that anyone looking to do a similar thing could easily set it up. First thing, I am assuming you have Handbrake installed and running. Also, unless you are only copying non CSS protected DVDs, you will need a program such as DVD43 or AnyDVD which automatically decrypts the DVD on the fly. After ensuring those work (and tested by copying a DVD via the GUI interface) then we can begin to….
Categories: System Administration,Windows
Tagged: autoplay, copy, disk, dvd, handbrake, rip
