Archive for November, 2005

Charset detection for fun and non-profit…

FreeDB [www.freedb.org] is a free online CD-information database allowing applications to query the FreeDB server over the internet for disc & track titles. The database was built with user-submitted information; as such entries were being submitted in whatever default character set the submitting-user had. The problem arises when someone with a different default character set retrieves this CD-information and finds it completely scrambled. The problem of character sets is not Read More...

Using MEncoder to convert a DVD to DivX

More for my own benefit, but here goes… This is an example of using MEncoder (Windows version) to convert a DVD to DivX. The original movie was widescreen and is being rescaled here to 720×408 to keep the 16:9 aspect ratio. The video bitrate I used was 1024kbit but you can tweak this as desired. It may seem unusual for the first run to output to NUL ( /dev/null ) Read More...

MediaCodeSpeedEdit tool for DVD-Writers by ala42

Stumbled across this when trying to find out why my 16x DVD media wouldn’t burn at anything higher than 4x. Download your drive’s latest firmware, feed it into MediaCodeSpeedEdit and you can edit the burn speeds for all media the drive can recognise. Save the modified firmware and re-flash your drive with it. Pretty neat! My only gripe is that the way you do it seems a little odd from Read More...