A lot of people claim that defragmenting your hard drive wouldn’t make any more free disk space. However, I noticed the opposite! I use my Laptop for my study and noticed the disk space is used more and more, the disk space left was 27 GB. Okay, this seems pretty nice and satisfying. But, I removed a lot of data and nothing changed, it rarely changed, maybe some 0,5 GB more space. Today I defragmented my hard drive and whola, I got 40 GB disk free space! How can this be? Anyway, I should defragment my hard drive more often 
I’m very disappointed about Vista’s incompatibility to record and convert 5.1 movies. All starts with Media Center, it will record AC3 2 channels only. When you watch TV on PC and prepare to record a movie, I bet you start the recording 2-5 minutes before the movie begins. While recording these 2-5 minutes, the sound will be only 2 channels, so Media Center will keep this information for the entire show, although 5.1 Dolby Digital is used for the movie.
The workaround is to use the software that was shipped with the TV card or USB. In my case I used Terratec’s Home Cinema and selected to record all available channels in MPEG. I loaded the file into Movie Maker and it was still 2 channels. Burning the movie with DVD Maker resulted in the same: AC3 2 channels aka stereo (see DVD Shrink and load DVD).
I needed some gadgets to see how to handle 5.1 audio and how to burn 5.1 movies to DVD, to playback on a DVD Player. Soon I found some tools like Cuttermaran, Project-x and DVDStyler. I reviewed my 5.1 recorded video and noticed that the audio before the movie begins is reported as AC3 2 channels and the movie itself in 5.1, hurray! I cut the video and kept the part with 5.1.
Finally I loaded this mpeg file into Windows Movie Maker, and guess what, yes, properties displayed 6 channels. However if I converted the movie to wmv the audio was set back to 2 channels, which you can verify by loading the encoded file back to Windows Movie Maker after it was processed. When I set to burn the 5.1 movie directly with Windows DVD Maker, it messed up my DVD.
So now I’m used to Cuttermaran and Project-X and DVDStyler, which will produce 5.1 videos! Sometimes “cheap” means good, and “expensive” worst.
Lately I wanted to burn one mpeg files with 5.1 audio and received a error in Windows DVD Maker, actually it took very long and failed. However later I tried to burn 2 channel AC3 and this failed also. For some reason every burning started to fail! Computers are wierd sometimes…
I started to think that my burner, the hardware, got messed up, but IMGBurn worked fine. That made no sense at all. After reviewing the event log I noticed that all troubles started a few days ago on 10.09.2007. Also 4 applications were installed the same day.
My aim was to solve this trouble as soon as possible, I was sure it was software/codec releated, at least some resources online claimed installing “Vista Codec Pack” will fix the problem. Finally I remoced all codec packs, and 2 programs that were installed on issued day. See burning worked again!
I’m not sure what could have caused the problem, but I list the stuff I removed and what I’ve installed:
Removed:
Installed
Today I found something mysterious in Vista: I saved data but couldn’t find it in Windows Explorer!? I wanted to make sure if it’s a disk failure or something but even the Command Line showed nothing. It was weird, I could load all files using the associated application used to handle this file type. However Notepad++ recognized it and could load it was well. Now this seemed more strange…
Then I noticed a button I have seen the first time “Compatibility Files”. I checked this out and whola, all my files where there! Soon I found out, that this is a feature that comes with Vista to protect the Program Files Folder. All the files were located in a different location at C:\Users\Manuel Adam\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\MA\Rockystudy\. ah! Now it makes sense
See the screenshot:
Windows Vista offers a feature to burn files and folders. However making a backup of a DVD movie will make some trouble on some DVD players, for instance the default.ini file included in the root folder. When you try to remove this file, Windows Explorer will fail to burn the DVD at all.
Fortunately I found some great freeware tools to backup my DVDs. Folder2ISO, LC ISO Creator, and ImgBurn. First you create an ISO file and the use ImgBurn.
ImgBurn:
http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download
Folder2ISO:
http://www.trustfm.net/divx/Software…oDownload.html
LC ISO Creator:
http://www.lucersoft.com/freeware.php
I was having finals, studied a lot, and therefore was having less time for the computer. Also my last blog post was added in June. I’m not sure if anyone reads my blog at all, but it’s still a great resource for myself. Often I had solved computer problems and posted the solution here. Indeed I have needed the same informations again and again.
At the moment I read a book “The Art of Seeing” by Aldous Huxley that is very interesting and helpful for me because I were glasses and sometimes noticed bad seeing. Also I read about smoking, how dangerous it’s and how people quit etcetera, although I never smoked, so I’m a never-smoker. Anyway it’s still interesting to know how people feel and what happens inside the body during such time.
Regarding computers I’m testing FreeBSD running in VirtualBox, which uses less CPU. I think I need a book to get more into it. At the other hand I’m thinking of setting up an ITX router/firewall with m0n0wall and later to use a ITX server which Compact Flash cards. Interesting is also the iRAM module but sounds risky for server applications, when I’m on vacation.
I have been having issues with the Flash Player. Although the installation seemed completed, all websites claimed about the missing Flash Player. Again and again I installed the Player, the installation worked but the result was the same.
Today I browsed to the folder “C:\Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash\” and ran the uninstall_acticeX.exe and uninstall_plugin. For some reason it messed up itself and needed a fresh install. However, removing Flash in control panel (add or remove programs) failed because “Flash” was missing in the list.
Finally I ran the online setup and the installation seemed different and took longer. Apparently the Flash Payer was truly installed. Moreover websites started to display Flash content!
After I uninstalled Terratec Home Cinema, the audio was starting to make noises like when you haven’t selected a channel. On every reboot I noticed the same problem. Although the line-in was set off in the mixer, the annoying sound was still produced.
Reinstalling the software solved it. I guess the software has modified something in the windows-system-registry, when it was uninstalled.
Two weeks ago I woke up in the morning and saw that my Laptop was powered on. It happened once and I thought it was my fault. Maybe I pressed the wrong button and the computer rebooted instead of powering off. However it happened continuously, again and again, it was just weird.
I posted a new topic on http://virtualdr.com and received some replies. However none seemed to solve the issue.
I investigated myself, uninstalled some windows updates, and some software. Although it was illogical that a Laptop which has less BIOS settings, power-on-settings unavailable, would boot up itself. But it did!
Finally I found a more illogical solution: removing the power supply and the battery for five minutes and then adding it back. It seems like Vista stores some information to power-on inside the RAM and the BIOS is acting by powering the system on.
DVD movies are very expensive and full of useless additions like trailers, commercials, annoying copyright messages, and so on. Until now I recorder from analog TV and compressed the content to Xvid.
Last week I bought Terratec’s Cinergy XS DVB-T card. It’s compatible with Windows Vista and Media Center. Within minutes it was installed and configured.
At first I recorded “The Passion” with Media Center. It was having a very impressive quality — MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital audio. It took some time to figure out how to edit Microsoft Recorded TV Shows — dvr-ms, the file which stores the video. Windows Moive Maker version 6.0 supports them. However I disabled the 3rd-party filters because they was having compatibility issues, they was set on by default (see tools, options, compatibility).
Finally Windows DVD Maker burn the completed project and added a nice DVD menu, which is customizeable of course.
