Converting and playing video on Nokia 5300

Until now I always use WinAVI MP4 (Mobile) Converter to convert video for watching on my Nokia 5300. However, I constantly experiencing video lagging and audio out of sync problem.

Today, after reading this message, plus hours of study I finally figure out problems and solutions with video conversion and play back on Nokia 5300.

First of all, you need to download and install SUPER to do the video conversion. And then you need to use the following setting when converting video:

Output Container: 3gp (Nokia/NEC/Siemens)
Output Video Codec: H.263
Output Audio Codec: AAC

Video Settings:
Scale Size: 176:144
Aspect: 4:3
Frame/Sec: 15
Bitrate kpbs: 85
Options: Hi Quality

Audio Settings:
Sampling Freq: 44100
Channels: 2
Bitrate kpbs: 192


Some Tidbit on version:

• The conversion app seems to treat Traditioanl Chiense filename OK, but have problem dealing with some Japanese music video file, and I kind of suspect that it's because of the Japanese name.
• Bitrate kpbs: 96 doesn't work with the Simpsons video that I tried to convert. So I will stick to 85 to aviod wasting time converting.
• SUPER seems to automatically remember all the setting I did the last time. This is good, for it would be suck to reset up everything every time.
  

Now some tidbit on playing back on 5300:

• If you experience lagging on video, you can try REBOOTING (that's right, shutdown and start up again) your phone. I have problem resolved a lot of times after reboot.
• After pausing a video and then resume again, you may experience audio out of sync. Try pressing prev button to rewind the video a bit and the audio sync problem will be resolved.
• I don't really need 192K bit rate for audio, but since the file size is about the same, and doesn't affect video play back and quality at all ... then, why not.
• 
  

MediaCoder: worthy video converter for mobile phone

I was interested by some discussion about how good the MediaCoder handles convertion, saying that it supports Core 2 CPU, and yield great result. Well, I should give it a try and see how goes ...

Console mod scene

The console mod scene is pretty exciting these days.

First of all, the question of whether there's a 65nm CPU equipped XBox 360 console floating around is still a hot discussion. Some claimed that the Halo 3 Special edition XBox 360 console has the 65nm CPU, while some say that not all special edition has the cooler 65nm. Regardless, it's defintiely NOT a good time to jump into the market and get a XBox360 unless you definitely need to play Halo 3 right now.

The new slim PSP also has a hot mod discussion recently. Some confirmed that some of the lastest slim PSP has problem soft-mod the console to play homebrew games. In fact, there are people who explicitly try to buy old version of PSP in order to play homebrew game. After all, the old version price, US$169 (or HK$1200 in Hong Kong) . The slim PSP price in HK cost HK$1280 which seems to be a much better deal than the US$199 pack in US.

Another issue is that the new slim version with firmware 3.7 or above couldn't be mod to play homebrew. This is such a big blow to those who are planning to big or switch to a slimmer PSP.

I personally won't get a PSP yet because there's not enough game attracting. In fact I'll probably mainly use it to play SNES emulator games. Being a media player, PSP doesn't have a good native divx/xvid player.

Oh, remember to use MediaCoder to convert media to play on PSP.

In addition ... the iPod Touch .. well it's not a console, but definitley in my radar :-P

Loving my iRiver 40Gb player again

I am using suffling feature of iRiver H140 now, and found that it actually work pretty well. I also conencted my player to my stereo system, and interesting enough, I discovered that my harddisk has quite a lot of good music in it that I didn't even realized it.

I think I revived my love with my iRiver mp3 player.

DELL Axim 50v gradually dying ....

I know that my Pocket PC x50v is heading to the end of it's life as it starts gradually malfunctioning one part a time, especially on the hard keys. Now I have to mostly rely on the touch screen to operate the device.

Yet I haven't found a device that can effectively replace it for all the work that I do on it, including:

- Writing Chinese notes.
- Listening to MP3.
- Watching video.
- Checking Contact information.
- Taking quick notes using hand recognition

I think an iPod classic can do a lot of the work, but still not perfect.

And now the the Samsung Q1 UMPC price drop to US$799, this could be a nice replacement for x50v.

Click wheel breakout is actually fun the play

I have to admit that I find it fun to play with the Vortex game that came with iPod classic. It's cater to the click wheel and I find it using the wheel very effectively.

Ulead video studio 10 messed up my DV video playback?

It seemed like after I installed the Ulead VideoStudio 10 with Vista update and Service Pack 1, I got problem playing DV video on Windows Media Player in my Vista system. Interestingly, the problem seemed to go away after I uninstalled the application. Plus, the application wasn't compatible with the Vista Graphic engine, and force the system to get into basic color scheme.

The problem is that I still need to find a way to do non-destructuve DV video trimming. So tonight I'll probably give VideoStudio version 11 a try.

A better SD card reader

My EagleTec USB 2.0 Flashcard reader seems to be not working right when I hooked it up to my desktop. It was unable to copy some big 300Mb podcast files from a Toshiba 2Gb SD to my desktop. I attempted a few times and they all failed somehow. Luckily , I also have some Mini USB card reader that sort of act like thumb drive enclosure. I tried my green on and it copied files like a champ. Sigh. Seems like the EagleTec one is dying.

Sigh, what's wrong with my 2Gb SD flash card

Here's what happned:

I was trying to move some files from my Tablet PC to my desktop. I didn't have the public folder of my desktop set up yet, and I just wanted to do it quick, so I tried to use my KingMax 2Gb SD card to transfer the photo folders.

So first I found out that the card was NOT recognizable on my Tablet PC. Then I tried using my EagleTec card reader to connect to the laptop, copy the files to the card, and then copy them on my PC. Unfortunately, when I looked into the files on my PC, half of them were broken.

Eventually I feed up with the card thing, so I set up the public folder on desktop, and the file transfer was all working fine.

Still, I want to figure out which part was the problem. So I reformatted the card, use the exact same way to copy file then read it on the desktop, and guess what? NO MORE PROBLEM?

So it seems like the reformatting solved the problem.

Curse you VMWare

It spent me a whole night, all because VMWare failed to do a good job at cleaning up it's own installation.

It happened last night when I tried to install VMWare Workstation 6 on my desktop. The installation was halted in the middle seemingly because ZoneAlarm prohibit VMWare to install certain driver. I thought, no big deal since I could just quit ZoneAlarm. Well, the VMWare installation was still stuck at a certain spot and couldn't be stopped. So I thought it just took time, and I went take a nap, and the nap turned into a full 4 hours of sleeping. But when I woke, the VMWare installation still stuck at the same old spot. I have no choice but reboot the box.

After I rebooted, I found that VMWare installtion refused to excute because it said that there's another VMWare software already running and urged me to uninstall the old one. The problem was that there's no uninstaller available for me to uninstall the prematurely aborted installation. I even tried to manually clean up the system registry, and found that there's simply way too many entries to clean up all the entries. Plus, some Windows service seemsed resisted to be cleaned up.

So I guess I have no other choice but reinstall the system because of this crappy mess.

Great. Hours of installation all over again.

Steps to install BioShock

These are the steps that worked for me in order to get BioShock installed on my desktop:

- Whenever any thing wanted have outbound internet traffic, kill it.
- Map the .iso.
- Start installation.
- Before the installation bitched about putting in the disc, go to the install directory, and move the content to another place so that the instalation won't kill it. I installed the file in Q:\BioShock_MyDir . No problem at all.
- click button on installation. Now the installation was abort, but you still keep the file. Put those files back in the installation directory.
- Run vc++ Disc app in your iso.
- Run DirectX dist in your iso.
- Put the paul.dll in windows32 directory
- Put the .reg in there , and run it.
- Put the Bioshock.exe in Q:\BioShock_MyDir\Builds\Release .
- Run BioShock (NO WinXP mode, NO administrator mode)

P.S. I also installed subinacl.msi but I tend to think that it's non issue.

Cheapest digital camera with remote control

I was curious about whether there's any digital camera with wireless remote control support, and find out the cheapest solution if any.

My finding? These are the cheapest options, one from Nikon and one from Canon.

• Nikon D40. About $595.36, and you still need to pay extra for remote control.
• Canon Powershot G5. about $499, but it's already discounted, and the newer model does NOT support remote control.

So basically I can forget about the whole remote control thing.

RAID and pain

A simple exercise of fixing RAID set up issue turned into a complete re installation of Vista on my desktop, and caused a whole day of frustration. All these because DELL set up the partition under RAID.

I did found a solution to make OS created under RAID to work under the "AutoDetect" setting, but when I tried to setting the Acronis OS selector so that I can choose between XP and Vista, the system got so totally messed up. Eventually I had to reinstall the Vista Basic from scratch. And even that was not easy since the Vista installation failed to see the disks properly. It's like Vista kept thinking that the disks were controlled by RAID, which I assumed a giant 800G partition was representing. The problem seemed to be resolved after I updated firmware to a newer version. After then that crazy virtual RAID partition stopped messing with Vista installation, and I finally got a clean Vista OS.

I did gain something thru out this exercise:
- The previous failed Microsoft Livecam 1.3 worked on my clean Vista Os.
- Similary, ZoneAlarm for Vista worked, instead of the rule screen of death that I got

Well, gain some, loss some:
- portable Photoshop CS 3 failed even though other portable Adobe software worked.

Compare with XP, the Vista Basic really runs smoother. Maybe it's the better multicore support of Vista.

It's still difficult to switch between XP and Vista. But now that I have tried XP on my box, I probably won't stay with XP. To a certain extend, I still had a feeling that there was something I didn't do right on the XP installation.

Resolve XP installation problem with Dimension 9200

Previously I encountered blue screen of death when I tried to install XP on my DELL Dimension 9200 (with QuadCore processor). It turns out that the problem is because of the RAID setting. So I resolve the problem by doing the following.

- During start up, press [F2] to go to setup
- On setup screen, select [Drive] [SATA Operation].
- On the screen, select [RAID Autodetect / ATA] instead of RAID on.
- Reboot.

However, notice that changing the setting of SATA Operation will cause your current OS failed to bootup. Since I want to use XP, I have to stay with the RAID autodetect setting.

Maybe I can trying and see if the Vista OS on my box can still be recovered.

Zone Alarm crashed my Vista

I installed zlsSetup_71_078_000_en and it crashed my Vista like hell. So I probably need to wait a while before I can finally have a good out bounce firewall.

Strange DVDR burning

When you burned something on a DVDR disc, of course you want to burned content of your DVD Disc to be exactly the same as the original so that you can reuse the content in the future. Yet I experienced the following strange situation.

I had a 7Gb DV video file that I try to achieve. I chopped the file into two parts using Winrar, and the Winrar comparison part works pretty well. Then I burned the disc on a DVDR, and Nero reported that file verification is OK. In fact I used a binary file comparison tools and they reported that the content on the disc is the same as the original source. Yet after I copied that data file to a local hard disk, and did the binary comparison again, I found that the file on harddisk is DIFFERENT from the file on the DVDR disc!

So after several trials, including using another disc, I start to suspect that there is something wrong with the harddisk that I was copying the file to. The fact that the file is a USB external harddisk makes me wonder if the "external USB" is part of the (or whole) reason why a file on a harddisk which copied from a DVDR disc can be different from the source file on the DVDR disc.

In fact, I tried copying file to a disc at local harddisk, and the file was successfully copied with identical size.

So now I need to figure out which aspect of the drive caused the problem:

• As being a harddisk in an USB 2.0 enclosure.
• As a EIDE harddisk
• Just the harddisk itself screw up.

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