MKV file format audio issues

On January 29, 2010 in #60SecondShout.
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I recently acquired some video files in the matroska video’ (.MKV) file format. Using VLC Player I ran one, to find that the video worked perfectly, as did the background noise but not the actual speech. I did a bit of research into the issue and it turns out that MKV files send different audio tracks to separate speakers.

For example, the audio in this case was being sent to ‘rear speakers’ on a 5.1 system. Although I have a 5.1 system it wasn’t being picked up (or was very quiet, at least). To solve the issue I opened the audio settings of VLC player and set the playback to ‘Stereo’ rather than ‘surround’.

Worked a treat, but it’s a handy little tip to know, and could save a lot of time googling the answer.

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UK Music File Sharing site cleared of fraud

On January 17, 2010 in #60SecondShout, Website Design.
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The UK’s first “illegal music downloading website” court case ended today with all charges being dropped for website OINK!’s owner and developer.

The site made over $300,000 in donations, which were claimed to be used to rent servers and eventually buy one. OINK! didn’t host any illegal files on the servers, it simply indexed music files that people held on their own computers and were prepared to share. Between 2004 and 2007 the site generated over 21,000,000 music downloads.

OINK!’s originator gave this reasoning behind the development of the website in court this week; “It was to further my skills. To better my skills for employability.”

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Attacks on Google exploited Internet Explorer

On January 17, 2010 in Internet.
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It has emerged this week that the attacks on Chinese human rights activists were made from, yes you guessed it, Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s director of Security was quoted earlier this week saying that the attacks were “targeted and limited” and were mainly “exploiting Internet Explorer 6″. Similarly, McAfee stated that the weeks attacks “showed a level of sophistication above that of typical, isolated cyber criminal efforts”.

In Germany the government has urged Internet users to find alternatives to Internet Explorer. In the same article (taken form BBC News) Sophos (an Internet security firm) told readers that the warning should be adhered to IE6, IE7 and even IE8 as the exploits had not only been proven to work on all these browsers but also the details of how to do so posted publicly on the Internet. Google has come under even more criticism as of late, with an open letter from security firms and lawyers asking why the security settings to enable HTTPS 100% of the time when accessing Gmail, Docs and other Google applications is so hard to find.

Google is reportedly considering it’s options regarding their operations in china. It may be that the years of strict censorship over the Chinese Internet has finally built to a head, and the recent attacks have broke the camels back. Either way, Google pulling out of China would be a devastating event for Chinese companies and civilians alike.

Not according to one company; ‘Baidu’, Chinese search engine giants recently posted the following on their blog:

“Google claims it will quit China. What it’s proved is not what the Google fans have claimed, that Google is a ‘Human Rights fighter’. Just the contrary. It’s proved that Google is a hypocrite.”

It’s a bit of a legal battle at the moment – let’s hope Google and China manage to come to some sort of agreement soon.

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Download all your tagged facebook photos

On January 11, 2010 in Development, New Technology.
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This has been on the minds of my collegues and I for a while now – To develop a peice of software to search through and automatically download all of your tagged photos from facebook onto your PC hard-drive.

Export Photo’s Too does this brilliantly. Install the application to your facebook profile and hit ‘Download Tagged photos’. The application then takes some time to compile a .zip folder of all the photos which you have been tagged in. In the meantime your free to continue using facebook.

After a short while you get a notification explaining that your photos are ready to download. Click the link and you can start to download the folder. It’s brilliant! The only negative is that it’s a little slow (as it’s being ran through the developers php pages on a relatively slow server. The fastest download speeds I was getting was 10Kbps with a folder of approximately 20Mb.

Never the less this is a brilliant app! Just goes to show that the little people can still make killer software too! If I were facebook I’d look towards incrementing this to the iPhone’s version of facebook.

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Yelp! For iPhone

On January 10, 2010 in #60SecondShout, Internet, iPhone.
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I’ve just downloaded ‘Yelp!’ for the iPhone, a simple app which let’s you search the local (and not so local) directories for business’ and people.

I’m currently sitting in costa coffee, writing this on my phone. I searched for nearby coffee shops and costa came up as 0.0miles away, with a photo, contact details and reviews. Other categories include shops, resteraunts and pubs, and each has a large archive of places to go – the best selection of any vicinity based app I have used.

What’s more it has ‘monocal’ mode which takes advantage of augmented reality – it’s the best exaple of the software to date too!

What a wonderful little app! Best of all it’s free!

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iPhone contact syncing

On January 8, 2010 in Development, iPhone.
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I’ve just updated my iPhone facebook app, and noticed it now has the ability to sync your contacts with facebook friends in order to download their profile picture, birthday and other info to the contact file.

I’ve been able to do this for a while now using an app called myphone+ but never the less this is a good development by the facebook creators. The facebook app is amongst the most used and downloaded app to date on the app store, so I’m sure this will go down a treat.

The only issue is that people who have incorrectly spelt names or are saved with nicknames may not be recognised and consuquently their data not updated. Luckily I have OCD when it comes to phonebook names and have all my contacts named (first and surname) listed alphabeticlly by surname first!

While we are on the topic of the new facebook app, it’s latest update also asked to use push technology. I guess this will bring up pop-ups onto the iPhone much like a text to alert you of new messages, wall comments or image tags.

If you don’t already have this app get it now! It’s brilliant, quick, familiar, simple and user friendly! Good work Facebook! A+

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Amazon DRM free music downloads

On January 8, 2010 in Internet, New Technology.
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So, as you may or may not know, iTunes let you download songs for a pretty good price. However I can recall spending hours searching through tracks borrowed from a uni friend to find the tracks with ‘Digital Rights Management’ (DRM) stamps! These ‘tags’ mean that the track can only be played on certain devices and with particular software.

Enter stage left: Amazon! They now support MP3 downloading, meaning you can buy songs at the same price as iTunes and not be restricted by the DRM stamped songs! It’s easy and quick to use. Even better is that if you have Amazon’s downloader installed the downloaded songs will automatically appear in your iTunes library!

Check out Amazon’s MP3 Download store!

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Happy New Year!

On January 1, 2010 in General.
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WordPress scheduling, it’s a wonderful thing, eh?

Things I expect this year:

  • New iPhone Announcement
  • LED TV to hit it big time
  • HD Broadcasting to move forwards
  • New processor development from Intel
  • Lots of unforseen techy releases!

    • Happy New Year!

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