Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Expensive Hotels internet access

Well, Infocom is over and I am back home. While I was there, I often used my iPod Touch to do quick things on the net when pulling out the laptop would have taken too much time. The only issue is the wireless AP there required a web based login where one would have to enter in the email address they used to register for the conference. This can be annoying at best on the iPod when all I really wanted to do was look up something really quick and this stage takes 50-80% of the time.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 21, 2008

The Hall of Shame

So, the good folk over at FFmpeg have stared a Hall of Shame. Basically, it is a page of projects which are using FFmpeg in direct violation of its license. The developers have asked that people link to that page, thereby increasing its ranking in Google. Well, here’s my part. Why should I care about this? Simple, if you look at the list of projects using FFmpeg, you will see Perian listed.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 21, 2008

Start of Infocom

Well, I am currently at Infocom. Getting here was a lot of fun because I had to wake up at 5am to drive to Houston and catch my flight here. In theory, I could have flown out of College Station, but all too often it is faster to drive to Houston than it is to fly. Then, when I got the rental car, I noticed it was made by Hyundai. I immediately remembered the old episode of Top Gear I watched the previous night where they “accidentally” called the Hyundai Accent the “Hyundai Accident.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 14, 2008

New iPod Touch

Well, after quite a while of looking at them, I finally decided to buy an iPod Touch. In fact, I wrote this blog post using it. The hardest part is to force yourself to stop correcting your mistakes, and trust that it can correctly figure out what you meant and correct it for you. The auto correction is definitely a necessity, but it isn’t as effective for those who can’t spell, like me.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, April 4, 2008

Where's real AC3 Passthrough on the Mac?

In my previous post, I discussed how to do AC3 passthrough using Perian. Unfortunately, this method is really a hack, and doesn’t work in all situations. There is a better solution though. Apple has enabled AC3 passthrough with Quicktime. They have enabled it on the AppleTV to support playback of their HD movies. The code for passthrough is even in the latest version of Quicktime on the desktop, but the celebration ends there.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, March 14, 2008