TechLifeWeb

A few years ago I used Picasa as my photo managing software. Then with Windows 7 I started using Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG).
A lot of my decision was based around the ability to use nested tags. That is, I tag things like Events/Family Vacation/Seattle and Places/WA/Seattle. These tags are used in Windows Media Center and make it worth the effort. Additionally and more importantly, WLPG saves the values you enter into the actual EXIF data that moves with the photo. Picasa uses a separate method and it can be a giant pain.

Anyway, now that I’m using Google+ more and more, it would be nice to be able to share photos right from within WLPG. On install, the default plugins let you share on Facebook, Flickr, SkyDrive and Windows Live Groups. Fortunately there are other plugins available, including one for Picasa Web.  Here is how to get that set up:

• Go to this page http://www.mlsteeves.com/picasapublisher/index.html and download the Picasa Publisher.
• Close WLPG if you have it open and run the install.

Now when you have some photos you want to share, you’ll see the Picasa logo a the sharing box at the top of the screen. Select your photos and click that logo.  You’ll get a dialog to enter the username and password for your Picasa Web account.  Enter your details and click Login.

You’ll then see a dialog showing you your current albums to add to as well as the opportunity to create a whole new album. Click Create new Album and name it something relevant.

You will then see the dialog box showing your photos uploading. After the upload you’ll get a box showing success and a button to view. Clicking View takes you online and to the album you just created. Here, if you are using Google+ you can share your album with your Circles by clicking the Share button on the right.

That’s it. A little effort up front will make it easier down the road to share your photos right from Windows Live Photo Gallery to Picasa Web and your friends on Google+.

If you have ever encoded a video only to find that you need it in a different format later for a certain device then EncodeHD i s for you. Or maybe your camera outputs a video format that your editing tool can’t use. Again, EncodeHD to the rescue.

The following output device types are supported:

• Apple TV
• BlackBerry (8100) Pearl
• BlackBerry (8200) Kickstart
• BlackBerry (8300) Curve
• BlackBerry (8700) Electron
• BlackBerry (8800) Indigo
• BlackBerry (8900) Javelin
• BlackBerry (9000) Bold
• BlackBerry (9500) Storm
• iPhone
• iPod 5G
• iPod Classic
• iPod Nano
• iPod Touch
• Nokia E71
• Playstation 3
• PSP
• T-Mobile G1
• Western Digital TV
• X-Box 360
• Youtube HD
• Zune

If your device is not on this list, chances are one of the formats will work. I’ve used the ‘Apple TV’ format for general h.264 conversion.

The interface is dead simple. Just launch EncodeHD and then open or drag your video file on to it.  You can click the advanced button to add FFMpeg options if you know them. Otherwise, select your output type then click start.

The other thing I like is that the program is small and has nothing to install. Just download and unzip the file to your directory of choice. You could even put it on a USB memory stick to take with you between computers.

EncodeHD is a Windows program. It is free to use ‘Donation ware’. If you are using it and find value, kick down the few buck that the author asks for.

Yesterday I wrote about Hulu Desktop and expressed my wish for it to be integrated into Windows Media Center. Well, less than 24 hours later, enterprising enthusiasts have built a method for doing just that.

Mike Garcen of Missing Remote has detailed instructions for the necessary system tweaks that put Hulu Desktop in your Media Center menu. And Yaggs, the developer of Secondrun.tv, has an easier method for those a little leary about hacking around in their system.

It appears that both of these methods do not work via MC extenders because of Hulu’s use of Flash technology.

via: Ian Dixon

This week, a coworker gave me this really handy tip. If you do a lot of command line work in Windows, this tip will let you pipe the output of a command line program into the Windows Clipboard. You can then use Windows paste feature to paste the output into Notepad or anywhere else that takes a normal text paste.

Redirecting the command and it’s output is as easy as this:

[command and switches]| clip

So maybe you want all the output of “ipconfig /all”

You would enter this on your command line:

ipconfig /all | clip

This works for other commands too. “Dir | clip” is handy for getting a copy of all the contents in a directory. All of the results of ipconfig get piped into the clipboard, which can then be pasted with a CTRL-V. Sweet! This works in Windows 2003 and higher (no Windows XP). I tested it in Windows 7 and it works there as well.

Tip originally came from: thebackroomtech.com

There are some web sites out there that make things hard to read. I don’t mean for quick browsing. Most of us who have been using the web for any length of time have trained ourselves to get the gestalt of a page fairly quickly. I mean for time when you really want to read an news or other type of long article.

Over at arc90 they have a new lab experiment where they have created a bookmarklet that you install easily in your browser. Then, when surfing to a page that you want to read for a while, you click the bookmarklet and instantly the page changes to a much more readable format.

Here is a quick video they put together to visually explain what they are doing.

Readability : An Arc90 Lab Experiment from Arc90 on Vimeo.

You can get the bookmarklet here: Readability

One of my favorite applications for Twitter is TweetDeck. TweetDeck comes as close to my idea of the Ultimate Twitter Client as there is. It lets me set up groups and watch keywords and arrange a sort of dashboard to keep track of everything.

The main downside to this is if something goes wrong. Once you set up a group and add lots of people only to later accidentally delete it you will know what I mean. All that time down the drain. Additionally, the settings are local to your computer. If for some reason you have to do a clean reinstall of Windows or you move to another computer, all your carefully crafted settings are left.

To remedy this situation I wrote 2 Windows batch scripts. One for back up and the other to restore. They are meant to be run from a USB memory stick or other location but you can put them anywhere.

Running the backup script will create a subdirectory in the location where you run the file and copy all your TweetDeck settings there. For example, if you put the backup and restore scripts in a folder called h:\backup and your run the backup script, it will create a folder called h:\backup\tweedeckbackup and copy into it all your TweetDeck settings.

The restore script does the reverse, copying files from the special subdirectory (h:\backup\tweedeckbackup in my example above) into where you have TweetDeck installed.

The scripts are contained in this zip file. Unzip it to your USB stick or anywhere you want to put the files.

tdbackup.zip

The scripts are commented so you can see what they are doing. Open them in notepad if you want to see how they work. I have used them on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Update to clarify restoring:

If you run the backup script from a USB memory stick and you want to move them to a fresh install, first install TweetDeck. Then run the restore script. This will put back all of your preferences including notification settings, groups, search queries, layout and colors.

UPDATE: 28JAN09 4:20PM

I just discovered the wrong versions of the files were included in the zip file. They should work but I redid them to work better with network drives and be more efficient.

UPDATE: 16MAR10 11:40PM

I discovered some settings were not being backed up. I believe these are new settings that were not present in Tweetdeck when I wrote the original script. These center around all the settings related to the different accounts you may have set up through Tweetdeck. All of these should now be preserved.

It has been over a year since I posted version 2 of a portable launcher for Windows Live Writer. In that time, WLW has moved out of beta and is now a big part of Microsoft’s Live initiative.

One of the biggest complaints about my portable launcher is that it required you to have Administrator level access on the machine you were running it on. For the most part this isn’t an issue on Windows XP but is big on Windows Vista because of User Account Control (UAC). In shared, locked down computer environments like colleges, this is a big problem and essentially renders the launcher useless. I have finally figured out how to fix that problem and am happy to announce version 3 of Windows Live Writer Portable.  This version does not currently support U3. Truth is, I’ve never really liked U3 taking over my thumb drive. I use the excellent Portable Apps Menu instead. You can put it on anything, not just a SanDisk drive.

Download

The File: WLWPortable3.zip

This zip file does NOT contain everything you need to run Windows Live Writer. This is simply a launcher which will run Windows Live Writer in a self contained environment so you can take everything with you between computers via your USB memory device.

If you do not currently have Windows Live Writer, follow the instructions in the section below titled “Details on installing Windows Live Writer.”

If you are currently using version 2 of my launcher, follow the instructions in section below titled “Upgrading from WLW Portable Version 2.”

Installation Summary for New users

1. Unzip this file to somewhere on your hard drive.

2. Download Windows Live Writer from: http://get.live.com/writer/overview

3. Install Windows Live Write as usual. You don’t even have to run it, just so long as it is installed. This is fairly straight forward but you might want to look over the details I have written below.

4. Copy ALL of the files FROM C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer TO the new structure on your USB drive that looks like the graphic below \WindowsLiveWriterPortable\App\WindowsLiveWriter

NOTE: Window 7 is copy the files from C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer to WindowsLiveWriterPortable\App\WindowsLiveWriter

5. You can now uninstall Windows Live Writer if you want.

6. Copy the whole WindowsLiveWriter Portable folder to your USB stick.

To use Windows Live Writer from your USB drive simply double click on WindowsLiveWriterPortable.exe and it will take care of the necessary registry settings and document paths.

Upgrading from WLW Portable Version 2

If you are using the standard, non U3 version, of WLW Portable you simply need to download and unzip the file above.  On your USB drve, replace your WindowsLiveWriterPortable.exe with the one from this zip file. You can then launch the program as you always have.

Details on installing Windows Live Writer

1. Download WLinstaller.exe from: http://get.live.com/writer/overview

2. Double click to start the installer.

3. The next screen will pop up. Accept the agreement.

4. The following screen will pop up. Unless you want these services you can deselect all of them and click Install

5. You will be prompted to add other Live services. Choose Writer and any others you want to try out.

6. Writer will install as well as others you have selected above.

7. Remember, you do not even need to launch the program. Follow the procedures above and then you can uninstall Windows Live Writer from your machine.

Quite often I need to convert video from various formats to xvid. I do this to bring video with me on my Archos 605 Wi-Fi Portable Media Player. Additionally, my Media Server can also stream xvid files to my D-Link DSM-520 HD Media Player so I often transcode video podcasts to xivid. I have been doing this with batch files and Mencoder for a long time. Recently I decided to make it easier and more flexible and build a GUI front end to Mencoder to make it easy to mix and match settings. This makes it much easier to use since I don’t have to re-script the whole thing or maintain several batch files.

My new utility is called My-Xvid. It can be used to convert files from mp4, m4v, mov, mpg, flv, vob or dvr-ms format to a Xvid (Divx compatible) avi.

MyXvid.zip (13MB)

MyXvid.zip (mirror. Use if the above doesn’t work)

There is nothing to install. Just unzip the file to a folder and run my-xvid.exe. The speed will depend mostly on the size file your are trying to convert and the horsepower of your CPU. High definition video takes a LONG time, just let it run.

Notes on usage:

Help button: Displays this information.

File to convert button: Use this to locate the file you want converted to xvid. When you choose your file, a file of the same name but with the avi extension will be put in the Name of output file box.

Folder to save to button: Use this to locate a folder to save your new xvid into.

Name of output file: This gets automatically filled in with the name of the input file and the extension of avi but you can change the name if you like.

Dimension options:
Do not resize: use this to keep the output set to the same dimensions as the input

Resize to standard TV: This is only useful if you have a large file (such as one from an HDTV source) that you want to save down to standard TV dimensions. Trying to upscale a small file is possible but might look very blocky depending on the source file so isn’t recommended.

Resize to small: Useful to scale down for a portable player.

Audio options:
Keep AC3: This is only good for vob or dvr-ms that contain an AC3 source.
Convert to MP3: Converts the audio to mp3

Quality options (NOTE: These do not apply to VOB files so don’t worry about it):
Best: sets some optimization for higher quality but is slower. How much slower depends on your computer.
Medium Quality: General use. Faster.

Start Conversion button: Once you have everything set, click here! If your source was dvr-ms the program will first quickly mux the file to mpg then proceed with the conversion to xvid.
When the process is done you will get a message box letting you know your avi is ready.

Enjoy your video!

My new Media Server doesn’t come with everything to play all file types. If I didn’t want to play files in Windows Media Player or Media Center, that wouldn’t be a problem. I highly recommend the Video Lan Client (VLC) as it plays just about every file type you throw at it. There are times however, when you want these files to be played in Media Player or Media Center. In not locally then streaming to other devices. For that you need codecs.

I recommend you stay away from codec packs. They say they play everything and can end up messing up your finely crafted system. A good article on this subject is Chris Lanier’s Guide to Codecs in Vista Media Center. As Chris’ article shows, you need 2 things. A splitter, which lets you open the files and a decoder to actually play the files.

Download and install Haali Media Splitter so you can open files like MKV, OGM, MP4, FLAC.

Next, download and install ffdshow. Ffdshow is always being updated. I mam having good luck with the latest stable build, ffdshow_beta5_rev2033_20080705_clsid.  Best to go with what works.Take all the defaults I’ll go into more detail later.

You also need to tell Vista how to handle these files. Simply use notepad to create a file called video.reg and copy and paste these lines into it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Content Type"="video/mp4"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.m4v]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Content Type"="video/mp4"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.m4a]
"PerceivedType"="audio"
"Content Type"="audio/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\MIME Types\video/mp4]
@="mp4file"
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Extensions.SpaceSep"=".mp4 .m4v"
"Extensions.CommaSep"="mp4,m4v"
"Extension.Key"=".mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\MIME Types\audio/mp4]
@="mp4file"
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Extensions.SpaceSep"=".m4a"
"Extensions.CommaSep"="m4a"
"Extension.Key"=".m4a"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Groups\Video\mp4]
@="mp4file"
"Description"="Includes files with .mp4 and .m4v extensions."
"Extensions"=".mp4 .m4v"
"FriendlyTypeName"="MPEG-4 Media File"
"MIME Types"="video/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Groups\Audio\m4a]
@="mp4file"
"Description"="Includes files with an .m4a extension."
"Extensions"=".m4a"
"FriendlyTypeName"="MPEG-4 Media File"
"MIME Types"="audio/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.mp4]
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"PerceivedType"="video"
"MediaType.Description"="MPEG-4 Media File"
"Extension.Handler"="mp4file"
"Extension.MIME"="video/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.m4v]
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"PerceivedType"="video"
"MediaType.Description"="MPEG-4 Media File"
"Extension.Handler"="mp4file"
"Extension.MIME"="video/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.m4a]
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"PerceivedType"="audio"
"MediaType.Description"="MPEG-4 Media File"
"Extension.Handler"="mp4file"
"Extension.MIME"="audio/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\Descriptions]
"737"="MPEG-4 Media File (*.mp4;*.m4v;*.m4a)"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\MUIDescriptions]
"737"="MPEG-4 Media File"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\Types]
"737"="*.mp4;*.m4v;*.m4a"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS\Extensions]
"mp4"="video"
"m4v"="video"
"m4a"="audio"

Save the file, close Notepad and then double-click on the file. Click ok to have the file added to your registry. Now these types of files will show up in your Media Player library.

Optionally, I install 2 other useful tools:

Real Player Alternative (MUCH better than installing Real Player)

QT Lite (Quicktime alternative) – Note: If you install the above correctly, you shouldn’t need to worry about quick time.

Ffdshow has lots of options for improving audio and video. I set up mine to be used with most every file type. While Ffdshow can be used to upscale or de-noise, etc. I do not enable any of those settings. I just let it play the files with out adding any extra overhead to the CPU.

Here are screen shots of how I set up ffdshow to play all the file types I need. You can also download this registry file and apply all the settings quickly. ffdshow-techlifeweb

Video Settings

Audio Settings

One nice thing about Windows Vista is that it has built in support for unzipping compressed files such as those with the .zip extension. It is nice until you have to unzip a file that contains lots of directories and small files.

Tonight I was updating the WordPress software that runs this blog. I downloaded the zip file and ran the unzip utility built into Vista. The file is 1.3MB in size. Inside are 516 files in 66 folders, 5.28MB extracted. I kid you not, Vista took around 15 Minutes to extract it! Ridiculous. The built-in zip utility is normally pretty fast but these types compressed directory structures and lots of small files cause it serious heartburn.

I had seen this behavior in the past and was hoping service pack 1 would fix it. No dice.

Thankfully there is an open source solution. 7-Zip is a small utility that installs quickly and becomes part of the Windows shell so you can right click and unzip a file just as easily as you could with the version that ships with Vista. It also compresses files smaller than competing utilities.

From the 7-Zip site:

The main features of 7-Zip

• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for 69 languages

Unzipping the same file using 7-Zip took mere seconds as you would expect.

7-Zip works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista. Do yourself a favor and install this utility now.