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Everybody's favorite MP3 player, WinAMP, has just gotten its next update, to 1.1! It's supposed to have a better spectrum analyzer and be considerably faster on Pentium and Pentium Pro systems to boot!
Get it here: http://winamp.lh.net/getit.html
Intel has made available software updates to their Indeo Interactive codec. IVI 4.3 has been released and a beta of IVI 5.0, featuring wavelet compression technology and progressive downloading support, has also been released. Personally, I find Indeo Interactive suitable for low frame rate stuff but at higher frame rates (24-30 fps) and sound quality MPEG-1 video compression easily beats it. Now that Xing's MPEG encoder supports variable bit-rate encoding I may try to compare similar bit rates. NT Internals, a great site with all kinds of hacks for Windows NT and undocumented info, was down for a while, but is now back up! Great stuff...anybody who uses NT should definitely check it out.
NSI/InterNIC, the company which administers domain names for the Internet, accidentally sent out a corrupt update last night. They did send a proper update out soon afterwards, but in the meantime anybody caught in the "ripple" would not have been able to resolve names to IP addresses correctly. For more, read ZDNet's story. The Tech Zone has the supposed prices for the price cut in CPU's which Intel will put into effect on July 28th. Prices of considerable note: the Pentium II 300 MHz will be $825, the Pentium Classic 200 will be $95 (!!!) and the Pentium 166 MMX will be $138. That is, if the info is correct. Pentiums are getting blown out the window in favor of the MMX models and Pentium II yields have been above expectation, leading to the price drop for the 300 MHz model. Infoworld has a good article explaining the latest round of price cuts. I'm almost ready to trash Netscape for IE 4.0. But in case you're not, here's the latest version. It's supposed to fix another security bug, I think.
Direct download link for base installation
Not much going on...Apple lost "only" $56 million this quarter. I may run some more captures on my Rainbow Runner, assuming I'm not too tired (I'm feeling especially sleepy this week). My parents turned the temperature upstairs from 79 to 83 ambient, which I believe caused my computer to overheat (with case on). I took the case off and the CPU+heatsink was blazing hot. So I think I'm going to drop back into looking for decent cooling solutions again. Big fans, that's the key. BTW, try IE 4.0 PP2, it really is awesome. I think I'm actually going to be keeping it on my computer.
Woohoo! This release should be far more stable and usable than PP1 ever was. It looks cooler, too. Click here to download the application (~417 KB) from Microsoft which will allow you to select and download your preferred installation of MSIE 4.0 PP2 (minimal, typical or full).
Well, I went ahead and bought this baby. This is probably the end of my major purchases for the summer...it's time to start saving! I'm still deciding whether or not I should keep it. The card is very capable of capturing 30 fps at 704x480 at 6.6:1 compression (maximum quality on the Rainbow Runner). This produces very good looking output. The strange thing is that it was only capable of getting that capture rate from live/"normal" video. I tried hooking up my Playstation to the Rainbow Runner and the results were horrendous...it would drop nearly 80% frames at those settings. The only way to get a decent capture was to drop the resolution to 352 x 240. I also got severe audio drift and sync problems...those might be rectifiable with a little playing around. Actually, 352 x 240 is ok for any video game AVI's or MPEG's I might want to make but the notion of it still bothers me. I'm having trouble understanding why at the moment. I was getting weird green pixels playing back MPEG's and MJPEG compressed videos with the Rainbow Runner...installing the 1.1 drivers seemed to solve it. I had done this before (installing the 1.1 drivers, that is) and it didn't seem to clear up but I trashed my whole Windows 95 installation and started clean with the 1.0 drivers. From there I went to 1.1 and that seemed to do the trick, I also got a couple of crashes which seemed directly related to the Rainbow Runner. One during capture (a blue screen) and one during movie playback (weird flashing stuff on a blank screen). Hopefully the reinstallation cleared up those problems. One of the benefits of running NT is that I can trash 95 regularly with impunity. Hehe.
The Rainbow Runner uses a method of on-the-fly compression during capture called MJPEG. Really this is nothing but JPEG compression applied to each frame of video. However there really isn't any standard and so almost everybody does it differently. Unfortunately I haven't been able to trick the Rainbow Runner codecs to work under NT, so any editing or conversion I've attempted to do had to be done under 95. NT support is supposedly forthcoming...one can only hope soon! I didn't have any problems with transfer rate to disk on my Quantum Fireball TM 3.8GB drive. Basically as long as you have a decent new hard drive, you don't have much to worry about in terms of I/O.
If you are interested at all in video capture/TV in a window/video conferencing and you have a Matrox Mystique or Millenium II, it really does look like this card is a winner at the moment. I will have to see about the reliability of my own card but I'll just have to see how that goes. You do get results close to the $800 cards for a fraction of the cost and so much more that's it's rather hard to complain.
I decided to switch my mail program from Microsoft Exchange to Outlook. Exchange gets a few enhancements and integrates itself with Outlook a little when you install Office 97. BUT, there is this really annoying bug when you use Exchange after this integration where if you try to reply to a message that has a Reply-To: mail header Outlook crashes. Luckily NT is perfectly capable of dealing with crashes, but it was still a pisser. Anyhow, using Outlook for mail doesn't induce these crashes. Actually, I get the feeling I ought to use Eudora instead or something. This is from the "Castle Keep" area of Dracula's castle. Not sure how to describe this one, determined and foreboding? I'm reaching...anyways it's good. | |||||||||||||||||||||
