Monday, November 23, 2009

DVD RAM....damn

Why oh why did I think DVD RAM media was a good idea back in England to record T.V. programs.

I had a Panasonic DVD recorder in England which worked fine and DVD RAM was better than the other media types with the Panasonic.

As it turns out DVD RAM is only a minority interest for other manufactures. Here in Japan only Panasonic and Toshiba sell players/recorders that can use DVD RAM media. We have a Sharp blu-ray player so its not compatible with my collection of DVD RAM media.

So my decision to buy an IMAC which I knew before buying stated no mention of being able to use DVD RAM. However after much searching I came across this squared5 site. Running the program and it stated I needed to buy the codec from the apple store for MPEG2 content.

So after actually buying and downloading the content from the Apple store the squared5 program could read the DVD RAM.......however......

Why oh why did I think DVD RAM media was a good idea back in England to record T.V. programs.

The program squared5 is good in that it plays the VRO file on the DVD RAM disk......but only one section of the entire disk. I know I recorded many episodes of shows like top gear, little britain and some films. Each disk in turn plays only one section of the entire content.

So..

Downloading another program called VLC and it shows the entire length of the disk........but

Why oh why did I think DVD RAM media was a good idea back in England to record T.V. programs.


It seems VLC plays the sound and pictures of the first section of the DVD RAM disk fine, perfectly acceptable...however what happens to the sound after the first show finishes, I cant figure it out but it all goes mute.

So the search goes on and......

Why oh why did I think DVD RAM media was a good idea back in England to record T.V. programs.


Friday, October 16, 2009

IMAC back to the past

A brand new IMAC 24inch computer and one of the first things I do is......install VirtualBox
and load up Windows 2000! Basically for Storm 3 and Paint Shop Pro which are programs I use in my spare time.

However getting w2k installed was almost to much trouble. The exact problem detailed in the VBox manual (11.2.3). It suggests a delay of 1! it failed, setting it to 5 and it failed, setting it to 10........ and it failed. Almost about to give up but then.....


In the end I used a delay of 20
VBoxManage setextradata windows-2000 "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 20

where "windows-2000" is the name of my virtual machine. It took a long time to install but at least it did install. And remember to reset after the install.

VBoxManage setextradata windows-2000 "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 0

Now Arturia the company that make Storm 3 are making me wait for a license. I have sent an email request as the online registration failed. Storm 3 does have a Mac version but this must be for the power pc Macs. Loading the CD into my Intel Mac and rosetta installed but some Java error occurred and it failed to start. So back to my w2k virtual box and it runs, but .... until Arturia respond with a license it will stop.........

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