Improve YouTube playback on older video cards

If you have an older graphics card (like the GeForce GTX 750 or the Radeon RX 460 for example), you may not be able to decode VP9 video from YouTube in hardware. This is the case if the "Video Decode" section of the GPU performance tab in Task Manager is showing 0% during playback:

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In order to change that, you have to enforce the H.264 format, which is natively supported even in very old cards like the GTX 260 or the Radeon HD 3000 series.

In Firefox, this is done by calling about:config and changing the setting "media.webm.enabled" to false.

If done correctly, you will see the "Video Decode" section showing some activity during playback:

 

NB: with older nvidia cards, there may be a problem with newer drivers getting the DXVA hardware acceleration feature working. It is advisable in this case to go back to an earlier driver, like version 353.62
In case you don't get the GPU tab in the Task Manager with older drivers, you can still see this information by checking the "Video Engine Load" in GPU-Z.

How to apply DRC to DD+ Audio

 You may have a 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC3) audio track lying around, that you want to apply Dynamic Range Compression to while transcoding it?

Well, the eac3to tool does not seem to help here, so here is an alternative: use FFMPEG!

The command line would look like:

ffmpeg -drc_scale X -i input.mp4 output.wav

where X = The DRC ratio you want to apply. 2 or 3 is a good value here.

Now you can take that WAV output and transcode it to whatever format you like :)

Beware of Stock AMD Ryzen coolers!

 There seems to be a problem with the thermal paste that comes with Stock AMD coolers, which leads to the CPUs being pulled off their socket once you want to replace them, as it tends to become like glued:

So make sure you remove the thermal paste that comes with it before installing it, and use some HQ paste like the ones from Arctic.

It is also always a good idea to let the CPU run hot with some Prime95 load for 15 minutes before replacing it, as this makes the paste a little bit more fluid.

Disable Automatic Updates in Firefox ESR 68

 

Starting from Version 68, Firefox ESR does not let you disable automatic updates in the UI anymore.

So if you don't want to be automatically updated to the latest version, there is an easy way to achieve this:

1. Disable your internet connection and install Firefox while making sure you untick the maintenance service checkbox
   
2. Make sure Firefox is not started
   
3. Create a folder "distribution" in the folder where Firefox is installed (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox)
4. Put a file named "policies.json" in this folder, with the following content:
   {
       "policies": {
       "DisableAppUpdate": true
       }
   }

That's it! Now when you open Firefox, you should see that it says that automatic updates have been disabled by the system administrator in the settings.

If it still doesn't, then you may have an antivirus or something like that, that added a registry entry which would make Firefox ignore the json file.
In this case, go to the Windows registry, look for "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox" and make a new DWORD there called "DisableAppUpdate" and give it the value 1.

Once you made sure the configuration change has been activated in the Firefox settings, you can reconnect to the internet again.

Extracting tracks from old Matroska files...

 Sometimes you want to re-encode your MKV files, or convert them to another format, but for some reason, MkvExtract won't allow you to extract individual tracks, even though you know they are perfectly fine.

Well there is an incompatibility between new versions and older versions of Matroska!

So if you want to extract a track from an old MKV file, you may have to download the library that was used to mux it in the first place!

For that, you would need first MediaInfo in order to find out the writing application.

Once you have that, go to the Matroska archive, and download that version, then put it in the MkvExtractGui folder, et voilà! Your tracks will be extracted without any problem :-)

Play DivX files on your PlayStation 4?

 

Well, if you go to Sony's website, you may see that it says, it expects MPEG-4 ASP videos in the AVI format.

Now if you take one of your old AVI files encoded with DivX or XviD to play them on the PS4, chances are it won't work.The PS4 is indeed very picky about AVI files, and if they aren't 100% compliant, they won't play. You can detect most of these non-compliant files by opening them in VirtualDubMod; it will then show up a message like this one:

Usually, rewriting the header makes them playable on the PS4.

If not, you will most probably have to re-mux your files to the MP4 format, using Avidemux for example. It can take an AVI file and remux it into MP4 without transcoding. This will work for videos with AC3 sound. But if it has MP3, you will need to transcode the audio part to AAC in order for the PS4 to playback the sound of the MP4 file.

Use DXVA Hardware Acceleration to accelerate your video file conversion!

 So you have a mid-range CPU and you want to bump up those encoding speeds when frameserving with AviSynth?

No problem with DSS2Mod!

Use the following code to load your video file:

LoadPlugin("PATH\avss.dll")
DSS2("filename.mkv", lavs=" ", lavd="hm3")

where PATH is where you stored the Dss2Mod files.

Note that you need the 32-bit version here, which come with the LAV filters. These are triggered by the lavs and lavd parameters.

Using "hm3" in the lavd parameter is what triggers the DXVA hardware acceleration to decode your source file!

You can verify that it is triggered during the conversion by checking the GPU load in your Task Manager:

On a Ryzen 2200G APU, expect up to 30% higher encoding speed during the 2nd pass when converting a Full HD VC-1 15Mbit/s video to a 1Mbit/s 540p AVC clip!

Re-enable Thumbnail generation in Windows 10!

 So, all of a sudden, Windows 10 stops generating thumbnails for your video files?

No problem! Get Codec Tweak Tool!

For example, if you don't get thumbnails for your new MKV files anymore,  click on [Thumbnails], and make sure the Matroska checkbox is checked, then click [Apply & Close]