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:

I

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]

Search within many PDFs at the same time!

Always wanted to search a specific word in many PDFs at the same time?
Nothing easier! Within ADOBE READER, hit [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [F] at the same time to use the advanced search feature. There you can specify the directory in which you want to search ;-)

Move your mouse without a mouse :-P

Ever wondered how you would move your mouse cursor, even though you have no mouse, or your mouse has just given up life?

Well, very easy! Just hit [Alt] + [Shift] + [Num] together, WINDOWS will offer you the possibility to move your mouse cursor with your numpad!
Use [2], [4], [6] & [8] for directions, [5] to click, and [+] to double-click.
If you wish to hold the left button, use [0], unhold with [,] (or [.] depending on your keyboard).

Unlock the locked!

You wanna delete or rename or move a file (or a directory), and stubborn Windows doesn't let you, because -it says!- some program is blocking it?

No problem! Use LockHunter! It will tell you which program is blocking the access to your file, and unlock it for you, or delete it directly if you need to ;-)

Infected or not infected, that's the question

Your antivirus goes nuts because of a specific file, and you have doubts about it being really infected?
Go to https://www.virustotal.com/ and check it there. It will be scanned by more than 40 antiviruses at once. You'll sure have no doubts afterwards! ;-D

Access the Task Manager even if a malware blocks it!

Your PC is infected, and you can't access your task manager anymore?
Didier Stevens, the security expert, has a solution for you!
He programmed an excel file that can list all processes and let you terminate or suspend/resume them... for example the virus process :p

You can download it from his website HERE.

Search for synonyms in Google

To widen a search for a specific term, use the tilde before the seached word to include its synonyms in the search.

For example, enter

~PC

and Google will also search for related words like "Computer".

New Firmware for the ADATA SX900 SSD

If you're one of the lucky owners of this fast and reliable SSD, ADATA thought of you, and brought last week a new firmware for it, going by the number 5.0.7a, fixing following issues:

1) Fixed a power management condition where the device failed to respond to COMWAKE, which might have resulted in the SSD not responding without being reset by the host.
2) Fixed the normalized value calculation for SMART Attribute 9 (Power-On Hours)
3) Fixed a SATA error recovery sequence coming out of PS1.
4) Fixed an issue during SMART self-test extended that could cause an unexpected read error.
5) Fixed an issue that could have caused the read thresholds to be artificially low during read disturb operations.
6) Fixed an issue that could have caused the drive to be unresponsive based on a flash program failure.
7) Fixed a theoretically possible instance where an UECC on the flash media while processing unaligned write commands that cannot be corrected by the ECC engine and RAISETM causes invalid data to be returned.


Download, Upgrade Guide and Upgrade Tool available by ADATA.

PS: this firmware upgrade should also work on the following SSDs:
SX910/SP900/SP800/S511/S510/S396

Load videos into your CASIO EXILIM EX-Z600 Camera

If you were always wondering how you could load your own videos into this beautiful digital camera, you came to the right place!
This camera accepts AVI-files with the following specifications:

• Video-Codec: MJPEG
• Audio-Codec: IMA ADPCM

Unfortunately, not every application can produce compatible files, even if the codecs used are correct.
One that does is the SUPER Media File Converter from eRightSoft.

For this tutorial, I use a Flash video file (.flv) downloaded from YouTube as source, but it should work with every other popular video file format as well, such as MP4, MKV or good old AVI of course.

Here we go:

1. Drag and drop your file into the box in the lower part of the converter.
2. In the upper part of the application, choose "AVI" as your output container, "M-JPEG" as your output video codec, and "ADPCM IMA" as your output audio codec.
3. Choose "FFmpeg" right underneath, as encoder engine.
4. In the "VIDEO" part, if your video is standard 4:3, choose 320:240 as your video scale size, and 4:3 as aspect; else if it is 16:9 widescreen, choose 320:176 and 16:9, then click on "Crop / Pad" to the right, check the "Pad ON" option, make sure you have 32 in the upper and lower boxes, then click on the color picker and choose black. This will make sure your vertical resolution attains 240 again, with black bars at the top and bottom of the video. This is important, since the camera doesn't handle widescreen files. Either case, resolutions beyond 320x make no sense here, since the camera screen is small, and the used disk space would be too big. Adapt the "Frame/Sec" value according to your source. Mine has 25fps, so I choose 25. But it could be anything else. To check the framerate of the source, use a tool like MediaInfo.
5. In the "AUDIO" part, choose a sampling frequency of "11025", and "1" under Channels. Higher values make little sense here, since the speaker of the camera is not Hi-Fi-Stereo anyway.
6. Launch the encoding process with the "Encode (Active Files)" button at the bottom.
7. After the encoding is done, you should find the new file in the same directory as your source file. Copy that file to your SD-card under "DCIM/100CASIO" (where your camera saves the photos anyway) and rename it to CIMGxxxx.AVI, where "xxxx" is a number lower than your current index on the camera. Mine is beyond 2500 (the latest photo I shot got the file name CIMG2517.JPG), so I can use numbers in the 1000 range safely. Sizes vary between 15 and 20MB/min most of the time. This means, you should be able to put about 4 hours of video on a 4GB SD-card.

Enjoy! :-)