Dark's Code Dump

Once again filling in the deficiencies of Google…

Recently, having got a new HDTV, I wanted to replicate all the good things about watching anime on a PC in Media Player Classic HC, except this time on PS3 via the well-known DLNA/uPnP server, PS3 Media Server. Out of the box, and with a little tweaking, I was able to get ASS subtitles more or less working, and it ran reasonably efficiently. However two very important things any anime lover will know were missing:

• Ordered chapters for MKV files
• ffdshow filters, most notably the Debanding filter

After days of experimenting (the biggest struggle being the buffer emptying during playback despite no obvious CPU/GPU/IO/network bottleneck), I finally achieved these in addition to ASS subtitles and everything I had before with just MEncoder.

Hopefully the following instructions will get you the same setup, though they are written in hindsight and I may have missed some crucial details.

1. Download and install PS3 Media Server v1.20.412 Beta the latest build of PS3 Media Server Contrib
2. Download and install the latest version of Combined Community Codec Pack (default settings should work)
3. Download and install the latest SVN 32-bit copy of ffdshow tryouts, of which you probably want ICL10 – if your CPU can’t run that then you might as well give up now
4. Download and install AviSynth 2.5.8 (try 2.5.7 if you have audio issues or mencoder crashes)
5. Download this multithreaded build of AviSynth and replace avisynth.dll in either C:\windows\system32 or C:\windows\syswow64, for 32-bit or 64-bit systems respectively. Then replace the files in (progam files)\AviSynth 2.5\plugins with the ones in the zip file.
   
6. Download VSFilter and extract it to (program files)\AviSynth 2.5\plugins
7. Open Haali Media Splitter settings and set Autoload VSFilter to Yes as so:
8. If you are running Windows 7, download and run Win7DSFilterTweaker, and set everything apart from MP2, MP3 and AAC to ffdshow where available. You shouldn’t need to change any other settings.
9. Open ffdshow Video decoder configuration and configure it as below: (H.264 set to ffmpeg-mt)
10. Set up any ffdshow filters you wish to use (DeBand is a good one) and keep Subtitles disabled as they are handled externally.
11. Open ffdshow Audio decoder configuration, go to the DirectShow Control tab, click Edit next to ‘Don’t use ffdshow in’ and add mencoder.exe to the list. This prevents ffdshow from handling the audio in PS3 Media Server, since it has a tendancy to go out of sync gradually, reaching several seconds behind at some points. If you get chipmunk audio even after following step 12, either undo this step or try the opposite version of AviSynth (see step 4).
12. Download and install CoreAAC, which appears to not have the chipmunk audio issue the built in Windows one suffers from, nor the sync issue with ffdshow’s AAC decoder.
    
13. Open PS3 Media Server and configure to match the following screenshot, using your discretion where necessary.
    
14. On the Avisynth/MEncoder settings page, make sure you have the convertfps=true option disabled, as it can lead to audio sync issues and very noticable frame skip.

At this stage, you should have everything working. Playing an anime MKV file via your PS3 should trigger at least 2 tray icons to appear: Haali Media Splitter and ffdshow video decoder. If you get an icon for ffdshow DXVA video decoder, something isn’t right. Although if you don’t care about filters and just want ordered chapters then this should be fine.

Good luck getting this setup working – it’s well worth the effort.

Update: 3 months later and the skin is still flawless. The colours are still vivid, scratches are only visible when angled against light (and it’s done a great job of shielding my phone from these) and the adhesive is as strong as ever. Absolutely top notch materials, very happy with my purchase.

Seems to be a near complete lack of written reviews for Intoroskins.co.uk, and I’m not a huge fan of review sites, so here we are.

Having looked around the various skin sites, I settled on a more local option than the several US-based alternatives. Despite a complete lack of reviews and a somewhat shady looking site design, I decided to bite the bullet and ordered a custom skin for my new Samsung Galaxy S (awesome phone, but that’s another story).

To start with, the Flash-based design tool for custom skins is actually decent. It’s packed with more features than the only other site I have experience with (GelaSkins) and uploading more images doesn’t exponentially increase the loading time, as is the case with GelaSkins where I often found myself having to go back to upload a variation on an image only to find the designer taking 5 minutes or so to load. As you can see below, image quality is poor in the designer (and in the final preview too, misleadingly enough) but this certainly does not represent the quality of the final print.

Disregard poor image quality in the designer and final preview

Having ordered on Monday, payment processing was done by the next day (Tuesday) and the skin was printed and dispatched on Thursday, arriving the next day to Northern Ireland.

The print resolution was exceptional, though I expected no less given that I provided a 2820×2500 image. There is some very slight distortion of the contrasting black lines, typical of inkjet prints, but this is only visible if you look very closely and likely would only affect anime-style skins.

The vinyl finish feels excellent to the touch, and provides significantly more grip than the standard plastic backplate of the Galaxy S.

All in all, I’m very impressed with the skin, as you can see in the final result: (decided not to use the front skin in the end)

The poor camera on the Galaxy S simply does not do Misaka Mikoto justice.

There is really very little to complain about, other than the preview, which in no way affects or represents the final product. So that’s a 9 out of 10 from me

#!/bin/sh

echo ---------------------------
echo InstallMaps by Darkimmortal
echo ---------------------------
echo Paste map URLs to be downloaded here, type @ to begin downloading.
echo

mkdir -p /tmp/installmaps
cd /tmp/installmaps

read -d @ line

echo
echo

if [[ $line == *rapidshare* ]]
then
  rsfaggot=" --user=YOUR_RAPIDSHARE_USERNAME_OPTIONAL -pass=YOUR_RAPIDSHARE_PASSWORD_OPTIONAL"
fi

if [[ $line == *tf2maps* ]]
then
  tffaggot=" --wait=26"
fi

wget --no-clobber --content-disposition $tffaggot --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3" --accept=bsp,rar,zip,bz2 ${line//&/\&} $rsfaggot

echo
echo
echo --------------------------------------------------------------------------
echo
echo

echo Extracting any compressed maps...
for f in *.zip;do unzip -j "$f";done
for f in *.rar;do unrar e -ep "$f";done
bzip2 -d -v -f *.bz2

echo Removing any non-bsp files...
ls -Q | grep -v .bsp\"$ | xargs rm

echo Zipping all maps...
bzip2 -k -z -v *.bsp

echo Moving files to the correct folders...
mv -f *.bsp YOUR_SRCDS_INSTALLATION/tf/maps
mv -f *.bz2 YOUR_SV_DOWNLOADURL/tf/maps

echo Clearing download directory...
rm -rf ./*

echo Done!

This simple bash script allows you to paste a bunch of URLs (one per line) leading to uncompressed .bsp maps, or maps compressed as .rar, .zip or .bz2. It will then extract these maps, bzip them and move them to your SRCDS maps folder and the bzipped copies to your sv_downloadurl maps folder.

Replace YOUR_SRCDS_INSTALLATION and YOUR_SV_DOWNLOADURL with the appropriate values for your system, add Rapidshare details if you want, then you’re good to go.

Prerequisites: wget, unzip, unrar, bzip2

CTRL+V CTRL+ENTER

They should really use native UI elements and a proper socket-based solution for communication, not some retarded Javascript bullshit and equally retarded AJAX/comet polling.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I’m going to be super badass and not delete this. :3