Tag: windows vista

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Damaged Ear Drum?

So a few days ago, I started noticing that when I was listening to music via my Shure E4c earphones, I wasn’t able to hear anything from my left ear (stage right). I was like, “OH *@!#!$@!#*$!” I pull the right earphone out and turns out I was not completely deaf in my right left ear as I could still hear music in my left ear.

Anyway, I was going to attribute this to the fact that 2 weekends ago, I had drop a bag of glass bottles (about 15 bottles worth) at the bottom of my stairs (a small confined space) and it started bouncing on my ceramic floor tiles for ~10 seconds and it was one of the most painful experiences for my ears ever. My ears were ringing for quite some time after that, but eventually went away.

So thinking it might be my computer, I plugged the earphones into another computer, and it was the same results. My left ear was definitely not hearing as much audio. I decided I would need to go see my doctor and ask for a ear specialist referral.

So today when people were talking, I would tilt my head left and right to see if their voice actually got softer if I faced the weak ear toward them. I didn’t really notice much difference, but given that it was in an open environment, it wasn’t really a good test to begin with.

So I decided to try to change the audio left/right balance, but apparently in Vista, the balance thing is no longer in volume control you get when you double click the volume icon in your task bar. Took me a bit to find it, but apparently you have to go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound. You can also go directly to this from the context menu of the sound icon in your task tray. Under Playback, select the speakers and click properties. On the Levels tab, you’ll be able to control the left and right audio balance. After a quick configuration, I can now hear music from my left ear again.

Then it hit me today, I haven’t really tested if it was the earphones. I had just blindly assume it was my ears drums were damaged after a quick test or 2 and the fact these were some expensive earphones. I inserted the right earphone into my left ear and vice versa. It turns out my left ear was NOT damaged, but the left earphone was definitely outputting at a lower volume. I was overjoyed.

Looking at Shure’s website’s How To Use Earphones, I’m hoping it’s just that I need to clear up some earwax. These earphones weren’t cheap to begin with…

NOTE: Nozzles can collect cerumen (earwax), which can clog the earphone and lower the sound quality. If you experience sound loss, check the nozzles for clogging before sending the product in for service. There is a service charge for removing wax.

Update:
Cleaning out the earwax did fix the problem. There were also these earwax guards which didn’t really have much or any earwax, but the left one was in the wrong place, probably the main culprit of all this. For some reason, I think the left ear now is hearing better… I’d take some pictures of the earwax I dug out, but you’d probably be grossed out by it.

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How to disable Screen Saver for Vista in Media Player Classic

Speaking of Media Player Classic, for the longest time (haha, I just realized I just repeated myself), I have also wanted to tell Windows Vista to disable the screensaver. It was annoying that whenever I was using Media Player Classic, it would start the screen saver after 30 minutes into the movie. I would then have to disable the screen saver temporarily and re-enable it afterwards. Similar with turning off the screen and sleep/hibernate options.

Anyway, while I was searching for something recently, I came up on Media Player Classic – Home Cinema. It appears to be a fork off the main Media Player Classic branch and one of the things it supports now is: Kick off Screen Saver from Power Options only while video is playing (Vista). So if you’re a fan of Media Center Player and dislike the fact your screen saver goes off when the video is playing, you should check out this Home Cinema version.

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How To Get Media Center to Play Any Video File

So for the longest time, I have been trying to get Media Center to play .mp4 files, but after countless searching for solutions, I never really came across a working solution. There have been instructions on installing different codecs and adding/modifying registry entries.

Today I realized that after my format, I could no longer play Quicktime (*.mov) HD trailers in Media Center anymore. I’m pretty sure this has to do with the fact that I had reinstalled Windows Vista Ultimate recently and never bother to do something. I’m pretty sure Quicktime Alternative (now better known as QT Lite) has already been installed, but I reinstalled it just in case, but that didn’t seem to work. HD trailers played fine in WMP11 and Media Player Classic.

I knew it worked before, but I had no idea what I had changed. I started searching again and after a few tries, ended up on this thread: Quicktime movies in Vista MCE. The key thing to take away from that thread is:

Hi there

I’ve had the problem of after installing QT alternative, it will play .mov files quite happliy in mediaplayer 11, but doesn’t get picked up in Mediacentre (this is on vista, when i had MCE2005 it went fine)

Any obvious reason/fix?

Thanks

Just found the answer on greenbutton,.com:

You need to install Quicktime Alternative. This has a DirectShow Quicktime plug-in that will allow .movs to play within Media Player or even Media Centre. However, for the .mov files to even appear in MCE, you need to make the following registry edit:

In HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov create a REG_SZ called “PerceivedType” and name it “video”.

Worked a treat. (one has to ask why Olympus made there cameras to record video in a format used by about 5% of the population – if you are a PC fiddler like most of us then we’ll find a way around it, for the vast majority it’ll be no holiday videos on the MCE machine).

The trick is to create a new String Value, name it PerceivedType and give it a value of video. So I thought, what if I did this to the other file types I wanted. I went ahead and added this string value to .mp4, .ts, etc. and now they ALL show up and play in Media Center. Of course you have to get the codecs to get it playing in WMP before you can actually get it to play in Media Center.

Update:
Now if I can only figure out how to get non DVD files to show up in my DVD library.

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Video Thumbnail Generation

So after I fixed my Vista Media Center yesterday, I got tired of how long it took to generate thumbnails for the video files in Media Center. I understand it has to open each video file and create a thumbnail from that and since all my videos are located on a file server (even though it’s on a gigabit network), I can see why it’s taking awhile. Of course it caches it and stores it into ehThumbs.db, but once in awhile, it decides that those thumbnails are out of date and clears and redoes everything.

I had learnt a trick that if you have a jpg with the same file name (i.e. video1.avi and video1.jpg), Media Center will load that image instead of generating its own. I’m actually not sure if Media Center 2005 supports this, but I know Vista Media Center does. So I decided to check how fast it took to load all those images on a test directory and BOY WAS IT FAST! I had just taken a random image and copied it a bunch of times after naming it after the video files in that directory.

So now I needed a video thumbnail generation software, hopefully something that will automatically go through directories, create these jpgs images, and then name it correctly. Sounded like a very specific program and a brief search resulted in nothing. It did however give me an idea that instead of generating a thumbnail, I can maybe go with a screenshot. I know Media Player Classic and a couple other video software I have allows me to take screenshots, but having almost 1,000 video files, doing that manually would really suck.

So I talked to RayAlome and we decided the best way to do was find a program that can take screenshots from videos via a command line, which I can then script to automatically run that line on all the videos under a certain directory and subdirectories. RayAlome suggested virtualdub, but I decided to take a look at my Gallery and see what it uses to generate thumbnails for the video files. It uses this thing called FFmpeg, which somehow led me to MPlayer. Apparently MPlayer allows you to save screenshots via command line after reading this: Re: Video output to jpeg/png file and Tools for extracting individual frames of an AVI movie file.

So I decided to give it a try:
mplayer.exe -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 300 X:\video1.avi

and it worked! I got an image named 00000001.jpg in the current directory. Renaming and moving the file should be simple enough. What was funny was the fact when it created the screenshot, audio was played for about a second. I knew that’d get annoying if it was processing hundreds or thousands of video files, so I added the -nosound option to it.

I got off starting to write a script. I did mine in Perl, though any scripting language would’ve worked. I realized my Perl knowledge was quite lacking after not using it for so long, but searching for Perl commands online wasn’t that bad. Interestingly enough, Perl doesn’t have a way for you to check if an item exists in an array (or none that I saw) and you had to inverse the array (as a hashtable) and check by calling the hashtable’s key. Another weird thing is that their way of defining methods and functions really sucks. They’re actually called sub (short for subroutines) and looks rather ugly.

Anyway, what the final script does is take a starting directory (current working directory if no starting directory is specified) and finds all the files with the preset list of extensions (changeable) and generates thumbnails for it. You’ll need to download MPlayer for Windows and update the path to it in the script.

There’s also a few other defaults you can change. I set the default time to take a screenshot at 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Another thing I added was to skip processing videos that already had an associating screenshot/thumbnail. Since I was testing this script out quite a bit, I realized that it was redoing a lot of screenshots that already existed. However, you can pass in the -f option and it’ll force it to regenerate everything under the starting directory.

One thing you must realize is that if the video file is not long enough to generate a screenshot at the given time, it just skips it. My HD trailers typically run from about 30 seconds to 2 minutes and having a 5 minute capture time basically skips over all of those. I then reran the script with a screenshot time of 30 seconds in that directory and everything came out fine.

Since I feel that others may be in my situation, I’ve decided to share the script here in case anyone wants to use it:
Generate Video Thumbnails for Media Center Perl Script

Usage: generateThumbnails.pl [-OPTIONS [-MORE_OPTIONS]]

OPTIONS:
-d StartingDirectory Sets the starting directory [cwd]
-f Forces Thumbnail Generation [off]
-t TimeInSecs Time in video to grab screenshot [300s]

Use this script at your own risk. I will not take any responsibility for any damage it causes. Of course to use this, you’ll need perl for your system. I also have cygwin installed, so I’m not sure if there’s any environmental differences.

As noted earlier, these are generating screenshots, not thumbnails. So depending on the resolution of your video, it can result in a screenshot that varies from about 30KB to 100KB. I’ve thought about finding a command line utility to shrink the screenshots to thumbnail sizes, but for now, this will work and until either it becomes intolerably slow again or if someone has knowledge of how to do so and is willing to share it with me, I’m probably not going to add this feature any time soon.

After running this script on all my video files, I will have to say that browsing videos in Media Center became a lot quicker and faster. Enjoy!

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Windows Update Error: 80070490

So yesterday when I was playing with my Vista Media Center, I was playing around with WebGuide and I was getting long delays when browsing through the folders. I know there was a network transfer bug in Vista that caused it to be slow and since all the files I was sharing were located off box, I decided to see if there was a new patch to fix this. That’s when I noticed that my system hasn’t done a Windows Update since December 5th, 2007. So after clicking on check for new updates, I get this error code: 80070490

Looked simple enough. I thought if I search online for this number along with windows update, I’d get a simple solution on how to fix it. Boy was I wrong.

First, I tried the Windows Update help file. It showed me a different bunch of error codes, but none that match mine.

So the next thing was the search engine. There were a bunch of hits, but none with a simple solution. According to FAQShop.com, 80070490 means Permission denied / [Problem initializing or using session variables] or Element not found. Not really sure what to do about that.

There were no official solutions. People have contacted Microsoft Support, but the only fix is to “upgrade” your Vista. I’ll elaborate later. The 2 most helpful sites I found in regards to this issue were actually threads:

I believe they both originate from the microsoft.public.windowsupdate newsgroup, but there’s several additional replies in the Google one. I also like the formatting of the Google one better as they hide the replies.

Here are the several solutions suggested:

I recently encountered this problem as well, and what the technician told me to do was enter the services menu, and reset the following services in this order: BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) – Cryptographic Services – Windows Update)

then restart your system. that worked for me once but it only worked until i restarted my computer again. any other more permanent ideas would be greatly appreciated, and i hope that these suggestions help somebody.

I wasn’t exactly sure what “reset” meant, so I restarted the following 3 services in order:

  • Background Intelligent Transfer Service
  • Cryptographic Services
  • Windows Update

I then restarted my computer. Windows Update still didn’t work and still returned the dreaded 80070490 error code.

The problem was eventually resolved by Microsoft Support via their free service for update issues – thanks for that advice, PA Bear. In spite of trying various ‘fixes’ with guidance from Microsoft, I ultimately had to ‘upgrade’ (not reinstall) Windows using the original Windows Vista disk. This process takes much longer than a typical install – so long in fact that at one stage I thought the system had frozen and that I’d have to do a complete reinstall. Fortunately ‘upgrade’ eventually completed the various tasks and all original data, other installed software and setting were preserved, so ‘upgrading’ was the better option – for me at least.

I hope this helps. Good luck.

This is actually the solution that has worked for most people that encountered this error and is in fact the current solution provided by Microsoft Support. What you do is stick in your original Vista DVD, perform what you would do with new install, and when the option comes up to for Upgrade or Advance/Custom, select Upgrade. I’m not exactly sure what it means to Upgrade when I already have Vista Ultimate installed, but what the heck, I just followed directions. They note that it does take several hours to complete. Of course that depends on how fast your machine is.

Anyway, I’m already somewhat pissed. What the heck is this error and why am I repairing my Vista install when I haven’t done anything to it in the past month. But worse of all, half way through the repair, it says my system isn’t compatible to install this version of Vista and tells me to run the compatibility tool. It then reboots and restores the previous configuration. I tried this like 3x, each time waiting an hour or so before it hits this error.

I finally gave up with this Upgrade solution.

– MY SOLUTION –

An idea hit me. Since the last successful Windows Update was on December 5th, 2007, what if I try doing a System Restore to the last point before that date. I hate doing System Restores as it smudges up tons of settings and breaks applications you’ve installed after that date. Anyway, I do a System Restore to November 30th, 2007 and behold, Windows Update suddenly works again! I had to reinstall WebGuide and a couple other apps, but this error needs to be better documented.

Update: David has provide an extra solution for people who have installed Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%. Apparently there was a problematic file (sptd.sys – Scsi Pass Through Direct) that causes Windows Upgrade to fail. I’m guessing the file is what allows you to have virtual cd/dvd drives. The solution was to delete the problematic file, upgrade Daemon Tools, or uninstall it altogether. You can read more about the solution in his comments.

Update #2: Patrick provided a very interesting tool to try:

When Googleing for answers I found out that many people had this problem and that it was not easy to fix. But one guy (jhaysITQ) found a Microsoft tool called “System Update Readiness Tool” that fixed 3 systems for him. I tried it and TADA, it worked for me too!

I hope it helps some of you people too!

Check out his original post here: 80070490 Vista Windows Update Failing

Tool info and download here (about 70 – 75 MB): System Update Readiness Tool