Thank you for reading the fifth edition of the DVD Catalyst Newsletter.
News:
Not much news this week. As you might have already noticed by the lack of articles I posted on my websites, I have been hiding in a cave this week. With the latest Beta (6) of DVD Catalyst 4 running without major issues (as far as I know at least), I started playing with the Android SDK a bit. Since I already had it installed to create screenshots from my Droid X and Xoom to post on the Tools4Movies website, it was a small step to install Eclipse and fiddle with it.
The programming language used for Android (java) is different than what I use for DVD Catalyst, but it is not as different as I expected, and the little project I am working on is coming along pretty good. I’ve been staring at DVD Catalyst code for over 7 years now, and while there are still improvements to be made, I am hoping that by tackling some of the shortcomings on the Android platform to get a fresh look on things. As a bonus, the programming language used for Android is very similar to that of the Mac, so the chances for a Mac release of DVD Catalyst is also becoming more likely.
The project itself I am keeping a secret at this point, but it does have something to do with video.
Rants:
New in this particular newsletter. There are a few things that bug me, and that I just need to get off my chest. These are some sore subjects for me, so sorry in advance for the emotional writing.
* TV. Sorry, but I really hate TV. I pay $80 for a cable subscription. It was $60 last month, but my wife decided she wanted to watch the Oprah channel (OWN) and that was only available in an extra package. The thing that aggravates me about TV is that every time I actually turn on the TV its commercials. Switching channels, still commercials. Back in the day, it used to be 2and2, 2 minutes 2 seconds, but the further you get into a program, the longer the commercials. Sometimes it is even so bad that you watch commercials for 5 minutes, and get 2 minutes of TV show before its back at commercials again. Seriously, is that why I pay $80 for cable?
I understand the need for some advertising, but really, my cable company must be making a fortune from getting paid from their customers AND flooding them with advertising.
Then, while last year they advertised that they would continue to provide analog cable, this year they decided that in order to provide more Pay Per View channels, they had to drop analog completely, rendering my 2 TiVo Series 2 Dual-Tuner DVR’s useless.
*TiVo. For over 4 years, I have been super-happy with my TiVo boxes. Sure, they had a few glitches here and there, but overall, they worked great. One of them, the wife’s, ended up getting harddrive issues, so I replaced the 80GB for a faster, larger (320GB) drive, and it has been working amazing ever since.
Then, with the cable company dropping analog, they became useless. Sure, I could hook up a converter-box, but since they are single-input-dual-tuner models, it would basically record the same channel on both tuners, which isn’t why we had them. Since my TiVo wasn’t used as much, I ordered one TiVo Premiere XL to replace both the Series2 ones we had, and had it setup with a cable card and all that. Aside from cable card and channel-lineup issues, the Premiere XL is a nightmare.
It is slow as hell. The 4year old Series2 is a lot faster. Even the upgraded one filled with 500+ hours of shows is faster than a brand-new (empty) TiVo Premiere. Then, when one channel is recording, it bogs down even more, and when you are recording 2 channels, well, just forget about it. It is basically unusable.
The specifications of the Premiere are impressive, its cool that it has Netflix and all build-in but only if it works. Last night I was watching a movie through Netflix, and it decided to reboot without warning to install an update. Ok, fair enough, it was 2am, but a warning would have been nice. Then, when it came back on after staring at the boot screen for 15 minutes, I went back to my movie, Netflix didn’t remember where I was at, but ok. Went to the position I was at, and watched for 5 minutes, and it decided to lock up, forcing me to do the power plug-reboot. Again, 15 minutes boot, and again, it didn’t remember my position. What a blast. It did that one more time after which I gave up and watched the rest of the movie on my iPod Touch.
*Lazy Virus Scanners/Security Software. A few times a year, virus scanners like Symantec Norton and McAfee decide to suddenly “find” a virus in DVD Catalyst. These are False Positives. Whenever these guys come up with something new, I get flooded by emails from people because something in DVD Catalyst seems malicious. For these companies its a small screw-up, for me it ends up in a lot of work, embarrassment and potential loss of sales, and it is wrong. Just because a few 1′s and 0′s look similar to that of something bad doesn’t actually mean it is bad.
The problem lies in compression, and the lazyness of detection routines of these virus scanners. Some of the files DVD Catalyst uses are compressed (with UPX) in order to reduce the file size. Some of these virus scanners just mark something as “suspicious” or as some trojan, just because the file is compressed. Unfortunately, if the files are not compressed, the download and install-size of DVD Catalyst will be 4x larger. But, in order to make it appear to run faster, virus scanners just look for a few 0′s and 1′s in a file, and if it finds that combination, it decides it is infected.
Every single file included and used by DVD Catalyst, every single release, is scanned using a website called VirusTotal (www.virustotal.com) in order to make sure everything is clean. VirusTotal uses 40+ of the most used virus- and malware- detection applications, and I always make sure it passes all of them, but every now and then, one of them messes things up and decides it finds a 4 year old virus in a file that has been included with DVD Catalyst for 7 years. If it takes that long for it to detect it, it makes you wonder why you have been paying for their security software all these years.
Then the cool thing about it all is, that when these companies do mess up, I am stuck with the cleanup. Trying to contact them is a nightmare, and often it takes days for them to respond with an automated message. Then companies like Norton require you to install a trial version of their software and use the submit-function in there to send them the file in question, but in order to download their trial version (which is a nightmare to remove) they require your credit card information. Talk about wishful thinking. Automatically sign me up for the paid version just because I need a trial version to clean up the mess they made.
DVD Catalyst News:
No new beta this week. I haven’t ran into any major issues myself, and I haven’t received reports from people who experienced anything major. There was one thing that was brought to my attention though.
*Subtitles stay on screen (MKV). If you convert MKV files with subtitles when using the Beta, the beta conversion engine (Boosterpack2) seems to have a bug in that it doesn’t hide the displayed subtitle after a certain amount of time. It will stay on-screen until a new subtitle is displayed. In order to fix this, I have to create a new build of the conversion engine, however, if you do run into this issue, switch the conversion engine for video files from Boosterpack2 to Boosterpack in Global Settings > Engines for now.
This week’s Tools4Movies articles:
This week I didn’t add any new articles to the Tools4Movies website. I’ve been spending all my time on my little Android project, and combined with the standard amount of questions and forum activity, I just didn’t have the time to write any articles. I will finish up on Subsonic eventually, however at the moment, I am very excited about getting an Android app in the Market. I haven’t looked at the B&N requirements yet, but I will certainly look into adding it to the NOOK Appstore as well.
Well, that was it for today. I hope you enjoyed reading the newsletter. My sincere apologies for the rants. If you have any suggestions or requests on things you would like to know more about feel free to reply to this email, Thank you for your time, and I hope you get to enjoy the weekend,
Sincerely,
Mitch
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