Watching 720p matroska on ASUS Transformer

Yesterday I decided to try and watch a series episode on my Eee ASUS Transformer (TF101). First, notice that I rooted it, and it is running CyanogenMod, with Android version 4.1.2.

The episode was stored on a SD card. It is not a fast SD card (class 4), but should suffice. The file was encoded with Matroska (MKV) in 720p. So far, so good.

Asked a friend about what player he would recommend. he said there were two, but just reminded of one name: MX Player.

Nevertheless, I didn’t like to notice that MX Player free version has advertisement, and therefore decided to try VLC. I use it on my Mac, and I like it (and its icon), so, why not test?

VLC installed cleanly, but when playing, it wasn’t able to render a single frame. From 5 to 5 seconds it changed the frame, but full of noise and encoding blocks. Gah, #fail.

Then, if VLC doesn’t work, let’s hear my friend suggestion, and try MX Player. Installed the free version, and then, needed to install the codecs package. Didn’t like much this approach… it could download the codecs itself, why to hide them in an app. Nevertheless, it installed with more or less effort. When playing, it was able to render the image perfectly, with acceptable number of frame per seconds (don’t ask how many, I don’t know, but enough to watch smoothly the video). The problem was that I could just watch the video, as there was no sound at all. No, it wasn’t a volume problem. Neither an option. As far as I could get after googling a little, there are more people complaining that MX Player doesn’t play sound when watching a Matroska file. Weird. #fail.

In one of those googling, somebody said he converted the Matroska file to MP4 with Handbrake. That is too much trouble for someone like me. But somebody else said that BSPlayer had a free version for Android that worked. Righto! Downloaded it, it installed cleanly and played the video at first. #win.

FlipBoard

After buying the Samsung Galaxy S3, I installed FlipBoard. The idea is pretty cool, but I am having some trouble using it.

First, it crashes from time to time. I couldn’t find out when/why does it crash, but it seems that it is related to the way it checks for new news, and some extra touches in the screen.

Then, I can’t understand how it updates. Some RSS feeds have news for more than twelve hours, and the application doesn’t show that news. Talking about RSS, it is not intuitive how to add them. At the moment most users consult personal blogs, and not just about a hundred of known websites that the developers find interesting.

And why does the Cover News are only selected from the standard news sources, and not from the RSS feeds supplied by the user?

Panoramic Photos – Hugin

Hugin is the only free alternative to AutoPano Giga/Pro that I have found. In these cases the number of photos is smaller (and mostly horizontal). This tool is not as good as AutoPano in guessing the position of photos, but does a good overall job.

3 x 5 MP photos

11 x 5 MP photo

7 x 5 MP photo

Panoramic Photos – AutoPano Giga

These are my two first experiences with AutoPano Giga. They have plenty of problems. One of the photos has a lot of inconsistencies, most of which are my fault, for moving while taking the photos (and not just rotating over an axis). Nevertheless, I like these pictures.

17 x 5MP photos

13 x 5MP photos

Lion, and some more impressions

And here I am, back on my comments on Lion. First, I will let you know that the things that I am liking more in this new machine are not related with the operating system itself, but different approaches I am taking, like the usage of homebrew for installing UNIX software. Also, the hardware makes a difference, when you have an i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and an SSD (unfortunately 128 GB of disk is not that much).

Regarding Lion, I already figured a way to put spaces or desktops or whatever you would like to call, behaving like my old spaces, having a shortcut for each one of them, and pinning applications to specific desktops. Unfortunately, I am not able to change all spaces backgrounds at once. I can change one at a time, but I do not have a way to change them all. Unless I destroy all the spaces I have, change the first one, and recreate them all again. Not feasible, specially when you have pinned applications.

The way 801.1X configuration is done is not clear to me as well. Fortunately I got the profile ready to use, but the Lion interface could be more helpful. It says “contact your system administrator for a profile”, but if you are the sysadmin (usually when you buy a laptop) you need to know where to create the profile. So, probably a few more help would be good.

When using Colloquy or Adium with the US keyboard, I can’t type a key and maintain it pressed to repeat the letter. A popup appears where you can choose an accented letter. If you press a letter that cannot have an accent, it gets typed once, and no repeat is done. I do not think this is completely Lion fault, as other applications like Firefox behave correctly, but I do not think this is Colloquy and Adium fault altogether.

Regarding launchpad, I am not able to understand why would I need it. Switch to it and searching an icon is slower than typing the shortcut to spotlight and typing the application name. I wonder when Mac developers stop working on the eye candy and start worrying with the operating system problems. For example, since Tiger (at least, since Tiger that I can confirm) locales are broken for C++ programs.

Unless you have a very good reason to do the upgrade, I do not think Lion worth it. I updated my old mac to Lion only because it was running Leopard (not the Snow one) and a lot of software stopped being supported.

Apple takes one month to deliver laptop

Ordered a Mac Book Pro, 13″, i7 with 128 GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM. Accordingly with Apple Store Portugal, if I buy this configuration, it gets deliver in two to four days.

I did not order directly on Apple Store, I like to have somebody to complain to. So, I ordered in an official Apple retailer, here in Portugal.

The order was done in 3rd November. Today, 30th November, the retailer did not receive the package yet. And I paid half the value already.

As I did not find any contact directly to Infinite Loop, I am complaining here. If you have any relation with Apple, please make them aware. It is inconceivable to wait one month for a laptop, not with the speed technology evolves nowadays, and in a global world, where a package can travel the globe in a few days.

My only comment is, APPLE FAIL!

Samsung Blue Earth is not usable

About an year ago I posted about Samsung Blue Earth. I bought it because it had WiFi, GPS, was blue and a cool solar panel. Unfortunately, it can’t push mail by WiFi (just 3G), the GPS doesn’t work properly, the solar panel is just cool and, worst, it doesn’t have an operating system.

It has a chronometer. You can use it. But you want to take a picture of the first lap? Ooops, sorry, you lost all your times. You need to send a message? Sorry, you lost all your times.

The web browser is from the time of WAP. You open a standard newspaper webpage, and the browser says “The page is too big, might not be properly displayed”.

So, dear Samsung, I feel robbed.

Calibre developer shows lack of interest

A friend lent me a Kindle DX. I installed Calibre to perform some simple conversion from .epub format to .mobi format. My first experiment was with the Open Dictionary for Portuguese (Dicionário-Aberto). This dictionary takes 5MB on ePub format. Let me remember you that ePub is a zipped format. It, after unzip, takes 25 MB. The dictionary is pure text.

The conversion from ePub to Mobi took about 45 minutes. That’s not a problem. But took more than 1.9 Gigabytes of disk space. Yes, you are reading the unities correctly. I found this value kind of absurd and though that, although not a relevant thing to fix right now, it would be interesting to investigate why it takes so much disk. By the way, the final Mobi file is around 15MB.

I’ve opened a ticket on Calibre, marked it a wishlist: find out why Calibre takes so much disk space performing a simple format conversion. I did not ask for it to be fixed. I did not complain. Just said it took that disk space, and added a pointer to the file that I used.

I was expecting the developer to be intrigued about this. But unfortunately he shown to be stupid. Sorry, I know this is a hard word, but it is the only explanation I have to this answer:

How much space it takes is how much space it takes. I have no interest in optimizing disk space usage.

Note that I wasn’t expecting a fix right away. An answer stating the there is a to-do list with more important things, would be OK. But closing the ticket with a wont fix made me delete the application from the disk. Would prefer to develop my own conversion tool than to know I would be using this guy software.

iPad and prices in the Iberian Peninsula

This week I went to Vigo to a conference (FALA2010) and my hotel was right in the building on the side of a Apple Store. Of course I entered and gone to try iPad. The cheaper version costs 488 euro. In Portugal, there aren’t iPad being sold. At least, I just found it in Pixmania, by 558 Euro. It seems that everybody likes to steal in Portugal, ranging from government to stores…

Using HDMI and external sound in XBox 360

In a previous post I was wondering why I couldn’t get sound from my XBox using any kind of connector when the HDMI cable was plugged in.

My doubts were funded on the design of my own cable, that shipped with XBox 360. It has two RCA for sound and one RCA for video but, in the XBox connector, it has too much plastic, in a way that it covers the HDMI connector.

Therefore, I supposed that that would be a design issue, with that purpose (to prevent to connect the two cables at the same time), and not a design flaw.

But then, I found the kit shown in the picture on sale: it includes a standard HDMI cable and a connector without that extra plastic, that can be plugged together with the HDMI cable, and deliver sound to two RCA (and an optical connector).

Already ordered the kit on eBay. Waiting for it.