I spent over a half hour today fighting with Linux trying to get it to play the BBC's video of Bush's escape. It turns out for Linux you need to first download the .asx file that their internal pages point you to (figuring out that URL is a pain in itself). Open up the asx, and find the mms:// URL within that and then give that URL to mplayer to play.

At that point mplayer still couldn't really handle it so I encoded it to raw video and then in order to allow for Windows compatibility I then re-encoded that to msmpeg4v2/pcm. This took it down to 1.8MB and should make it universally watchable. Undoubtedly, given the mess of Mac/Windows/Linux video codecs, it probably still won't play on someone's setup. What a pain, though the BBC could do better.

Here's the torrent: pep_delicious-bush_escape.torrent

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:14 AM in general | Comments (0)  

Doing some Prodigem upgrades. Should be down for about an hour tonight.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:29 PM in software | Comments (0)  

Switched off mysql-pconnect on Prodigem which, while still sluggish at times, was a quick fix to handle growth.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:28 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Ever since introducing Auto RSS Torrent, Prodigem has been seeing a healthy increase in traffic. Some of this has been causing some strain and yesterday, while doing some code clean up, I inadvertently broke the tracker. The result today was a day of broken torrents. It looks like I resolved my foul up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:40 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)