I know you’re in a bit of trouble right now with the whole worldwide credit crunch thing, but allowing me to update my phone numbers still doesn’t really count as an “offer”.
December 31, 2008
December 29, 2008
Nero 9: a bloated heap of rubbish aka, how to turn DV into DVD without it
The disaster that is Nero
My father has rather a lot of camcorder tapes going back to the early 90s from three camcorders, an old analog Hi8 which was discarded due to it breaking and a Sony DCR-TRV120E Digital8 which we still have. At this was starting to deteriorate, a Canon HV20, which uses HDV, was purchased. The plan was to use the firewire output on both cameras to capture the video and turn it into a DVD as a backup.
My father has previous tried to use the Nero 8 “super ultimate edition” (or whatever it’s called) trial to convert the tapes to DVD, but he found that it took forever, and then didn’t burn the disk properly. We reinstalled his computer, which didn’t help, and contacted Nero technical support. They didn’t help either, as they didn’t reply. Apparently they don’t care about people who are using the trial version who are having problems.
I decided to capture the DV using WinDV, but then use Nero 9 (a massive 380MB, plus .NET 3.0) to do the processing, i.e. turning it into a DVD. This worked a few times, but then just stopped working. It would spend an hour or two encoding the video, then suddenly decide that it couldn’t burn it, generating the following error.
[02:00:34] DVDEngine SEH EXCEPTION (0xC0000005: ACCESS_VIOLATION) was raised in NEEM2V.DLL at RVA 0x00025342.
Great. Well, rather than waste my life trying to debug Windows and Nero, I decided to find another solution, mostly using tools I’d already used before.
An alternative solution using free utilities
September 4, 2008
LivLug
I went to Liverpool for the first time in a year yesterday. Despite Liverpool being so close, I don’t have much need to go there these days, working in Manchester. I was reminded how much I miss the place, having been a student there for four years. It was quite sad to see all the houses on Edge Lane marked for demolition.
Things I miss about Liverpool: The buildings, the architecture, the history, most of the people
Things I don’t miss about Liverpool (which I unfortunately experienced): Having smelly old men come up to you and say “‘Ere lad, can you lend us 20p?”.
June 29, 2008
How to install Debian without a CD/DVD or netbooting
I was running Ubuntu 7.10 on my server, but wanted to reinstall it with Debian etch. The machine in question doesn’t have a CD/DVD-ROM drive, and I couldn’t be bothered to set up a tftp server on my laptop so I could netboot it. The answer? Set up the existing grub to boot the network installer kernel and initrd (initial RAM disk).
The files you need are here and here. (You’ll need some different files if you don’t want the x86 version, that is left as an excercise for the reader)
Just stick them into your /boot/, configure /boot/grub/menu.lst with something like this:
title Debian etch installer
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/linux vga=normal
initrd /boot/initrd.gz
Since the initrd contains everything you need including the installer and network driver modules, and only gets read once (when booting), you can of course overwrite the partition that these files are stored on (though if you mess up the installation it’ll be a bit harder to get it re-started ;)