Panasonic HDC-SD909 to iMovie to iDVD in reasonable quality

May 27th, 2011

I had a lot of trouble of getting my recording properly edited and burned to DVD (SD) without loosing image quality.

Camcorder: Panasonic HDC-SD909 (or similar HDC SD707, HS900, SD800,...)
Quality Setting: 1080p50 (1920x1080 50 fps progressive), Dolby Digital 5.1

Install ClipWrap to get a version of ffmpeg.
Install Perian 1.2.1 (NOT 1.2.2 or the audio is distorted)

Convert files to m4v using Alan Somers Automater Script Rewrap2M4V. This will change the container to m4v
Import the files into iMovie (after some research I could not find a way of organizing the files myselfs. You probably have to let iMovie manage them, but it creates nice folders that can be backup'd using rsync).

Create your movie!

Export using "Export using QuickTime" in HD (720p or similar) - if you use "Share with iDVD" the image quality sucks (is terrible).
Open iDVD
Goto preferences and select "Best performance" for encoding settings (Professional quality will compress more... wtf?)
Create a new project
Drag&Drop the previously exported movie into iDVD - behold even chapters are there!
Burn to DVD

Enjoy!

Things I looked into:

  • Final Cut Pro - way to complicated for what I want to do with videos. iMovies just does it all without manual.
  • Compressor - a lot more option for encoding, but I lost the chapters I created in iMovie.
  • DVD Studio Pro - for my basic needs iDVD fits better because I'd like to have a nice standard theme AND that doesn't look as crappy as the once from Toast.

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Outlook 2010 Duplicate Item Remover (Free VBA)

January 2nd, 2011

For those that don't want to pay 20$ for removing duplicate mail items.

Create a new macro and add this code:


Dim t As Items
Dim i As Integer
Dim arr As Collection

Dim f As folder
Dim parent As folder
Dim target As folder

Dim miLast As MailItem
Dim mi As MailItem

Set parent = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI").PickFolder
Set target = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI").PickFolder

For Each f In parent.Folders
Set t = f.Items
t.Sort "[Subject]"

i = 1
Set miLast = t(i)

Set arr = New Collection

While i < t.count
i = i + 1

If TypeName(t(i)) = "MailItem" Then
Set mi = t(i)
If miLast.Subject = mi.Subject And miLast.Body = mi.Body And miLast.ReceivedTime = mi.ReceivedTime Then
arr.Add mi
Else
Set miLast = mi
End If
End If
Wend

For Each mi In arr
mi.Move target
Next mi
Next f

On my 1.4gHz Intel ULV for 7000 items it took approx. 5min.

The code asks for the folder to scan and then the target folder where the items should be moved to.

Posted in coding, Exchange | No Comments »

Nokia Mail For Exchange broken after Exchange 2010 SP1 Upgrade

September 23rd, 2010

After upgrading Exchange 2010 to SP1 my mobile phones (Nokia E71 and another N-Series) didn't have any mails/contacts/...

After deleting the Mobile Phone Partnership in Exchange Management Console it sync'd again.

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Simple Deep Zoom Silverlight Howto

September 21st, 2010

DZConvert.exe \* /s

DZCollection.exe .dzc /v

Generate .cxml using .dzc as input generate the correct ids

For Silverlight the .dzc and .cxml need to be encoded using UTF8.

http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/xml-schema.aspx

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Compare file counts per directory in PowerShell

May 31st, 2010

dir|?{$_.psiscontainer}| %{"{1,20} {0,4} {2,4}" -F (get-childitem -rec $_).count,$_.name,(get-childitem -rec ("Z:\somedir\" + $_.name)).count }

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Lotus Notes (Domino) to Exchange 2010

May 14th, 2010

we more or less successfully migrated lotus notes (domino) to exchange 2010.
what you need:

  • exchange 2007 server
  • lotus notes client + account to access all mailboxes to be migrated installed on exchange 2007 server
  • exchange 2010 server
  • Microsoft Migration Lotus Notes Transport Tool

(this was all done in a virtual environment (hyper-v) and lotus notes was on linux server)

First of all you cannot migrate directly from notes to exchange 2010. The mailboxes need to be migrated to 2007 first. Once a mailbox is migrated, you can run the migration tool multiple times and it will nicely check for dups. Just make sure your users don't delete/move mails, as they will be re-created by the migration process.
Also make sure you have enough space on the exchange 2007 server, because the mailbox size is almost double (compared to lotus notes) and notes transport tool writes some hugh log files.
Our mailboxes ranged from 6mb to 8gb.
Migration is cpu intense and log files need some preprocessing before one can grep (mail me if you need to the tool - essentially I concatenate lines based on the beginning and make sure to handle utf16).
Once the mailboxes are moved from 2007 to 2010, the migration tool cannot migrate items anymore.
We migrated 99% of the emails with some errors (e.g. messed up sent times (=3 year old email end up with sent date of now), sender names wrongly mangled, calendar items timeshifted,...).
We couldn't find out what we should change in the source, so we ended up letting the users manually check and migrate the user via copy&paste.
We also successfully managed to migrate an "archive" database, by copying and mounting it on the server and changing the template.
The move from exchange 2007 to 2010 was completely painless - each mailbox was migrated within 1-2 hours.
Depending on the lotus notes permissions read/unread item status was ignored (I think write access is required to migrate the read/unread item status).
The users were mapped manually in the Transporter Tool (all the Active Directory accounts already existed). I let the Transporter Tool create the exchange mailboxes (I had some issues otherwise).
Contacts were migrated by each user using CSV - they tried multiple formats/options and if alot of fields were used in Lotus there were always some fields missing.

Why we migrated (incomplete and mostly my personal view): Outlook as client, web access, iPhone sync, failover via database availability groups, better spam filtering (we're down to 1 spam per week compared to 10 per day), outlook anywhere (=sync of outlook via https)

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ORF 1/2 HD (DVB-S2) in Windows 7 Media Center *working*

February 22nd, 2010

I finally got a setup working!

Hardware: Core i7 920, ATI 4300, TechniSat Skystar HD2 PCI + TechniSat CI-Slot SkyStar HD2, XBox 360

The Media Center PC is setup using Windows 7, DVBLink. The drivers for the TechniSat cards need to be installed manually, then continue with DVBLink (make sure you follow the setup).
DVBLink found ORF 1/2 HD straight away. Channels are selected in DVBLink and configured into MC7.
The XBox 360 is added as an extender. HD live tv is working nicely, recorded videos have short stutters every 15-30sec (I already tried to disable automatic pulldown in ATI Catalyst... I'm not 100% sure if it helped). XBox is connected via 100mbit cable. Makesure it is in the same IP subnet.
Using divx 7 helped me to get mkv (matroska) files streaming to the XBox, divx avis work OOB.
Music and pictures are stored on another machine. I had to re-add the folders on the XBox again (including username/password) - even though it is already listed and working on MC7.
To watch HD videos on the XBox I was prompted to download the "optional media update". I received the error 80072f76. After the 6th try I was finally able to get it...
About the noise: I have to admit that the fan is pretty noisy... when watching tv one won't probably notice it. I even think it's louder than a projecter - but this is really subjective.
The XBox nicely starts the media center pc if it sleeps. Media Center on XBox can be configured to startup automatically.
The startup time of the XBox somehow lowers the WAF - don't think about using the controller as a replacement for the remote. The controller has all functions but not very intuitive.
Channel switching time is not super fast, but acceptable.

I hope somebody will find this helpful, since it took me some months to get a working setup.

Update using the controller for Media Center is actually a bad idea as the controller goes to sleep after while and takes quite long to wake up. I now use a Harmony 515 to control it - I added a "Windows Media Center PC" although it's not in the room (just to get the proper commands). I still had to customize the activity to turn on the XBox 360.

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Posted in tv | 2 Comments »

Replace symlinks with source

February 16th, 2010


find . -type l -exec stat {} --format=%N \; | /root/move_symlink.pl | sh
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chown apache:apache {} \;

move_symlink.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
while(<>) {
/^.(.*?)' -> .(.*)'$/;
print "mv '$2' '$1'\n";
}

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nagios, speedfan und sfsnmp

February 7th, 2010

tried to get speedfan, sfsnmp and nagios to work together. no success :(

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

ping working, http not?!

January 23rd, 2010

problem: ping to a host on the other side of a vpn works, http not.

environment:TMG on both sides, both have multiple external IPs and source side has them distributed over multiple network cards.

solution: Although I disabled web proxying and the network relation between the two vpn sites is routing, TMG still tries to access the target web server using one of it's external IPs. I tested pinging a host on the other side using various source IPs from the source TMG, I figured that only certain IPs work.
I finally configured all IPs onto one nic and it started to work.

Posted in isa | No Comments »

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