Mastering DVD's

DVD flick is an awesome little app that puts an easy to use interface on top of the Ffmpeg project which is the bases for many modern media applications including VLC, this gives you a very powerful DVD mastering application that is also easy to use. It has a huge range of features and supports many file formats, here are the main ones of interest ..

AVI to DVD, FLV to DVD, HDMOV to DVD, MKV to DVD, MJPG to DVD, MPG to DVD, M2V to DVD, MP4 to DVD, M4V to DVD, NSV to DVD, NUT to DVD, QT to DVD, MOV to DVD, RM to DVD, SMK to DVD, OGM to DVD, WMV to DVD, ASF to DVD, 3GP to DVD, 3G2 to DVD.
DVD Flick supports DVD Authoring, ISO image creating, DVD burning also in one tool.

The project is very well maintained and has a very clean organised feel which is reflected on the website as well as the UI. There's a good guide on the project page and here's another one that gives a good quick intro but doesn't cover the relatively new menu creation features, but that is easy to figure out. This application belongs in your media tools without any question.

Nvidia release new drivers

Nvidia have finally released the latest 180 drivers with the enhanced PhysX processing and new support for a second card dedicated to Physx processing that doesn't have to be the same gpu (not SLI) as the main card, it just has to be a Geforce 8 series or later.

Also check out the stats on the latest games :

• Boosts performance in numerous 3D applications. The following are some examples of improvements measured with Release 180 WHQL drivers vs. Release 178 WHQL drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
• Up to 10% performance increase in 3DMark Vantage (performance preset)
• Up to 13% performance increase in Assassin's Creed
• Up to 13% performance increase in BioShock
• Up to 15% performance increase in Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
• Up to 10% performance increase in Crysis Warhead
• Up to 25% performance increase in Devil May Cry 4
• Up to 38% performance increase in Far Cry 2
• Up to 18% performance increase in Race Driver: GRID
• Up to 80% performance increase in Lost Planet: Colonies
• Up to 18% performance increase in World of Conflict

That alone makes the update well worth it. Get it here.

Left 4 Dead – The Zombie Survival Guide

Over at the www.britishgaming.co.uk website they have a really good tip page that I suggest all L4D players read and there's a Hacks, Mods and tweaks guide that is worth reading as well.
One thing to note is the inclusion of the defunct split screen 2 player code in the PC version that was removed before release on the Xbox360. This allows 2 players on one PC via a gamepad and keyboard/mouse with little to no frame rate drop and both can play in co-op matches !!

Non destructive partition resizing / Drive Imaging

I have a need about once a month to resize a hard drive partition without loosing data. I've been using a bootable Partition Magic disk for years but it is not a free application and I am a huge freetard, so I went looking for alternatives.

The First step is to always backup your existing data before doing anything with your disks partitions. I recommend DriveImageXML for standard Windows partitions, it will create an exact image of the partition to a local drive or over the network. One of the nice features is the ability to browse the image file and extract files that you need, this is brilliant were you have an infected system that you are going to wipe and re-install. Create an image and store it, wipe the system and re-install, then pull out the docs, images etc that you require, while leaving anything nasty in the archive.

This is also available on the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, a must have for anyone who works on windows based PC's, giving you a wealth of diagnostic and repair tools that run off of a bootable CD running a BartPE shell so you have access to your network too.

For Linux and Mac users there is Clonezilla which also features unicasting and multicasting for huge network clone jobs, of course it supports NTFS and FAT as well and has many boot options.

EASEUS Partition Manager (Home Edition)
This bills itself as a direct Partition Magic replacement and I have to say the user interface is damn near identical, which is great because I always found PM's to be the best. It is an installable application that runs from within windows only.
You make changes and they are added to the change queue before you commit to them so you can play around and change your mind before taking the plunge. Anything major will require a reboot and the EPM wizard will run before the OS and make the required changes. The web site also lists it as being able to work with hardware raid which is something my old copy of PM could not. The 32bit version is free for home users, while the x64 is a pro feature that you need to pay for.

GParted
The GNOME Partition Editor has been around for a long time as part of the Gnome desktop project and has come a long way. It supports a huge range of partition types. It has its own live cd distribution so its a quick boot and your away. Again this is very similar to the PM interface so use is nice and easy.

Visopsys Partition Logic
This is a bootable CD that uses the Visopsys OS. There are some limitations :

• Does not work with some SATA hard disks
• No hardware support for non-USB SCSI hard disks
• Supports only DOS/Windows-style MBR partition tables (used on nearly all IBM PC-compatibles). No support for Sun or BSD disk labels, or EFI/GPT tables used on Itanium and Intel Mac platforms.
• Cannot format partitions as NTFS or EXT3. Can format as FAT (12/16/32), EXT2, and Linux swap.
• Cannot resize FAT or EXT filesystems. Can resize NTFS (Windows XP) and Linux swap.

In general it works with no problems, if it cant do something it wont even try, so you wont accidentally break your OS. It works with Vista as well, but again with some caveats :

Partition Logic (version 0.66 and later) can be used with Windows Vista. However, you should not move your system partition using Partition Logic, and in some cases you will need your Vista installation CD/DVD to update the boot configuration before Windows will start. Vista uses a new boot process that is sensitive to changes in the boot sector and partition layout:

• Vista NTFS partitions (including the system partition) can be resized without any problems. Resizing will automatically schedule disk checking for the next boot -- this is normal.
• The Vista system partition should not be moved using Partition Logic at the present time. More information will be posted as it becomes available.
• The Partition Logic "Write basic MBR" operation and "MBR boot menu" can be used, however Vista will report that it cannot boot, and needs the installation media for repair. Follow the instructions and allow it to 'repair' itself. The repair only takes a moment.

It is a project under active development so these things will be ironed out.

For Mac OsX you can use the diskutil resizeVolume command as detailed here

Will my PC be able to play this game ?

If you have wondered if the latest game will be playable on your laptop or a friend has asked you this question, head over to Can you run it ?
It will load a java applet and match your system specs to the minimum requirements for the selected game. The game database is kept up to date, so you should be able to find the latest and greatest.
Its detailed enough that, while my wife's laptop came up as a fail for Left 4 Dead it was due to the Intel mobility chipset not being recognised as valid (not ATI or Nvidia), but the specs showed it had the right shaders, ram and actually passed all the requirements.

Left 4 dead, Fallout 3 and Farcry 2

First things first, let me explain the sort of gamer I am to give you an idea why I review the way I do. I am primarily a FPS player with a short attention span, so for a game to keep my interested for any length of time it has to work hard. I am a big co-op fan and very rarely play online if it isn't (I did my death match days with Doom).

Left 4 Dead :

Valves new 4 player co-op title has just been released as a demo for the people who have pre-ordered it and I had some hands on with it last night. The first thing that surprised me with this game is that I started it, watched the intro movie and was called into the other room by my flatmate. On my return I found my wife playing and asking the usual "never played a FPS in my life" questions.
My jaw hit the floor, this is a women who has said on many occasions that video games don't interest her and when they do its Zoo Tycoon, Mah-jong and Zuma. It is a testament to the games playability that she was able to sit down and instantly get into the action with very little foreknowledge of the FPS dynamics. The zombies did a good job and kept her interested for the entirety of the demo, needless to say I quickly explained that the game is co-op and I should get her a steam account so we can team up, we'll see how that goes :)

So after she finished it was my turn, my first impression was that its the same old steam engine with some updated textures and a bit more polish, i'm not saying that's a bad thing at all, just its a gear change from some of the latest engines we have started to see in the gaming world.

The world is well realised and moody, the film aspect comes through well with the weather effects and atmosphere. The zombies are great, they have the best physical movement models ive seen yet with very fast running that emphasises the urgent uncontrollable need to feed at all costs. They jump over obstacles, climb fences and jump off buildings, usually in great numbers and its literally like being hit with a wall of chewy death.
It will take a little re-adjustment to get used to not shooting your team-mates while franticly dispatching as many zombies as possible before your clip runs out and this brings me to the weapons. The basic weapon is the pistol, usually 2 after you find one lying around and the pistol ammo never runs out. The aiming is pretty loose, and I felt some of the weapons were missing some of the punch associated with the Counter Strike Source weapons that gave a real sense of satisfaction when fired, but once again that disappears into the malaise of dead flesh.

The foot soldier zombies are easy to dispatch as they rely on numbers to overwhelm you, while the next level zombies (Boomer, Hunter and Smoker) all have their special attacks and require a little more effort. The head explodie, arm/leg shooty and general dismemberment is very satisfying, it really does feel like a movie.
The team dynamic from the first aid to the needing to be rescued when you are pinned to the ground is also very refreshing as it makes the co-op play more urgent.

This game has an awesome future and I fully expect to equal, if not surpass Counter Strike as the game to play for LAN party's etc and as we have come to expect from Valve support the day after releasing the demo a patch update has already hit tidying up a few minor hiccups and making the game even more submersive. I really recommend you try the demo on November 11 if you haven't pre-ordered it already.

8/10

Fallout 3 :

I have never played any of the Fallout franchise before and I have read a number of reviews that make direct comparisons and find this game not quite up to its predecessors. So from a completely non-biased stand point here's is my opinion after only 3 hours of game play, I will update as I get further through the game to see if they change :P

Bethesda have used the Gamebryo engine which they used for Oblivion and the first time I saw the outside world it was a hay that's quite pretty, kinda shiny, um sort of flat feeling like all the air has been sucked out and your playing in a vacuum. For some reason when I think back to the Fallout 3 world I get a blue tinged edge which I suppose makes a change to the muddy brown that "HD" games seem to think is the "real" world.

I watched a game play trailer a couple of weeks ago that brought home the game dynamic that Fallout is known for in the moral choices you are able to make in the game. In the first trailer you visit the town of megaton and pal around with the locals before accepting a mission and heading out into the wastelands. Just so happens the mission is to strap a detonator to the unexploded nuclear bomb at the heart of megaton and wipe out all the generally friendly town folk. I was taken aback by this as the idea of wantonly wiping out a town for monetary benefit with no apparent consequences (other then negatively affecting you karma rating, which I don't know what actual impact that has yet. )

After playing for 3 hours tho and taking some of the frankly dumb "go here and nearly deliberately die then come back" missions coupled with some of the townsfolk attitudes, you get the feeling the game is deliberately engineering you to want to take out the dump.

The decision by Bethesda to not allow the killing of children, while allowing the player to make some truly inhuman choices in the game has not gone over well in the gaming community and I have to agree. If you are going to build a game around constantly testing the characters moral standpoint, why denigrate that experience by having one thing you can not do in the game world due to external pressures.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see a child murder simulator game unleashed on this already fucked up planet. I intend to play this game first as I would approach real life with a sense of moral worth and value of human life.
Then I'm going to play it again as a complete psycho that will only ever exist in this virtual space, which I feel is the point of creating adult entertainment, allowing the well formed adult mind to stray outside its normal bounds and restrictions that are there for very good reason and do so in a safe, controlled way.

So enough about that, unfortunately I really do not enjoy RPG games and especially loath turn based RPG's, which is why I find those elements in this game off putting. Using the pip boy to asset manage is fine but having to use it to switch weapons constantly really throws the flow off for me and the VATS system, while cool to watch slow motion splattery, completely ruins the immersion for me as well. The constant loading blips when moving from outside to inside locations blow it for me to as does the lack of feet or any other body part, other then your hands when in first person mode and the 3rd person mode or over the shoulder camera that sits off to the right of the character just serves to annoy and feels rather unfinished.

So to finish off I think this game is huge with the right group of gamers for a reason, but that is not my group. I would also go out on a limb and say that it's game play is more console friendly then PC.

5/10

FarCry 2 :

This is a game that I think has done the most for pushing the FPS genre to the next level, there have been many reviews that claim it will ruin you for other FPS games and to a degree they are correct. That's not to say the game doesn't have its weak points, which is what i'll start with before I start the love fest.

The world has lots of items kicking around ala half life 2 but unlike that seminal game you cant interact with them unless you need to , like grabbing a bottle of water when you need health etc. This means the goof off factor is lessened i.e no throwing random junk in the air for target practice or building a hut out of car doors, crates and milk bottles in the middle of a road.

The enemy regenerating very rapidly once you move on from an area has also been getting a lot of press and I think they should enable a game setting that allows you to control it to your own liking, this will have very little affect on the game play / story line and make it that much more enjoyable. The missions get a bit samey as well, but that is forgotten as you get into the world as explained later on.

Now onto the good stuff, the game world is awe inspiring, not photo realistic like Crysis but very close. The foliage moves out of the way as you walk through it and I must admit I have spent some time shooting the palm fronds and branches off tree's because I can.

The weather / day night cycle is very well realised and I have actually called my flatmate over to point out the beauty of the HDR sunrise and the way the sunlight streams past you and the shadows created by holding the gun in front of your face. The morning's especially make me conjure up the crispness of the air and feeling of a real new day dawning with lots of explody potential like no other game. The little things like the light causing your in-game retinas to be open when you walk out of a dark hut and getting that temporary flare of sunlight that almost hurts when you walk outside to the occasional rainy night that makes you feel cold as you shelter in a tin shed is brilliant.

The game uses the potential for carnage very well and it becomes one of the main enjoyment factors, from causing a large chain reaction explosion to popping out of the jungle in time to sniper a Jeep that's just driven past, the potential for fun really is something that you start looking out for. The ability to store weapons in crates that are available in the safe houses is a good touch, as is the armoury were you always have a fresh weapon ready, once you have bought them from the gun shop once. This is important as the game has a wear system that renders the weapons inoperable after too much use.

The game world is present in its entirety, so there are no load waits between areas and the constant point of view of the character while moving around in the vehicle and doing first aid on yourself really makes a big difference to the submersion factor.

All in all this is a very complete game world that you can literally just goof around in doing what you want, the coming updates that is adding carnivores and further animals will add another dimension again, big game hunting anyone ?

I have deliberately stayed away from talking about the multi player aspect as I feel they have really let themselves down by not enabling co-op play, it would be game of the year hands down being able to take on an enemy base with a friend and the tacked on usual capture the flag , team deathmatch modes feel exactly that, tacky. In an interview I read the developer rep said that having such a large game world with 2 players was an impossibility, I say restrict the players to a 2 kilometre radius from each other and that will still be an incredibly fun experience.

8/10

Microsoft tcpip.sys hard limit removal

Yesterday I was diagnosing why my torrent server was having problems connecting to trackers through my vpn proxy, when I came across a piece of information I learned a year ago but had completely forgotten about. Since XP service pack 2, Microsoft have hard coded a limit into tcpip.sys, limiting the maximum simultaneous half-open (incomplete) outbound TCP connection attempts per second that the system can make. This was to protect the system from virus propagation and to stop DDOS attacks being launched from a compromised system. When the limit is hit, you get this in the systems event log :

EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts

Windows XP SP2 has a limit of 10 maximum incomplete concurrent connection attempts per second while Vista depends on the version you have, Vista home Basic has maximum limit of 2 and Vista Ultimate is 25 per second.
Your normal user isn't going to have any problems with these limits, but when you have a torrent application and streaming as well you're going to hit it. I regularly have 12+ torrents seeding (fulfilling my civic duties to my private trackers), plus 5 - 6 downloading and seeding, add a Steam update and watch some internet TV and I am hitting the wall.

To remove the limit you need to patch tcpip.sys , this is easy with XP but with any Windows x64 OS you have to disable the driver signing integraty check, Vista also has ehanced security to get around. There are a few ways listed to do this around the internet, but the easiest by far is this patch.

The patch works for the following MS OS's :
Windows XP SP1(x64)/SP2(x86,x64)/SP3, Server 2003 SP1(x86)/SP2(x86,x64), Server 2008(x86,x64), Vista without SP(x86,x64) and with SP1(x86,x64)

It worked perfectly on my Vista Home Premium x64 system, but note this proviso from the site :

For Vista and Server 2008 users: Maybe sometime, after updating Windows or SP installation on a desktop will appear watermarks "Test mode". They can appear because in all versions of Vista and Server 2008, except Vista without SP(x86), there is the obligatory check of the signature of drivers, and the file tcpip.sys sign with test signature after patching. Most likely, to make it disappear will be necessary simply once again to patch tcpip.sys.

After making a few changes to utorrent and the limit fix, I no longer have any problems with trackers and the speed has increased :)

Update : Patch also works for Windows 7
Update 2 : This is also the reason for the "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" error from youtube.

Fast windows search

The Everything search engine is an incredibly fast search assistant for NTFS format drives, the Master File Table of the NTFS volume is used to build its database rather then manually indexing the drive, like other search assistants.
It includes right click shell integration and has a small memory footprint (8188KB on my laptop). It defaults to running in the system tray, but I actually don't run it until I need it which means I pay a small start-up penalty while it rebuilds its database, but its only a couple of seconds. Don't forget to enable regular expression searching (Enable regex) in the search menu so you can use wild cards (*) etc.

Another very cool feature is the HTTP and FTP servers built into Everything, this allows you to install on a file server and gives you the full search options as well as download capability remotely. The http search is as fast as the desktop gui so all in all an awesome little feature that will be right at home on your home network.
The ftp server is very simple, only requiring a single password with no user access control, so its not really something I would leave facing the internet but works very well with Hamachi and its ilk vpn solutions.

One draw back is that it has no options to search inside files, which would make this the ultimate solution but as mentioned in a previous post there are ways around that.

Free Internet TV

A quick update to tell you how to get free cable tv streaming from the internet onto your TV.
This relevant to me because I want to watch The Daily Show live election coverage (you can also watch complete shows on the website) and we don't get Comedy Central here in the sandpit.
First your going to need the Tvu player which is a Peer to Peer (P2P) app for tv, very similar to Joost used to be before it became a solely web based app.

One thing to be aware of is that when you close the player it will still be open in your system tray using up bandwidth, so remember to right click and exit from the system tray icon.

So now you have the app installed fire it up and select a channel, you will see the "signal strength" indicator, hopefully it will be nearly full, the channel should start playing.

Now for me to get it onto the tv, I simply ftp to XBMC/UserData/playlists/video on my xbox media centre (which is also now available on OSx, Linux and Windows and by far the best media centre ever, more on that later).
Create a new text file tvuplayer.strm with the IP address of the PC running the tvu player and the port 8901, it looks like this : http://192.168.254.4:8901 , making sure the file saves as a .strm file not strm.txt .
Make sure you allow the tvu player to get through your firewall and you should have a picture and synchronised sound, its not exactly HD quality but hay its free :)