For information related to computer programming and the C# programming language see:
Alternative to Windows - Linux Ubuntu
We have recently Installed a Network to provide internet service to our town as dial up has become intolerable. For more info see:
MG suite of programs is a large group of software primarily for doing Multi-Media work. Organization of video sound files and images. For Further info see:
For information related to our "Presale Home Inspection Program see:
A project that have worked on and revised numerous time is an identifier of the Ferns of the Northeastern USA. For info related to this on going project see:
For many years now I have worked on botanical identifiers. This is a daunting project if one has to do the botany and the computer programming. DAS is a program that allows an author to construct an identifier with no knowledge of computer programming by simply inserting the data and user choices. For further info see:
We do a lot of video capturing and editing on our computers. For information relating to this activity see:
For some tips and hints relating to use of the Internet see:
Update 2007.07.29 - Inexpensive Word processing machine.
I am often asked what a simple machine to do word processing and playing music would cost. My feeling is that any investment made should also take into account the possibility of upgrade as this costs very little and to my mind buying an old, outdated, used machine for a hundred dollars is a waste of money.
Here is a machine using the MSI box, which we use to build very high end machines, with some very minimal hardware to make it work. The MSI box is a socket, AM2 which, will accept a dual core 64 bit processor, therefore it can be upgraded to a real screamer if you desire.. By using Ubuntu, which is free, as an operating system the total cost with shipping and handling is about $200. As time goes by you will desire to upgrade this package, but since this a state of the art machine that is possible. This machine does supply you with minimal capability for a small price.
I am working on setting up a hardware list for our latest MSI box builds. Since we do a lot of multi media we require the ability to save many terabytes of data. To accomplish this we have used Dataports for many years now and we plan on continuing although we are transitioning to SATA.
SATA / IDE / PCI –setup thoughts for MSI multi media
Have not found any way to easily get more SATA ports without installing a PCI card. We are very limited with only 2 PCI. There are two other card ports 1-PCI express 16x and 1-PCI express 1x. Read some bad reviews on using these ports. So I think the best plan is to use these two SATA ports to connect to 2 - Dataport III SATA’s. This would allow for SATA>SATA drive mirroring In the case of those that have been using Dataport IV they would also want to have a frame for their older drives. With a DVD drive you would use all four front 5.25 “ bays. Amazing as very few boxes have 4 5.25” bays. If you put in an audio card and a video capture card that’s it! only 2 PCI slots.
You have 6 IDE ports:
IDE – Primary Master - The C: drive will be a small 80g
IDE – Primary Slave - Free
IDE – Secondary Master – CD-DVD drive
IDE – Secondary Slave – Dataport IV
IDE – SATA1 Dataport III
IDE – SATA2 Dataport III
As you can see about the only additions that can be made to this machine is another IDE drive and the two remaining PCI x slots. There are many VGA, SVIDEO, HDTV out cards available. I found this card for example which has VGA, SVideo and HDTV out. It is a PCI x16 card.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127242
There is a PCI 1x SATA card so you could add 2 more SATA ports there.
This configuration would allow you to mirror your old Dataport IV drives to the newer SATA drives and also do SATA to SATA drive mirroring. Drive mirroring is the way to go when backing up data as the creation dates are not destroyed. This sure is a tight fit but this box leaves more room than most. Many are reducing the number of IDE ports. I guess the transition from IDE to SATA is inevitable but I will resist with my dollars. We will not buy boards with 1 – IDE………Yet. I wish they would give me at least four PCI slots.
We have been using three of these machines for many months now and for someone wanting to do Video, Audio, and Graphics it’s a solid little device. The Dual Core AMD 4600 chip is a good performer and the price has come down significantly in the past month to $110. 1gb Ram that I paid $130 for two months ago is now $80. Just bought a 500gb SATA drive for $120 (24 cents/ gig) and put it in a Dataport III $28. I was worried that this might push the power supply but all seems to be okey.
Update: 2007.04.28 Multimedia MSI K9VGM-V box - Back in stock
This box has been quite popular with system builders. Each time it was in stock it only lasted for a short time and then was unavailable again for a long period.
We have been waiting for several months for inventory of the MSI bare bones to arrive. This MSI box I have used for many builds and we have found it to be a very good product. The fact that it has 4 - 5.25 front bays is very important for us as we install Dataports in these bays. It seems that motherboards are becoming more anemic as time goes on. Most motherboards today only have two PCI slots and 2 PCI express. The newest MSI barebones has only 1 IDE which limits you to 2 IDE drives. This box we like as it has ability to have 2 – SATA, 4 – IDE drives. The motherboard is clean and well designed. The case is roomy considering it is only 17” inches high. We have used this case with various Athlon chips. Currently we are using the Athlon Dual Core 64 X2. The configuration in the price list is the minimum hardware to create a working Multimedia machine. The Realtech sound on the MOBO is not worth wasting any time with. We always replace the MOBO sound with a card. We have had mixed results with the Chaintech $20 sound card but when it works it works very well.
For someone desiring the absolute fastest CPU chip look at:
3ghz, dualcore, 64bit, reportedly can be overclocked to 3.8ghz ????
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16819103773
The C: drive is a small 80gig drive as we recommend using C: to hold the OS and little else. The remaining space on the C: drive can be used as a temporary work area. All our data we put on the Dataport Drives so they can be removed for safe keeping. A fact of life when using Windows is that at any time you must be prepared to reformat your C: drive and reinstall the OS. The C: drive is a IDE drive reserving the two SATA ports for two Dataport III frames. This allows you to copy from one Dataport to another making backup of drives simply a matter of mirroring the drives. I also have a Dataport IV frame which is IDE for reading my numerous IDE drives. We have recently been using Western Digital 320 gig drives ($90).
The list above does not contain an OS but my personal preference at this time is any copy of Win XP Pro you may own, updated with Service Pack #2 and the .NET framework 2.0. Good reports have come in about using this configuration with Linux.
It seems we are always buying more drives. Video at 1.5 gigs per minute eat up drive space really fast.
We have recently only been buying Western Digital SATA drives. We have found them to be inexpensive, reliable and fast. They honor their guarantee, have good tech service that speaks English, and they have a nice software package which I use daily. The software package has a very good drive mirroring feature. We are presently buying 320 gig drives for about $75. The above link shows all drives meeting this criteria at NewEgg. For heavy video work the heavy industrial drive with the 5yr guarantee is worth considering.
After several weeks of experimenting with the MSI bare bones box I am basically satisfied but there is one major thing that I don’t like. This motherboard has Newtech sound on board. The Newtech sound might be decent hardware but the software is the worst. Yesterday I discovered that the volume control for recording was disabled and I could not enable it. I hate the Newtech software interface, and drivers. I was suspicious of the play back quality also. This is a problem I have had before and resolving it is quite easy. Just install another soundboard. I purchased several Chaintech soundboards ($22) and with the exception of one defective one they have proven to be quite good.
Note: 2007.07.21 I have now installed three of these boards and all three have failed within a couple of months. I can no longer recommend these boards.
Last night I was searching the Directv schedule I by chance ran accross a "Nick Brignola" concert on wmht. I have it on my Tivo. This should be a good test for my new video capture card arriving today. I have researched video cards pretty thoroughly and have learned a lot. It seems that almost all video cards that capture to MPEG2 use basically the same chip known as the Brooktree Chip. There are two models of this chip BT878 and BT848 and they are very similar. What this means is that capture cards from $15 to $200 are all going to produce similar results. The less expensive cards do not have a tuner. A tuner provides little advantage for me as the output of my DirectTV does capturing via the Y-C output. The only other sources I record from are a camcorder, and VCR where the tuner provides no advantage. So I ordered the following:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815100120
If you read the reviews you will find that many people complained about the sound quality. This is due to the fact they are passing the sound through the video card, which is not necessary. Just route your video to the card and run the sound directly to the line in of your soundboard.
The highest quality capture is accomplished by boards that capture in the .AVI format like the Pinacle DV500 which costs about $400 but for the home video producer if this card for $20.99 works it would supply a lot of bang for the buck.
Well I am happy to report the Kworld PCI capture board meets and exceeds my expectations. Setup was a little complicated as the instructions did not match the software but I was able to get it working after about an hour. The quality of the capture is quite good. The sound I had to route directly to my sound board otherwise the quality was poor. If you own a camcorder and a computer this is a must have accessory and at $20.99 is a bargain.
one. It is called "Command Prompt" and located in START/programs/accessories or you
can just go to START/RUN and type CMD . The most important use of dos for me is
the creation of lists. Of course there are many programs to do this sort of thing but DOS
gives the user the power to do so according to their needs and then alter the process as
their needs change. The dos DIR command is the primary tool for doing this.
Some simple DOS DIR commands:
Example File structure D:\jazz\docs
DIR - show a directory listing of all files at present Location
DIR /b - use brief format
DIR /b /s - include subdirectories in listing
DIR /b /s \jazz\docs - display all the files in the docs folder
DIR /b /s *.mp3\jazz - display all MP3's in \JAZZ
These commands can be followed by the > "redirection" and "redirection append" >>
commands. Redirection of the console printout is instead done to a file. Lets say
TEST.TXT. Our last command redirected to a file would look like this.
DIR /b /s *.mp3\jazz > D:\TEST.TXT
DIR /b /s \jazz\docs >> D:\TEST.TXT
And then the second listing of contents of \jazz\docs is appended by the ">>" command. Otherwise the file TEST.TXT would be overwritten by the second "redirection ".
It is also possible to PIPE the output of a program to another program. The symbol for
the pipe is a single vertical line '|' , usually capital "\". One important application of the
PIPE is to send the output of the DIR command to the dos SORT program.
To send a list of all MP3's in our jazz collection to TEST.TXT in chronological order
Since the date starts the filename this is quite easy.
DIR /b /s *.mp3\jazz | SORT > D:\TEST.TXT
If you go to the root of your D: drive there should be a file there that can be read with
Notepad.exe because it is an ASCII file.
Okey lets say we want to sort according to the last name of the artist which in our filing
system is the fourteenth character in the filename for all files in the folder D:\jazz\. If the
path is not a single directory of four characters this changes.
DIR /b /s *.mp3\jazz | SORT / 14 > TEST.TXT
For examples of all of this and more see MG#progs\MAKEm3u.BAT don't execute it drag it
onto Notepad and read it with Notepad.
Update 2006.09.10 Goldwave
I haven’t tried any of the newer versions of Goldwave. I am using version 4.26 and I would not want an improved version. Software seems to always get worse as the version numbers climb. As a programmer I have noticed this is true of my own work. The original work has a clear-cut intention and as features are added it becomes a ball of string with no ends. Adding new functions has unintended consequences and decreases reliability of the original code. A good example of this is MF# which was a real mess of patches and added functions. This is why I have rewritten from scratch, this code recently new progs collected in folder MG#progs. It amazes me that the new code although 1/3 the number of lines of code has many new features and most of the old features.
I have read a lot of complaints about the newer versions of Goldwave. I keep up to date with Multi Media stuff at.
www.afterdawn.com
I understand they changed the mouse interface in Goldwave, which is what I really like about the original program. Left click selects beginning of clip. Right click selects end of clip. Select play and you hear the clip. I sometimes I do this process thousands of times in one day. After installation you must go options tool bar and add some functions to the main tool bar.
On a backup disk I sent to many people there is a folder \System\goldwave. Or let me know and I will burn a disk with the \System folder. It contains a lot of software. TMPGenc, DVD2AVI, DVD Shrink, TMPG DVD, and much more.
Update: 2006.09.09 – Media Player Classic”
I have suggested trying “Media Player Classic” before but I now have a month of extensive use and I can only say I am overwhelmed. Just put it on a new installation and XP played MPEG2 using MPC something that usually requires installation of a codec.
DVD’s - play very well.
AVI’s - perfect
MP3’s - I have only used this a little but, all junk in the audio heard when using Media Player 9, is not present. I use MF# as my primary player.
The full screen mode is excellent with adjustments for aspect and pop up controls when you move the mouse to the bottom of the window.
Options Options Options – Yes there are options galore – Command line arguments – Key Controls – Menu Options – Editable .ini file – I still havn’t seen it all. The important thing is it has retained the simplicity of Media Player 6.4 which is most peoples favorite.
If you are doing advanced video work you often need information about the file being viewed. Such things as FORMAT, BITRATE, RESOLUTION, FRAMERATE, FILE SIZE, CLIP LENGTH , etc are often need to know pieces of information for doing video work. This info can be displayed on screen by this player.
I have not identified a single media display task that MPC cannot do better than other software. I have now integrated it into MF# by renaming it Mfvideo.exe and MF# now uses it for MPG and AVI files.
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/guliverkli/mpc2kxp6490.zip?use_mirror=umn
G.
Update 2006.08.20
I find that many people are operating their machines with little understanding of the IDE. I seem to get a lot of questions about this that make it obvious people are confused by what is really quite simple. After all there are only four IDE devices.
Some basic info.
There are two IDE ports on a standard mother board IDE0 and IDE1 these are commonly referred to as primary and secondary.
Update: 2007.10.27 - Many new machines have only 1 ide and two
Each IDE port is capable of supporting two devices. Most IDE cables therefore have three plugs. One for the mother board and two for devices such as Hard drives and Optical drives. These devices are called master and slave. A device is either master or slave determined by jumper setting on the device. There is usually a chart of jumper settings on most devices.
Many stock machines have only two devices a C: drive which must always be Primary – Master and an optical drive which is most often put on the same cable as C: and is the Primary – Slave. Although this is not the most effective way to work as both drives are on a single BUS. This configuration acts like a single lane highway. Data can only travel in one direction at a time.
For this reason I always remove the optical drive from IDE0 and install an additional IDE1 cable. I change the jumpers on the optical drive to Master and attach it to IDE1
So it becomes “secondary master”. This allows me to burn CD’s from my C: or D: drive faster as the optical drive is on a different bus.
This leaves two ports available for Hard drives or removable hard drives which will always be slaves regardless of which port they are attached to.
So the multi media machines that I set up look like this:
IDE0 Primary Master – C: operating system hard drive
IDE0 Primary Slave – D: an additional hard drive or Dataport
IDE1 Secondary Master – An optical drive and burner
IDE1 Secondary Slave – A hard drive or Dataport
Because all hard drives other than the primary master are slaves they can easily be moved or switched without changing the jumpers. When burning CD’s I always try to burn from IDE0 to IDE1.
George
Update 2006.08.18 - Subject MG# and associated programs
I have finally gotten some time to work on MG# code. I have integrated the "Gabbest" media player classic by "Gabbest". I thank you and I am sending you a donation.
Windows Media Plaver 6.4 is with out a doubt the best player MS ever wrote it is unfortunate that it had several shortcomings that precluded its use as a call from another program. It was obvious that all the program needed was some command line options. Like /fullscreen /play and, the all important /close, so you are returned to the parent program. When I got the source code for Media Player 6.4 I thought my problems were easily solvable. I even had a player up and running with the extra options available on screen but the player was buggy and rather than all the fancy buttons making a call to a reliable Video Player with command line options would be easier. “Gabest” has done this with “Media Player Classic” as he calls it. I have renamed it MGvideo.exe in my MG# folder just so I don’t have to rewrite a lot of code in MG#. At present it simply plays the AVI or MPG in the full screen mode. It plays to the end and closes. The ESC key escapes from full screen to a window.
So far “Media Player Classic” has proven to just as stable as 6.4 with a lot of options added. I played a variety of AVI and MPG files directly from MFm3u.exe without a hitch.
I have tested the DVD functions and am equally impressed. I am now using GABEST as my default DVD viewer. Its the GABEST. Also Plays MPG2 and VOB files.
Presently MS media players 9. are over bloated pieces trash. If you listen your MP3’s with it you must be deaf.
For download
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/guliverkli/mpc2kxp6490.7z?use_mirror=superb-west
So we now have Display of Video in MG#!
For more info on MG#progs see: MG Suite of Programs