lazy l3ib ramblings

DaVinci Resolve Lite, certainly the best free option out there for color correction, now has a Windows version in beta which you can download here. However, the installer is likely to give you an error if your platform is not specifically Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. It will read something like this:

“No configuration matching locale and operating system found within 1 configuration(s)”

And then your installation goes no further.

But, what if you’re pretty sure that your platform would run Resolve Lite just fine, and you want to give it a try anyhow?

Here are the steps to install Resolve Lite if you’re getting the same error. However, this article is not making any guarantees that Resolve Lite will work for you after installation. It’s merely to get around that error dialog and allow for a successful installation.

Note: Resolve Lite is a 64-bit application, so make sure you’re on a 64-bit version of Windows.

1. Make sure that you have an app that can extract both Resolve Lite’s installer and some cab files it has within. I used 7-Zip, so that’s what this tutorial will use as well.
2. Download Resolve Lite for Windows (again, here).
3. Extract the installer to a directory of your choice (Right click->7-Zip->Extract files…).
4. Enter the directory where you just extracted the installer’s files. Inside that directory, go to RES_CAB.
5. See all those .cab files that start with the word SETUP? Extract them all just like you did with the installer in step 2.
6. Great! You’ve just extracted the msi installer for Resolve Lite and the installers for Resolve Lite’s dependencies. Make sure to install everything in this directory. Yes, that also means installing and setting up PostgreSQL.
7. Run Resolve Lite!

I can confirm this working for me on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard. Whether or not it’ll run for you, I cannot say. But now, you can at least install it and see!

Also, on a side note, if after installing and running Resolve Lite it tells you that it cannot find a CUDA card, try upgrading your NVIDIA drivers to the latest version.

Program Files\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\deviceQuery.exe will tell you whether or not your graphics card passes.

Maybe if we’re lucky, Blackmagic will just put up a notification that your platform isn’t supported yet still allow the installer to go further, rather than making you have to go through these steps.

Anyhow, have fun color correcting!

Special thanks to tonsofpcs for his contribution to the article. Check out his site, Video Production Support.

Projects are at github, javeed is now rich and is wasted 24/7, nobody blags anymore, p1 thinks phd comics are funny, sponge dog picture.  fin.

I am sure most of you heard but I built a new PC and finally just said FU to winders and reinstalled it.  This morning I tried out BATTALFIELD and it is actually playable.  I am pleased.

STOP BEING SO BUTTFUCKING LAZY AND MAKE A FUCKING POST ALREADY! THIS IS A FUCKING HIPSTER SITE, IT’S NOT LIKE YOUR POSTS HAVE TO BE INTERESTING TO ANYBODY BUT YOU! IN FACT, IT’S PROBABLY BETTER IF YOUR POSTS ARE ONLY INTERESTING TO YOU! STOP BEING SUCH A PUSSY AND WRITE A FUCKING BLOG POST!

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Hope this inspires somebody! Take care ;)

-illuminata

I recently purchased Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at the behest of professional gamer Justin “Fitzsimmons” Fitzsimmons claiming it was a serious game for professionals and that CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was a toy game for nubs and bros.  Steam was offering BF:BC2 for $30 which is right about the most I’ll pay for the majority of games I’ll play, excluding soccer games of which I will pay top dollar (and play for 500+ hours a season).  This is my take of the first few hours of playing.

I initially tried out the single player mode, which I was surprised was even included as my flirtations with the Battlefield series which began many years ago in college seemed to deem it as only a “pub” game suitable for 32+ players.  The single player mode had story, cinematic introduction, high production value, etc.  It also immediately dogged my 3 year old now antiquated computer, so I switched to the lowest graphic settings in order to keep it playable.  I was entertained while playing this mode, but since multiplayer gaming is what I’m after in a game like this, I wanted to try out this mode.  Here’s where the fun begins.

To play online, you must have an EA account that is active and signs you in. Ok, I have one already from my FIFA days, so no worries - I recalled the email address I used and the correct password.  At this point, I expect to have to enter the serial number as told to me by Steam - this never comes up.  Well, alright, let’s try to play online.

From the multiplayer drop down, there is a “Play Now” option, which brings up a simple “gametype/map” chooser.  I assume this will pick any game with people in it, so I just select “play”.  No dice: “No games found”.  Ok, this is strange.  I literally did not filter anything with my options, and this gmae is recently AND popular, so why are there no games?  My feeble brain concludes it is because I did not enter my game key yet.

On the multiplayer menu, there is an option called “Redeem Code”.  I bring this up and type my Steam provided game key into it.  After some thinking, it tells me it has already been used or is invalid (you can’t tell me?).  I try a few more times, give up assuming the auth server is down or something, and try again the next day.  No luck.  Now I’m getting upset - play now still can’t find a game, I never entered my game key, and now it’s telling me it’s invalid or used already?  Great.  I contact Steam support after reading the FAQ about game keys (and reverifying local cache etc).  They get back to me about how they don’t support the game as it’s EA, and I’ll have to contact them.  This is going to go well.

After dealing with EA’s shitty website to try and find more info about it, something finally states that the “Redeem Code” option is NOT where you enter your game key, it is for downloadable content or whatever.  Gee, thanks, UI, ever think that someone might get that confused?  How bout a little sentence on the popup for that portion saying what a “Code” is?

So, that’s not what I need to do. But I still can’t connect to a game. And bringing up the “Server” tab on the bottom right hand corner of the main menu doesn’t help - it lists nothing.  I can vaguely make out from the near invisible tabs that it only shows your history and favorites.  I try another “Server” item from the multiplayer menu to find a completely DIFFERENT server browser, albeit not populated.  Pressing refresh or search or whatever on this finally lists some servers, and I manage to join a multiplayer game for the first time, a week and a half after buying the damn thing.

I only played briefly so my thoughts on the multiplayer game are this:

• Maps are goddamn big.  I mean seriously.  You better hope there are vehicles, or you’re doing a lot of goddamn running to find people only to be shot quickly and repeat the whole process.
• My computer can barely handle the game on low settings.  Too much swirly dust and stuff.  Makes it slow down when trying to aim/fire.
• Guns have a lot of recoil, will take getting used to.

I also own CoD: MW2 that I bought after a Steam free weekend in which I got hooked on the achievement/reward system.  I play it occasionally but only as a pub game, the same way I view Counter-Strike.  Something to waste time with, but not play “seriously” like Enemy Territory.  So far: my experience with MW2 has been MUCH better than BF.  YW.

Before I get started, I’d just like to give another fuck you to tumblr, this time for scaling uploaded images and not having the automatic ability to click on an image for a larger version. tumblr modifies the actual image. Anyhow, let’s proceed.

So, the review long awaited by two people is finally available to you. But first, it would help to know what the fuck it is. The good people of Hong Kong have made a device that intended to take your low res sources and scale up the image, all while offering processing options. Here it is, roughly the size of a flask of whiskey.

The HD Box Pro can take component and VGA in and outputs VGA out. Remember, component is not composite, so composite video to this device just won’t work out well. For audio to be used along side VGA, you’d need a 3.5mm cable to run to the TV. There’s only 3.5mm out for audio, nothing more. The TV I tested this on has 3.5mm in for VGA, but others may take RCA in. You’ll want to check and see what audio options you have for your TV first and then possibly get a 3.5mm to RCA stereo adapter cable for it.

Here’s what the inputs and outputs look like:

You’ll notice that they have the wrong colors on the L and R inputs. From what I understand from reading elsewhere, they aren’t meant to read as R and then L.

The HD Box Pro also ships with a remote, which would be nice if it didn’t suck balls. It has a usable distance of about three feet and doesn’t perform well on an indirect angle. Furthermore, the buttons are fucking weird. Take a look.

Basically, the enter button gets you to the menu and the RS button is an aspect ratio toggle. As far as the other shit goes, dunno. The next time I go to play a game on it, I’ll push them a whole bunch to see if anything happens.

First, let’s see two games before the HD Box Pro is used. These are displayed on an LG 32LD450, which I don’t believe is doing much processing-wise. The games are Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec and The King of Fighters XI for the Playstation 2, both output at 480i via component out.

I should also note that the images have had their brightness adjusted as the room was not well lit and my camera’s aperture was rather small. Anyhow, on to the images.

Before seeing the results, here’s the menu options from the HD Box Pro.

Sharpness, dark detail (seems to be black level adjustments), and motion level (not quite sure what that does) are on a scale up to 10. The other options go up to 100. Also, on the display menu, I’m not quite sure what the RB means in option 10.

Here’s what the image looks like at 1080p, 60hz via VGA out.

The image looks good, aside from being a bit soft with the default settings for Gran Turismo 3. Here’s what it looks like with a maximum sharpness increase.

For comparison’s sake, this is what it looks like at the minimum sharpness level. The next shot also shows what KOF XI looks like with what I believe are the same settings.

The HD Box Pro does a rather good job upscaling. However, you shouldn’t expect picture quality comparable to an HD source. That’s simply asking too much. But, it will take a lower res source and make the picture quality a bit nicer on a high res display.

I purchased mine straight from the people that make the device. It shipped relatively fast directly from Hong Kong, but they did send me two tracking numbers for the same package. One wasn’t on record, the other was said to head to Canada, while I live in the U.S. Aside from that, the device only cost $50 and shipping was reasonable (a bit above $10). That’s one of the big benefits of the HD Box Pro, the price.

This works well for analog sources, however, there’s a lot of devices out there that claim to do similar results. Some use HDMI out, some use SCART in (which is most used by people in Europe and is the connector of choice for older game consoles), and there’s other devices with different combinations of inputs and outputs. In fact, some of these boxes apparently use the same chipset with the same menu system. There’s a good chance that if you buy a scaling box at a similar price to the HD Box Pro, you’ll essentially be getting the same device, just with different inputs. Just make sure you search beforehand to see if others have anything to say about it.

In the future, I may get some video of the device in action. I might also provide high res image links that tumblr should have done on its own but fucked up. Then, I also want to test this with a 240p source (older game consoles that output via SCART, and then converting SCART to component or VGA before going into the HD Box Pro). I’ve heard from some that it works, while some said that it doesn’t.

We’ll see whether or not there’s a part two. Until then, here’s some links.

HD Box Pro’s website

The thread at Shmups, discussing the HD Box Pro (a Shoot ‘em Up game forum).

Hazard City, a site that has a ton of info on scalers and other related items.

Just one more note on tumblr before I go, the post editor is fucking nuts. I navigate away from the editor, come back, and two of the images are put at the end of the post. Last night, I could’ve swore I saved the edit (almost half of this was rewritten) but it was gone too. For some reason, I can’t see the queue from this blog, but I can for my account’s blog. Then, for this very post, I had to copy it to another post editor because the save button got fucked up. Stupid bullshit.

Edited at the suggestion of floffe to remove potential analog/digital stupidity.

The HD Box Pro is here, and I’ll have a review. But, others have reviewed it in various forums and what I have to say will probably be similar.

I BET YOU CAN’T FUCKING WAIT.

(Also, fuck you tumblr, again, for removing blink tags. They are fucking great and would’ve been of great use here.)

you are tired of rerunning xinput after unplugging your mouse.

it has gone on for too long.

if this is you plz to be keeping up.

$ dmesg

[182008.680756] input: Razer Razer Mamba as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.0/input/input71

$ udevadm info -a -p /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.1/

<snip>  

looking at parent device ‘/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.0/usb3/3-1’:   KERNELS==”3-1”    

SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”    
DRIVERS==”usb”
<snip>  
ATTRS{quirks}==”0x0”
ATTRS{authorized}==”1”  
ATTRS{manufacturer}==”Razer”  
ATTRS{product}==”Razer Mamba”
<snip>

$ tail -n 1 /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

ATTRS{product}==”Razer Mamba”, ACTION==”add”, RUN+=”/usr/local/bin/fixmousesu”

$ cat /usr/local/bin/fixmousesu

#!/bin/bash
su - user -c ‘/usr/local/bin/fixmouse’


$ cat /usr/local/bin/fixmouse
#!/bin/bash
export DISPLAY=:0.0
# no accel
xinput set-prop 8 “Device Accel Profile” -1
# set sens (9 = slow)
xinput set-prop 8 ”Device Accel Constant Deceleration” 2

# udevadm —debug control —reload-rules
done!

19:12 p1: jvd how to decrease mouse sens@x?

19:13 p1: new mouse is max sens compared to old

20:29 p1: jvd: o nm found a button@mouse to do it :P

20:29 p1: p hardcore

20:31 jvd: no

20:31 jvd: NO

20:31 jvd: doin it rong

20:32 jvd: that’s like reducing your screen resolution if text is too small

20:32 jvd: instead of increasing font size

If you have a pro gamer mouse with insane resolution (HIGH DPI LOL!), you’ll want to fix some things in Xorgy. They keep changing things around, so you might find misleading references on The Internet.

The relevant settings are described in a potentially obscure document. First, find out what your mouse device is called.

ε % xinput list

⎡ Virtual core pointer                     id=2 [master pointer  (3)]

⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer               id=4 [slave  pointer  (2)]

⎜   ↳ Logitech G9 Laser Mouse                 id=8 [slave  pointer  (2)]

⎜   ↳ Logitech G9 Laser Mouse                 id=9 [slave  pointer  (2)]

⎜   ↳ Macintosh mouse button emulation         id=11 [slave  pointer  (2)]

⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   id=3 [master keyboard (2)]

    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             id=5 [slave  keyboard (3)]

    ↳ Power Button                             id=6 [slave  keyboard (3)]

    ↳ Power Button                             id=7 [slave  keyboard (3)]

    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard             id=10 [slave  keyboard (3)]

Clearly mine is called ‘Logitech G9 Laser Mouse’. Unfortunately, for some reason, there are two of them listed. If we try to use the name to denote the device, xinput doesn’t know what to do. We’ll use the ‘id’ thing instead. Through sophisticated scientific experiments, I found that setting things for id 8 works (I didn’t need to touch id 9).

 First, we want to disable acceleration. Note that the magic number 8 is the id we just found, and -1 means no acceleration.

xinput set-prop 8 “Device Accel Profile” -1

The mouse pointer probably still moves too quickly. Luckily, the aforementioned document describes a setting that can help us.

xinput set-prop 8 “Device Accel Constant Deceleration” 3

You’ll probably have to play with that last ‘3’ to get the sensitivity to a comfortable level.

These settings will be lost when you restart X. I put the xinput lines in my .xinitrc to fix that.

This concludes the lesson on correct mouse operation.

holy wall of text

I’ve changed my 24hz modeline to this:

Modeline “1920x1080@23.976” 74.25 1920 2558 2602 2752 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync

glxgears says it’s a bit faster than 23.976Hz, but mplayer is perfectly smooth. On that note, there were two mplayer issues that I encountered and seem to have solved.

The first problem is correct colorspace conversion (YUV to RGB). The xorg radeon driver’s xv output and mplayer’s opengl output both originally output RGB values in the range [0,255], which is correct for a computer monitor. However, TVs are designed to work with [16,235].

Both of the mentioned output drivers use pixel shaders to go from YUV to RGB. Modifying the fragment program in radeon’s xv output looked extremely painful. However, mplayer’s opengl output allows one to use an arbitrary fragment program. With debugging enabled, it spits out the fragment program that it generated (in case you haven’t supplied your own.)

I started with the fragment program generated by mplayer -vo gl:colorspace=2:levelconv=2. This actually gives correct output, except that it allows for the possibility of output values outside of the range [16,235]. Fixing this was trivial. The resulting fragment program can be used with mplayer -vo gl:customprog=/path/to/pro.fp.

The second problem was that every so often, the video would appear to “jump” or “skip”. This is solved using mplayer -mc 0, to disable A-V sync correction. However, it is desirable to have A-V sync correction when playback starts and when seeking. To fix this, I did a quick hackjob @ mplayer.c to disable correction once the A-V difference is within a certain range, and re-enable it during seeking.

I also had some problems with xmms2 and HDMI audio output. xmms2 expects write operations to the sound card to block until they are completed. For some reason, the mysterious alsa radeon hdmi thingy driver blocks for too long. To fix this, I did a quick hack which ensures non-zero available space in the sound buffer before trying to write to it. I should probably submit a bug report at some point…

I just installed Enemy Territory for the first time in a couple of years, since moving to Arch Linux and 64-bit. I have also left behind my old SB Live. Any of these three points might be the cause for not getting sound in ET (although Arch should not be it).

I get “sound system is muted” when starting ET, none of the dreaded “device or resource busy which can be fixed by running the famous lines as root.

I managed to solve my issue by installing this package (in AUR as et-sdl-sound), and running et as “enemy-territory.sdl” rather than just “enemy-territory”. This method was painless and gets a nice recommendation from me.

I just bought an HD Box Pro. It’s made in Hong Kong by real Hong Kongers. It upscales your old game shit and makes it look good. Also, check out this thread at shmups.system11.org because they know about the HD Box Pro. I’ll review it once I have it and then you’ll know more about it.

nyxmms2 is awesome, but I get tired of typing ls and jump to view/switch songs. xmmsviewer is born!