Carbonized Blog » Tutorial http://carbonize.co.uk/wp Just a bunch of stuff Sat, 09 Aug 2014 07:58:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=308 Zuma Blitz on IE9 http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/2011/05/17/zuma-blitz-on-ie9/ http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/2011/05/17/zuma-blitz-on-ie9/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 15:43:08 +0000 http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/?p=449 OK I’ve noticed a few people a searching for information about Zuma Blitz on IE9. I did notice this issue myself when I first tried IE9. The main problem is the hardware acceleration that comes turned on by default in IE9 which results in Zuma, and anything else Flash intensive, being really jerky and laggy unless you are on a pretty powerful computer. This is because both Flash and the web browser are using hardware acceleration and competing for your graphic cards processor. This also applies to Firefox 4. Anyway you can try to improve things by disabling the hardware acceleration in either the browser or in Flash.

To disable it in the browser go to Internet options by either clicking the gear cog on the right hand side of IE9s toolbar or go to your control panel. Once open click on the Advanced tab. The very first option is Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering* so tick that. You will then have to restart IE9. Hopefully Zuma Blitz will be a bit more tolerable now.

To disable it in Flash simply go to a web page that has Flash in it and right click on the flash. From the menu that appears select Settings… and then deselect the Enable hardware acceleration option.

So first try disabling one. If that doesn’t work re-enable the one you disabled and disable the other one. If it’s still jerky try disabling them both.

If all else fails you can always just uninstall IE9 and go back to IE8 or try one of the other browsers such as Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

]]> http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/2011/05/17/zuma-blitz-on-ie9/feed/ 1 Play MKV on Xbox 360 http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/2011/05/14/play-mkv-on-xbox-360/ http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/2011/05/14/play-mkv-on-xbox-360/#comments Sat, 14 May 2011 10:51:56 +0000 http://carbonize.co.uk/wp/?p=440 OK so I downloaded the first two episodes of Pioneer One which is a free to download mini series made for VoDo, which is a free video site. Unfortunately, like a lot of high definition (HD) video, it came in the MKV format which, unfortunately, the Xbox 360 does not support. Now the first thing you need to understand is that the video format is just a container. The actual video and audio inside the container can be exactly the same in a different container. Orange juice is still orange juice whether it’s in a glass or a cup. Anyway what we need to do is take the audio and video out of the MKV container and put it in to a container that the 360 can play such as mp4. I did a search for instructions on how to do this by searching for play MKV on Xbox 360 but the one I found required about 10 different programs. Admittedly the instructions on that page are from 2008. Mine is a lot simpler and requires just a single, portable, program called XMedia Recode. The site is in German but just click Download under where it says XMedia Recode Portable. Extract the contents of the zip file and run XMedia Recode.

XMedia Recode
  1. Drag the video file you want to convert over on to the XMedia Recode window and wait for it to finish checking it
  2. Click on the video in the list near the top of the XMedia Recode window
  3. Click the Format tab and change Profile to Custom, Format to MP4 and File Extension to mp4
  4. Click the Video tab and tick the Video Copy box at the bottom of the options
  5. Click the Audio tab and under Modus select Copy. If your file has multiple audio streams you can choose to remove some at this point.
  6. At the bottom, under Output, change it to Source Path so the mp4 version appears in same folder as the original (optional)
  7. Click Add Job at the top
  8. Click Encode

If you want to do more than one file simply repeat steps 1 – 7 before clicking Encode. So now you now how simple it is to get MKV to play on Xbox 360.

Just a minor update. I forgot that the Xbox does not like 5.1 audio so if your original file is using 5.1 audio you will have to convert to stereo. If you do you need to do this then simply setting the Modus under Audio to convert instead of copy should work just fine as the default is stereo.

Warning! – The latest version of Xmedia recode, 3.0.3.0, has a bug where selecting Video copy will result in an empty file being created. I have informed them of this bug. Appears to have been fixed in version 3.0.3.4.

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