Author Archives: joed

How To Speed Up Your Pendrive??

Posted by on April 17, 2010 1 comment

It always has been a time consuming task to copy data from one system to other or to some portable device. Follow the steps to increase the performance of your usb flash drives.

  • Set your pendrive filesystem to NTFS (well FAT32 cannot handle large data). This can be done by formatting the drive and settting the filesystem to NTFS.
  • Right Click the drive and click properties
  • Select the hardware tab and select your drive from the list and click properties.
  • Select the policies tab and change the radio button to Optimize for performance.

There you are done. Now enjoy higher data rates.

Note: Formatting will delete all your data. NTFS cannot be read by WIndows 2000 or before. Original data rates may depend on your pendrive and Operating System.

Encode Your Videos Using Your GPU

Posted by on March 16, 2010 No comments

Encoding videos has always been time consuming task. Time consumption has been so long because of the CPU’s inability to use its raw power for image processing, which has always been below par when compared to GPU. Traditionally the encoding was done by the CPU with playback assist from DirectX. But with the introduction of Nvidia’s CUDA and Ati’s Stream  parallel processing power video encoding wont be the lazy bit of task anymore. GPU video encoding not only reduces the load on the CPU but also reduces the time for encoding, since GPU is more powerful than the CPU for image processing. Reducing the CPU load makes it possible to all possible things along with the encoding processes which were unimaginable otherwise.

Even though transcoding Blu-ray movies isn’t exactly at the top of everyone’s list, but one can significantly reduce its size using H.264/x264. x264 is the new DivX and its usefulness extends far beyond just ripping HD movies. Its use isn’t going to increase unless encoding using the codec gets faster. Elemental Technologies has been working on a technology they called RapiHD, which is a GPU-accelerated H.264 video encoder. This is introduced in Nvidia’s CUDA.

Many Software’s are already in market capable of using this raw GPU power.

Some of them are

1)Badaboom: Badaboom is a blazingly fast media converter that formats video files for a variety of devices, including iPod, PSP, Blackberry, and YouTube, by using your system’s graphics processing unit (GPU). In a practice that used to take several hours, Badaboom converts feature-length movies in a matter of minutes while keeping the videos looking crisp and clear. By harnessing the power of NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs, Badaboom offloads the CPU to allow users to continue browsing the Internet or checking email without decreased system performance, making transcoding high-quality video fast, easy, and painless. Have a look at it here.

2)ATI Avivo Video Converter: ATI Avivo Video Converter supports transcoding between H.264, VC-1, WMV9, WMV9 PMC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX video formats, as well as formats used in iPod and PSP. Earlier versions of this software uses only the CPU for transcoding, but have been locked for exclusive use with the ATI X1000 series of GPUs. Software modifications have made it possible to use version 1.12 of converter on a wider range of graphics adapters. The ATI Avivo Video Converter with GPU transcoding acceleration is now also available for use with HD 4800 and HD 4600 series graphics cards and is included with the Catalyst 8.12 drivers. Support for Vista x64 is available via a separate download starting with Catalyst 9.6. The new software is faster than Badaboom, an encoder that uses NVIDIA’s CUDA to accelerate encoding, but has a higher CPU utilization than Badaboom.Have a look at it here.

3)CyberLink MediaShow Espresso: MediaShow Espresso’s support for NVIDIA® CUDA™ and ATI ® Stream™ technology delivers huge gains when transcoding high-definition video content. Delivering up to 10X FASTER performance, MediaShow Espresso leverages the power of the GPU to the maximum and produces faster results. With faster speeds for HD video transcoding, you’ll spend less time converting home videos to H.264, and more time enjoying your movie masterpieces. MediaShow Espresso allows the output of H.264 content for playback on PSP, iPod, iPhone and PS3 and a choice of video profiles for high quality or small file sizes.Have a look at it here.

Will The GPU Replace The CPU Or Will It Be The Other Way Around?

Posted by on March 9, 2010 3 comments

The Significance of GPU has sky rocked to a level that its even required for running an Operating System. Windows Vista made this impact and made GPU more significant, which was otherwise required for only gaming and video editing. Nowadays  every user not only looks at CPU and Memory configuration, the GPU is also considered with equally importance. Even thought  the use of dedicated GPU is limited its fast rising.

Intel’s plans to introduce its new architecture, Sandy Bridge, which has 2 integrated GPU’s and that run at about 1-1.4Ghz may be a challenge for the GPU developers. Even though  these may not seem so dangerous for now. Intel’s plans to improve it much higher grade in the future.

Intel wanted to  integrate all the computation into a single device which was the CPU. GPU was introduced to give some extra bandwidth for image processing. And now with the introduction of Intel’s Nehalam processor and GPGPU, things have have become a bit interesting for whom is to survive this race. GPU has replaced the CPU in many roles which was otherwise performed by the CPU. The power to price ratio of CPU is no where near that of the GPU, even though a GPU is capable of doing computation limited to vectors it may be such that such developments may significantly decrease the role of CPU to a drastic level. CPU will be limited to do just the basic computation purpose and the rest may be done by the GPU. There will be time when we may ask “Whats the specs of your GPU?”, instead of asking for the CPU.

It may seem clear to say that the GPU will rise over CPU, but Intel’s proposed new Larrabee architecture has raised hope for intel to power its graphic power and compete with the GPU vendors in the future. Its not a question of who will survive? But its a question who will dominate?


You may like this too
From Central-Processing on the CPU to Co-Processing on CPU & GPU with Nvidia’s CUDA Architecture.

FOOBAR2000: The Damn Small Audio Player

Posted by on March 7, 2010 1 comment

The name foobar is derived from a common meta-syntactic variable name used in computer programming. Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for windows, it has highly modular design and extensive SDK which allows third-party developers to customize even change the interface. The core structure is closed source but the SDK is under BSD license. Foobar2000 is very small in size and includes many tools like tagging and audio conversion and all this and more at merely a size of 3MB. Many other audio players more than double the size wont offer such features. Foobar2000 increases audio fidelity using noise shaping and dithering. Ask anyone if they have opened a 7z file with an audio player, well Foobar2000 does that with no problems, all you need is an addon.

The Main Feature of Foobar are:

  • Audio formats supported natively: MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA, and more.
  • Full Unicode support.
  • Customizable user interface .
  • Advanced tagging capabilities.
  • Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats with command line support.
  • ReplayGain support – both playback and calculation.
  • Gapless playback support.
  • Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
  • Media Library with automated folder watching.
  • Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.
  • Embedded support for album list, album art, spectrum visualization.
  • Metadata support and file organization.

Moreover Additional components can be added providing more support

  • APE, ALAC support.
  • Playback statistics.
  • Kernel streaming support.
  • ASIO support.
  • WASAPI output support.
  • CD burning support.
  • Ability to open archives (7z, RAR, ZIP ).

Foobar2000 is a must for all music fans out there. So Check it out.

Screenshots:

Download

Plus there are additional components here.

There are also skins available here.

Or If you are interested in developing additional tools download the SDK here.

So Have fun with Foobar2000.

XBMC:The Full-Fledged Media Centre

Posted by on March 5, 2010 No comments

XBMC (Formely Known as Xbox Media Center) is basically a free and open source cross platform media centre to suit all your media needs. It is written in C and using some python. Comes with a large codec support so that you can play all your media files with ease. It outperforms the default media center. A lot of plugins and addons like BBC player, Radio, ESPN makes XBMC more additive. Using XBMC makes you forget all about the Operating System that is siting ideal, such that they are providing it as Live CD and Live USB.

XBMC has greater basic hardware requirements than a traditional 2D software applications, this basically means that it needs 3D capable GPU graphics hardware controller for all rendering; on the other hand, powerful 3D GPU chips are common today in most modern computers. It even plays pure 1080p media files using a core 2 duo processor using only the CPU power. Hardware accelerated video decoding using VDPAU is supported in XBMC 9.04 (and later) under Linux on Nvidia graphics hardware.

You can make a cool library by adding covers, description, fanart etc. It moreover supports network playback so you can stream media anywhere in your house or from the net using practically any protocol available.

XBMC is used as a application framework platform for others projects to base their media center software on, and today at least Boxee, MediaPortal, Plex, and Voddler are separate derivative products that are all known to initially have copied the GUI and media player parts of their software from XBMC’s source code.

XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Plugin scripts like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, weather forecast, TV-guides, e-mail clients, instant messaging, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware, Internet-radio-station browsers, P2P file-sharing downloaders, IRC, also casual games such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more.

XBMC is distributed as a GPL and is developed by a global community, so there is lot to offer. Moreover it doesn’t require a high-end PC making it is easy to build a Economical HTPC. If you want a HTPC you got to have XBMC, The Ultimate one. The difficult to put all the feature of XBMC in words, to know it ,you got to experience it.

XBMC supports a lot of platforms, namely Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple TV and there are also Live versions.

Download

and also dont forget to check out skins and plugins.

here is a site dedicated for all plugins and scripts.