If you ever find yourself needing to do video playback and format conversion with a wide variety of video formats on Windows, I have a few key free pieces of software to recommend:
VirtualDub: a video capture and processing tool that can very quickly read, manipulate, and write AVI files in many formats (VirtualDubMod, a spinoff, handles even more formats) (Wikipedia description)
VirtualDub filters: the other great thing about VirtualDub is that there are many plugin filters available that implement a varietyof video/image processing algorithms
ffdshow: a codec (decoder and encoder) package that installs as a native Windows DirectShow filter, enabling playback of many modern video formats in Windows Media Player
Auto Gordian Knot: a tool for converting DVD video content into XviD or DivX or x264 MPEG4 video
MediaInfo: reveals the codecs used for video and audio contents within a video file
The DOAJ lists scholarly journals that give free access to the full text articles. Some papers are pretty decent — I poked around and found the International Journal of Signal Processing interesting.
The IR & EO Systems Handbook — the definitive reference for Infrared and Electro-Optical systems — is available for free. For scanned PDFs, the quality is high. Unfortunately, the fact that they are scanned means that the text is not searchable.
Volume 1: Sources of Radiation
Volume 2: Atmospheric Propagation of Radiation
Volume 3: Electro-Optical Components
Volume 4: Electro-Optical Systems Design, Analysis, and Testing
Volume 5: Passive Electro-Optical Systems
Volume 6: Active Electro-Optical Systems
Volume 7: Countermeasure Systems
Volume 8: Emerging Systems and Technologies
For some reason, TiVo Desktop version 1.9.3 (008) for Mac OS X is a processor hog for me. Especially after I’ve committed the crime of actually running iTunes or iPhoto on a given day.
I’ve noticed that stopping and starting TiVo Desktop improves this situation, but I’ve also gotten personally tired of doing this, so now I offer you a way of automating an escape from this monotony. Use the plist file here:
saved in the /Users/uname/Library/LaunchAgents/ folder with a name something like com.QuickSilverWatch.plist in combo with these launchd instructions. Or, just use lingon as described is this Mac OS X Hint. Either way, you’ll need this applescript to actually reboot TiVo Desktop:
-- open Sys Prefs and wait for it to open
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
end tell
-- stop/start TiVo Desktop w/10 trys
repeat 10 times
delay 1
try
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "System Preferences"
-- set frontmost to true w/10 trys
repeat 10 times
try
click menu item "TiVo Desktop" of menu ...
"View" of menu bar 1
delay 1
tell window "TiVo Desktop"
click button "Stop"
click button "Start"
end tell
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
end tell
end tell
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
-- quit Sys Prefs
tell application "System Preferences"
quit
end tell
