The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

With films typically I see 1536kbps AC3 (512kbps per channel).
As far as video goes, h.264 tends to be the going trend for tv and film. Web video is generally native MP4, including the extension.

 

It's also the format Apple has adopted for HD films. h.264 is sort of a unified codec pack/encoding technology that actually takes the first step towards unified formats. Maybe I'm a broken record here, but basically yep everything is MP4 these days.

h.264 is the container format, much like MKV, but normally both audio and video are MP4 in an h.264 encoded file. Just FYI MP4 audio is more commonly known as AAC So anything specifically h.264 is usually going to be MP4/AAC. AAC actually shines for surround audio as it's very space conservative for the quality. All of this is why you normally see .mp4 as the extension even though h.264 is the actual container.

x.264 is specifically the video codec and this is the really common one you see used in MKVs alongside AC-3 audio.

This is all separate from older native .mp4 encodes which used a much older standard. Like the .mp4 files say a PSP or iPod would play. h.264 is essentially .mp4 with a much larger range of compatibility, but native .mp4 is lighter weight and usually has better compression which makes it ideal for mobile devices.

 

Yeah I hear you guys, you all tell me it works, why it works for you guys and not me I don't know, I have several players, neither works with bluray, go figure.

 

Because VLC doesn't recognize the index file of the Blu-ray but does play the M2TS files. You have to go into the Streams folder and play the biggest M2TS file which is normally the movie but there are Blu-rays that use multiple smaller files for the movie so that isn't a hard fast rule.

Not plug-and-play so I can see why you wouldn't of found it useful or thought it would work. It does play the stream files rather well and I like it for taking snap shots of the movie which I use for custom covers and labels.

For a easy free Blu-ray Player try Digiarty's player;

DAPlayer 1.0.1.9

VLC will be supporting native Blu-ray movies soon as they are working on that and have some buggy limited use versions out there right now named "VLC media player nightly 2.1.0" in both 32bit and 64bit.

 

I don't know about VLC, but MPCHC will play "bluray directories", where there's multiple M2TS files for the main title. And that's just it. MPCHC by default goes straight to the main movie. I haven't tried "Three Musketeers" yet, but it's probably broken, like most peoples...

 

Interesting little tidbit I picked up on newegg, whilst panning through reviews for the WD30EZRX (no longer sold by anyone in the UK until the next shipment arrives in a month or so, hence looking at newegg).

A couple of people proclaiming to be in the IT industry have observed extraordinary rates of mechanical premature failure/DOA of WD green drives of all sizes (e.g. click of death) that they have not observed in similar batches from other retailers - leading them to suspect inappropriate warehouse storage.

It's something I've suspected for a while, with every WD Green drive usually seeing about 30% of its reviews claim a DOA drive, considering multi-buy purchases, yet I own 20 WD Green drives, of which none have yet failed.

Food for thought?

 

Wow, somebody finally explained it to me in a way I can understand, thank you, I will give that a shot and see what happens and hope I can figure it out, and that vlc 210, buggy is an understatement, I had to get rid of it after messing with it for about 5 minutes, it was a total bust, would not play anything let alone bluray.

 

I keep very close tabs on my HDD's(SMART statistics). It would be quite the shame if either of my drives up and failed. Most of them are at 75% capacity. Can't wait til something non mechanical becomes standard...

Although there's always risk

 

Yeah! I found the replacement 8600Gt fan on ebay for $9.99!

Totally worth it in my opinion. My mickeymoused hot glued solution wasn't working. It did work, but the glue wasn't holding very well. Now I can probably sell it! Probably not for much... But at least I paid zero shipping on the fan

 

This is the smallest computer rebuild I've ever done LOL! The screen was severely scratched. I replaced it with a perfectly cut chunk from something lying around. Is this not the cutest thing you've ever seen? The screen even lights up with a typical classic apple/mac desktop. It's apparently part of the american girl set.
It'll likely go for auction.

 

Toy repair omega?

 

LOL, I did it for my mother. Working on tiny things is kind of difficult for her. Plus I had to prove her wrong. She said that we wouldn't be able to replace the plastic screen. It was a sixteenth thick. I used something that's only 2 hundredths thick. But I braced it well. Apparently they fetch a pretty penny too. So of course I had to repair it

 

I still collect toys from time to time

 

Some toys are very cool. I've been watching Star Trek toys for instance. I really want a large enterprise to play with. Heck, any of the trek lore ships would be cool! I'd love to do some image editing with them!

 

The pentium 4 is a joke by todays standards. I recently lost internet, and found myself tethering to another switch in the house(50ft Crossover ethernet). I'm so glad I bought that cord a while back LOL! But before hand, I was handling my facebook on a 2001 Pc. Monster World(a flash based game) taxed the CPU fully. I've been thinking that her hard drive has been the bottleneck. Now, I'm looking quite sharply at the CPU. That whole system is OUTDATED LOL! I plan to open up her case this weekend, and see about Micro ATX/ATX options.

Probably just go with a micro with IDE option, and a low watt CPU. She doesn't do anything intensive on that machine. She's an ebayer solely. Of course Ram will also need to be updated. She likely wants to stick with XP for a while longer. So I can probably uninstall the main drivers, shut it down and do the build. That way I theoretically don't need to reinstall XP. She has Apps on there she wants to keep

 

Surely not? I guess I'm gonna have to chat with her then. I will NOT reinstall XP. If it comes to that, I'll install '7' instead

 

New hardware very often means new install of windows, even if you uninstall the drivers - there are some parts of the system you can't remove, and it's those that cause the problems.

If new machine, I don't see why windows 7 is an issue, but then XP isn't really an issue either.