Dan Cunningham

Hi there...

I'm Dan and this is my website. I’m an Irish IT infrastructure architect with 10+ years experience in a wide range of technologies. I spend most of my time designing, implementing, securing and managing the workstation infrastructure for a large multinational company in Dublin. I also do a bit of development. You will find some of the applications I've built here.

7 July 2010 4 Comments

EncodeHD 1.2.209 Released

This is just a small feature enhancement and bugfix release for a few things that cropped in the last build. Hopefully this sorts out some of the issues that I’ve been getting mails about :)

Changelog:

  • NEW: Added support for HTC Desire
  • NEW: Added support for Nokia N900
  • NEW: Added Hebrew as a preferred language type
  • CHANGE: Revert back to 2-channel down-sampling. Seems to work most of the time and 5.1 AAC caused device incompatibilities. Better to fail upfront than after encoding
  • FIX: Double conversion error could occur in locales where the decimal is ,

Download available in the Media Tools > EncodeHD section. And don’t forget to download the faac encoder library!

Enjoy! :)

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23 June 2010 13 Comments

EncodeHD 1.2.206.0 Released

I initially planned to just add support for a few new hardware models, but then I kinda got caught up in some audio issues that I really wanted to resolve. I then discovered that stream copying is now working in FFmpeg for H.264 video, so I’ve enabled this. Basically, if you’ve got, say, a 720p MKV and you output to a device that supports 720p or higher, the video stream is just remuxed into the new file instead of having to be re-encoded. This gives HUGE performance gains. In one sample file I use, converting for use on the X360 is down from 6 minutes to around 15 seconds!

The major underlying change to note is that since the ‘libfaac’ audio encoder is no longer considered to be GPL compliant, that meant either using the new experimental AAC encoder in FFmpeg which has some fairly huge quality issues right now, or keeping EncodeHD GPL compliant and letting people download the libfaac library separately. I’ve opted to go this route. So before you try to run EncodeHD, please ensure that you have downloaded the library from here under the ‘faac encoder’ section, and place the files in the EncodeHD folder. Otherwise you’ll get an error when EncodeHD starts.

Here’s the full changelog:

  • NEW: Support for Apple iPhone 4 & iPad
  • NEW: Support for HTC EVO 4G
  • NEW: H.264 video stream copying when specific device adjustments (resolution / bitrate) are not required, giving dramatic performance improvements (no need to re-encode)
  • CHANGE: Switched to Gianluigi Tiesi’s FFmpeg builds to avail of dynamic loading of libfaac (r23591). This is an additional component that is not GPL compliant and needs to be downloaded separately from here under the ‘faac encoder’ section
  • CHANGE: No longer try to force 2 channel audio from 5.1 audio streams. FFmpeg generally fails. Instead, try 5.1 AAC and let the device downmix
  • CHANGE: Increased maximum audio bitrates for AppleTV, PS3, X360 and WDTV to 320kbps
  • CHANGE: Updated MediaInfo to 0.7.33
  • CHANGE: Updated MP4Box to 0.4.6 Dev 12/06/2010

Download available in the Media Tools > EncodeHD section.

Enjoy!


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15 April 2010 0 Comments

Software Compliance Tool 1.0.90.0 Released

Hi all,

I’ve implemented a number of small changes to SCT to make it better capable of handling automatic application removal and resolve issues with certain types of uninstallers.

Head on over to the SCT section to download it. Here’s what’s changed

  • CHANGE: Reverse Application Enumeration to ensure that Windows Installer is processed first
  • CHANGE: Encapsulate paths as required
  • FIX: Resolve issues with uninstallers of type RunDLL32
  • FIX: Resolve issues with arguments of type /? and -?
  • FIX: Exception could be incorrectly thrown when the uninstall string contained quotation marks

Dan

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7 April 2010 2 Comments

EncodeHD updated on GitHub

It was pointed out to me yesterday that EncodeHD wasn’t updated on GitHub to the latest 1.1.182.0 release. Ths has now been rectified. Sorry about that folks.

It can be found here: http://github.com/sintaxasn/EncodeHD

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19 February 2010 1 Comment

Workstation Migration Assistant 1.09 Released

Second blog post of the evening, I’ve been a busy lad :)

Again, this is mainly a bugfix release – primary intended to resolve an issue on Windows 7 with USMT4. Here’s the changelog:

  • NEW: Command-line option /PRIMARYDATADRIVE <drive>. Required when user data is being restored to a different partition from C:
  • FIX: Migration Assistant would display an error relating to MigSys.XML on Windows 7 when the RuleSet wasn’t modified
  • FIX: Lots of smaller code fixes (I switched SVN repo and lost exactly what these were, but they were important!)

Download in the Migration Assistant section. Enjoy! :)

Incidentally, I’m not back developing these apps fulltime, and I really do hope that someone picks up development of these from GitHub.

 

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