Today, I was processing something in the background while I slept. I’m pretty much in bed for most of today and I will be for most of tomorrow. I was trying to convert a movie that I enjoy, called “Vampire Hunter D”, from one AVI format to another. The original avi format was called DIV3 or MP43. This is Microsoft’s hacked-around version of MPEG4 video + MP3 audio for low-motion videos. Most animes can fall under this category, I think. However, the Microsoft DIV3/MP43 format is so old and screwy that it’s almost impossible to find something to decode it correctly.

You can know the format for .avi files (maybe other movies, I don’t know) by something called a FourCC code. In order to change this movie from one format to another, the best way with the most options that I have found is to first install codecs (I used Nimo Codec Pack) for compressing/decompressing the movies. Then, take a program such as VirtualDub(1.6.3 at the time of this writing) to change from one format to another.

Inside of VitualDub, when you go to open a file, there is a setting to show advanced options for that file. Check the first “force FOURCC box” and type “MPV3” into it. This will make it so that VirtualDub reads the video as a different format, basically the same as DIV3, and will let you re-encode it as a different AVI format.

This is not my end goal, though. After changing it to an AVI with uncompressed PCM as the sound format, keeping the same video stream, I’m going to code the AVI into MPEG1 format for viewing on our home theater.

To do this, I’m using TMPGEnc. An excellent program, it lets you set all kinds of things in regards to MPEG files.

Where does SSE come into all of this? Well, while doing research to find appropriate converters for the old-format AVI file, I came across something called “ffdshow”. It had a regular version, an SSE version, and an SSE2 version. With this new computer and new processor, I can now use things with SSE2, where before I couldn’t even use regular SSE.

What is SSE?

The Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) were introduced in the Pentium III processor. The SSE extensions consist of a new set of instructions and a new set of registers. These instructions and registers are designed to allow Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) computations to be made on single-precision floating-point numbers.

Click here to find out more.

Okay, I can’t sleep. I haven’t had a voice with which to speak (yes, I’ve lost my voice) since the 7th. I’m having a midnight snack and surfing. I came across this rather strange page while searching…

ludickid

Yep. Strange indeed. But not as strange as this:

Coors put its slogan, "Turn it loose," into Spanish,
where it was read as "Suffer from diarrhea."

You can find that and other such weirdness at this page.

Peace.

http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/xmlhttpreq.html
First I went here. I copied, pasted, everything worked.

I modified slightly. I found out that you could NOT make it so that

  if (req.readyState  4) {
        // only if "OK"
        if (req.status  200) {

reads as

if (req.readyState  4 && req.status  200)

because the callback function gets called more than once. Since the readyState WILL NOT be 4 on the first call, the error message will occur, even if the expected result DOES happen afterward.
(Thank you, #EFNet.)

Also, I’ve learned a little something about callback functions. When you set an event handler name to a function, you’re setting a reference to that function name. YOU CANNOT PASS ARGUMENTS to a callback function in that assignment statement.
(Thank you, MSDN.)

As far as I can tell, you have to have a global variable or something that the function can access if you need for the function to have arguments.

XHConn is supposed to make using xmlHTTPRequest a little easier. I think it’s easy enough without the library, though.

Things I’ve learned to check:
1) Make sure the backend script is sending a Content-Type of text/xml

PHP: header(‘Content-Type: text/xml’);

2) When using a non-unicode program with Windows, and you have Windows set to use…oh…say…Japanese…as the default language for non-unicode programs (I don’t even know what unicode is), then you have to make sure that the program isn’t outputting funky 2-byte gibberish into the front of the files you’re working with, especially .php files where you’re trying to use sessions. The session data is the first thing that has to be output to the browser, and that 2-byte gibberish screws it up.

3) Don’t try to access .innerHTML for page elements that haven’t loaded yet. Use something like

<body onload="myfunction();>

to ensure that the page elements have loaded before trying to access them.

Thanks to xkr.us (where the Javascript geeks rule) and allinthehead.com (where they pimp Kool-Aid), I’ve established what is undoubtedly going to be another useless and miserably ending attempt at a blog. I have no idea what I’m going to write in this blog, but hopefully I’ll at least be able to keep at it this time. Even if this going gets slow…maybe the slow can keep going, yeah? I was searching for information on xmlHttpRequest … (thank you, #Javascript on EFNet) when I found those sites.

Oh…by the way…it’s pronounced “zah-zee-oh”…the language that has the closest pronunciation is Portuguese. Thank you for your time.