Thoughts on a Toodles TE Kitty

Long story short: to have the best PS3 stick available, you'll need to get a Mad Catz TE FightStick for the Xbox 360 first.

http://forums.shoryuken.com/discussion/comment/10137013/#Comment_10137013

http://godlikecontrols.com/

Mysteries of the MP4 solved

Let's start with what we already know:


XviD4PSP 5.xx is the best encoder for everything. I only really use two formats:

• MP4 PS3 or XBOX360
• MP4 PSP AVC

Go to settings and disable auto volume, auto crop, and analyse interlace. Check the global settings and change the temp folder to the same drive you're encoding your video so you're not waking up any sleeping drives when batch encoding.

For most videos (basically any non-PSP video), I like to stick with:

• AVC profile: High
• AVC level: 4.1

I've already written about specific file sizes here, but now that I'm capturing and encoding every episode of Good Eats again at a mere 233 MB, let me just state unequivocally that 3-Pass encoding (versus 2-pass) does make a difference! In fact, the lower the file size and bit rate, the more it matters! I realized that a bit late (already halfway through all the episodes), but what're ya gonna do.



To add chapters to a video, take your newly encoded video and load it into YAMB 1.6 (you probably need to locate MP4Box under Options too). Load a text file that looks like this:

CHAPTER01=00:00:00.000
CHAPTER01NAME=1
CHAPTER02=00:03:16.363
CHAPTER02NAME=2
CHAPTER03=00:07:12.282
CHAPTER03NAME=3
CHAPTER04=00:10:27.010
CHAPTER04NAME=4

You could do this in YAMB 2.1 as well but there's no convenient "clear" button when you're adding chapters to multiple videos, though in the future I might cook up an AutoHotkey script to clear it instantly myself.



To encode the best quality videos for PSP, which is to use XviD4PSP's "MP4 PSP AVC" format at 720x480, follow these settings:

• under video encoding
• Encoding mode: 2-Pass Bitrate
• Bitrate: (kbps) 2000
• AVC profile: Auto (main)
• AVC level: 3.0
• under video > Resolution/Aspect
• Output Resolution: 720x480
• Resize filter: Lanczos4Resize

Then load that newly encoded video in YAMB 2.1 (Warning about uninstalling the 2.1 beta here). Highlight the AVC, go to Properties, then Pixels Aspect Ratio and choose. Without this step, the 720x480 video will not quite be 4:3 or 16:9, and you'll have to stretch within the PSP itself. 

That last one took me about a decade to figure out! I knew Media Go converted videos and kept the original aspect ratio at 720x480, but that program wasn't any good compared to XviD4PSP. With my PhotoFast adapter coming sometime in the future, I'll likely have enough room for every PSP game I've ever bought, all my music, and every Simpsons/Seinfeld/South Park episode!

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EDIT (2024-05-27): Actually, MeGUI is better...

Weird-ass dream (2014-12-05)

So I was playing a version of Street Fighter where there was also a game of Tetris going on in the background, and the inputs were shared. Move your character left and your Tetromino moves left as well.

Also, a Hatsune Miku RPG not unlike the first Persona game, isometric perspective and all...

(Up next: my thoughts on arcade parts! Probably.)

Cheers to Cooking Channel; jeers to TBS

I've got the urge to capture every single episode of Good Eats again, for the third time.

The first was in the early 2000s with an SD capture card. Back then they didn't have HD anything. The second was when Food Network started airing their programs in HD. And now with Cooking Channel showing Good Eats in HD, I'm inclined to start capturing the hundreds of episodes again, but I can do it right this time. I know about making sure there's no bits of audio after an edited out commercial break. I know how to add chapters to a video file. And the quality is better thanks to my HD capture card.

To Cooking Channel's credit, they aren't showing the old SD episodes with that annoying panorama/stretch-o-vision aspect ratio that Food Network does. Sure, it's stretched, but I can easily shrink it back to 4:3. It's impossible to "un-stretch-o-vision" a picture.

And it's also impossible to uncrop cropped video. TBS apparently doesn't think much of their viewers because they're still showing Seinfeld in "HD" by cropping off the top and bottom of the picture and zooming in. When Funimation released the first Dragon Ball Z DVD sets, they thought they could get away with doing the same thing, but no one liked missing 20% of the picture and eventually Funimation released another DVD set to address the complaints. (And then once more for Dragon Ball Z Kai... and then once more again for the music-fixed DVD release...)

I think I'll try to make my Good Eats encodes a consistent 233 MB, up from the 170 MB my SD encodes were. It'll be down from my usual 440 MB for a 30-minute show without commercials, but I don't think the show requires a high bit rate to begin with, and honestly, there are a lot of episodes. At 233 MB per episode, 18 episodes will fit on a DVD-R. At 440 MB per episode, it would only be 10 episodes per DVD-R.

Dreamcast: flickering s-video cable issue solved

I bought another Dreamcast s-video cable from Retro-Bit since the s-video output from my Madness Gameware VGA box wouldn't work for some reason. Maybe I broke it trying to trick non-VGA games to work by flicking the switch at exactly the wrong time. Well, whatever.

My other Dreamcast VGA box by Naki had working s-video output in addition to composite, but when I tried it, the picture would flicker, which is why I bought another s-video cable.

This Retro-Bit cable had the same flickering problem at first, but once I plugged in both s-video and composite (the cable has both) into my DVDO Edge, the problem went away.

No video while playing purchased videos in iTunes?

Problem: iTunes wouldn't play my purchased videos. Just a black screen with no audio or video.

Solution: Close other programs. In my case, I had MAME with Tekken Tag Tournament running, as well as Blackmagic Media Express in playback mode.

Also, if you ever wanted to skip a few seconds back or forward when playing video in iTunes, hit Ctrl+Alt plus left or right.

Mumon's pearls of wisdom (Persona 4 Golden)

I'm doing New Game Plus on Persona 4 Golden and right now I'm trying to (1) get the Hardcore Risette Fan trophy, (2) get as many skill cards from Chagall Cafe as I can, and (3) get the new "accomplice" ending.

Here's everything I've heard Mumon say:

• Have you heard this before? The question of whether or not dogs have souls. / Sounds stupid, right? But that’s all right. Questions like those are what you call Zen dialogue.

• Hey, are you all right? That coffee might have been a little too stimulating for you. / Well… climbing the stairway to maturity means you’ve gotta grit your teeth sometime and take that first step.

• When a flag blows in the wind, is it the flag that moves? Or the wind? / It’s neither, kid. What moves… is your heart.

• Ah, What great weather. I haven’t seen a sky this clear in ages… / Ha… I’m not talking about the sky out there. I know that your heart’s always clear as a summer’s day.

• Have you heard this before? About how a strong man’s weakness is his first defeat. / But… a guy like that isn’t strong. Someone who’s truly strong will never back down.

• Some things are real in this world, and some things are fake. Most people don’t have an eye for the difference… / But even so… if what’s real loses hope, don’t you think this world is done for?

• You know, kid… you remind me a lot of my brother. Especially the way that you act cool even if you have to force it. / But not everything in this world is fine. Sometimes, it’s just as important to show the ugly side of yourself…

• Has there ever been a time when you couldn’t find an answer to your problems? / When that time comes, I suggest you stop thinking about it. Not every question has an answer, after all.

• Ha… Your eyes didn’t lie. They’re fixed straight on the future… / No matter what happens, you better not back down. All you gotta do is keep going down the path that you believe in.

• Ha… You’re already a regular here, kid. Still, there’s no need to be so hasty… / Everyone becomes an adult eventually, like it or not.