For all the iPhone/iPod touch users out there. If you are tired of the poor selection of videos that Youtube has chosen to encode in h.264, why don’t you check out www.vtap.com ?! This nice search engine/web-app not only lets you search for videos in multiple sources, it also offers to convert them to h.264! Have fun with it! pat

Do you remember back in 1998? Online-clips were either too big (filesize/downloadspeed) to be watched within reasonable time or were just a pain for your eyes! Something had to be done!So, some crazy folks extracted the mp4 codec from windows media player and started to mess arround with it. The ultimate result; they blessed, or cursed us with the first DivX.mp4 codec. Why blessed and cursed?Back then Flash-video was virtually non existent, microsoft and apple fought their own little codec/video war with quicktime and windows media-player and the only 3rd party competitor was Realmedia.So DivX really helped us out in a BIG way! While some people understood it’s commercial value, divx supported DRM, and made a fair amount of money with it and others were just happy about the flood of clips on the internet, the downside of having a high quality, low capacity way to encode video surfaced very fast:movie-piracy!Don’t get me wrong, divix never supported piracy but the codec sure as hell gave it a boost.  Essentially DivX was for the Movie industry what .mp3 was for the record lables; the source of all evil. DVD’s just got popular and were, simply due to their capacity and the bad compression of regular codecs, hard to share over the (slow)internet. The movie industry felt quite safe. Back then, the file distribution greatly depended on size. Smaller files were more popular and therefore easier and faster to get.. ab big NONO for DVD-sharing. DivX filled that gap pretty well! IMHO, the new codecs had a huge impact on the industry. Today, there are so many different codecs out there. h264, flash, wmv, xvid.. the list goes on and on! What do you think, do you prefer a codec over the others? And what do you think about divix or video codecs in general if it comes to piracy? Post a Comment  regards. pat

I got reminded of something over the last couple of days: one of the most annoying things if you try to do tech help over a chat, or for that part tech help in general, is to get the people ask their questions the right way. It’s kinda tiring having to dig and dig and ask and confirm all the time to find out what actually is wrong and where the problem is. people, please, if you are looking for help, and we really like to help, at least try to give us somewhat of a sentence or question to work with.pat

Yay, i was able to help someone in Chris’s channel today. He had a problem getting ICS work within his local network. No big deal for the most of us i think but it felt nice to have been able to help. Maybe i’ll make a post here every time I can successfully help someone. If I’m going to do that I’ll add the problem to begin with and the solution of course. We’ll see.pat 

like you can see in the description, this blog will be more or less a place where I can write down what comes to my mind. You’ll find mostly  notes here for the time being. all tough I won’t promise not to write an entire essay in here from time to time thx for reading. pat