Online Favicon Creation

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FFMPeg and the XBox 360

I've got a pile of old MPEGs on my PC from an old Sony camcorder of mine, that I wanted to play on my XBox 360. My XBox isn't connected to my home network, and I wanted to be able to convert the mpegs into something the XBox could read from an external drive.

I've been using Handbrake to do conversions, and it works. Handbrake is an excellent piece of software, but it isn't quite what I need, as I wanted to do batch conversions and the HandbrakeCLI is a little clunky and too slow for what I want.

I've been trying for ages to convert the files to .mp4 with ffmpeg, but the damn things just wouldn't play. I finally worked it out today. The mpegs have 5 channel Dolby audio - the XBox 360 doesn't support that. All I needed to do was restrict the audion channels to 2 on the output, and it worked! I haven't seen this anywhere on the web, so here goes:

ffmpeg.exe -i input.mpg -sameq -ac 2 -aspect 16:9 output.mp4

The -sameq tag forces the quality to be the same as the source. The -aspect is required for my files as the mpegs had a strange 2.34 aspect on them that made the resulting video play in a stretched mode (no idea why). The -ac 2 was the piece I was missing - this restricts the audio channels to 2, and my mp4 files now work on my XBox (which, incidentally, has the optional media pack applied). So now, I can just batch convert all my files to .mp4 using FFMPeg, which is REALLY fast, and I'm done.

NServiceBus error "Parameter name: meth"

It's been a while since I used NServiceBus and I got this annoyingly cryptic error message this morning:

Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: meth

I finally found this post about it and it's actually a fairly obvious mistake - I had added property without a setter on one of the objects that needed to be serialized as part of my message. The error message was unfortunately cryptic enough for me to take a while to find it. I thought I'd post this on here for my own future reference.

HTTP Pre-Authentication

Rick Strahl posted this excellent article on pre-authenticating HTTP requests - this is something that's caught me in the past but he explains the whole concept so well here I thought this was worth noting for my own future reference.

SQL Server: Updating varbinary fields

I'm working on a development database with a lot of varbinary fields - these are great once you have your admin screens but they're a pain in the initial development phase when there is no GUI for loading data. This little T-SQL snippet can be used to update varbinary fields - or adapt it to insert new data into varbinary fields.

update [schema].[table] set Column = (
 SELECT * 
        FROM OPENROWSET(BULK N'E:\Share\Temp\myfile.jpg', SINGLE_BLOB) AS BinaryFile
)

Page LifeCycle Events Listed

Joe Stagner posted this useful list of the entire ASP.NET page lifecycle events as they occur, in order.

Now if only you could get people to actually use these things correctly....

Locate File in Solution Explorer - Visual Studio Macro

A colleague found this blog post by Brian Schmitt, which is one of the most useful little tips I've seen in ages.

I'm currently working on a solution with 30+ projects in it: and the Visual Studio items tracking REALLY annoys me when trying to navigate to files between projects that are far apart in the solution explorer tree. I've been wanting to turn this off for ages, but I also do like being able to locate the current file quickly in the solution explorer, so I just haven't got around to doing it. This Macro solves my problem perfectly.

To get this working:

1. Switch of auto tracking: Tools, Options, Projects and Solutions, turn off Track Active Items
2. Open the Macro Explorer: Tools, Macros, Macro Explorer
3. Under MyMacros, right-click Module1 (you can rename this if you like) and click New Macro
4. Replace the code of the Macro with the following:

       Public Sub LocateFileInSolutionExplorer()
           DTE.ExecuteCommand("View.TrackActivityinSolutionExplorer")
           DTE.ExecuteCommand("View.TrackActivityinSolutionExplorer")
           DTE.ExecuteCommand("View.SolutionExplorer")
       End Sub
   

5. Save and close the Macro Explorer
6. Go to Tools, Options, Environment Keyboard, and in the "Show commands containing" type in the macro name until it appears in the list below
7. Select the file in the list, focus on the "Press shortcut keys" input field and enter the key strokes you want to assign to the Macro. Like Brain, I used Alt+L,Alt+L. Assign it, and that's it.
8. Watch productivity soar.