Going through some of my burned DVDs and finding out that some, especially my older discs, have developed some sort of foggy residue on the data side. It wipes off with some spray cleaner and tissues (and air duster for the resulting detritus) and the disks still play. It may be due to the plastic chemical makeup for the cases used, as it affected all the different brands of media used in the cases. Some of my more recent cases and burns haven't yet shown signs of this odd fogging.
DVDs in cake boxes and the single slim trays don't appear to be affected at all.
At any rate, I finally found some place offering scratch protective adhesive inserts much like the one I got in the jewel case for my Sailor Moon 1st season BGM CD. I am of the opinion at this point that the fogging can be prevented by keeping the data side away from the plastic case.
I'll be getting more supplies to clean the other fogged DVDs. Even though the single slim trays are ideal, I like to label my discs with printed inserts. It's a tradeoff I'll have to figure out.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Friday, April 11, 2014
Various things and whatever (I'll come up with a title later)
Still trying to start up my computer services business. Right now I have a sick Win7 desktop that is going to get a HD clone and transplant, then I have to fix a corrupted user profile. The HD going bad likely was the cause of that and I have 2 ways to get that user profile to work again. If I just restored the profile without a new drive, it would just go bad again.At any rate, IT'S MY FIRST NON-FAMILY, NON-FRIEND CUSTOMER!! Yay.
I still have a little work to do on the laptop I've been working on. The parts got here and the flux pen did its magic on the one broken off post I wanted to re-attach. Now to get the energy to remove the varistor, clean up the area and work on getting the new varistor fluxed and tacked in place. I have the thermal transfer stuff for the heat sinks. I truly hope after the time I spent on this laptop that it still works.
I need to get another O ring for the DVD drive I was handed to work on because the size of the one I got in the first place doesn't offer enough grip for the motor and mechanics to disengage the magnetic disk clamp from the top of the drive housing. So it needs to be smaller.
And then the power supply board for a DVD player a friend dropped off got the capacitors replaced (the originals had leaked everywhere) and I have to check more of it because when I put it back in place, the player wouldn't turn on. So I missed something though I'm sure the capacitors were installed and soldered in correctly (they're polarized electrolytic caps). It started out not being able to eject the DVD... I was hoping that the problem was with the power supply board and fixing that would help. One problem at a time.
But I'm more excited about a Flash Video file I was able to grab. It came with closed captioned subtitles. At first I thought I wasn't going to be able to grab the data for it, but I found the link for that data. A simple Java application turns it into an SRT file, and then I was able to turn that into a stylized subtitle file. Subs, got.
The video file was more of a pain in the butt. VLC played the video just fine, but conversion to AVI with one tool I like resulted in the video playing too slowly and got out of sync with the audio but somehow the subtitles remained in sync with the audio. Odd. I ran it twice before trying something else, after making darn sure I told it what I wanted it to do.
So I used another tool and got a raw MP4 from the original file, but that tool saw it necessary to insert 70ms gaps in the audio it converted, so the later parts of the conversion played out of sync with each other. But I was able to convert that to a subbed AVI where the subs were in sync with the video. I figured I'd do what I've done before - grab the audio from the original file as an MP3, remux with Virtual Dub and it would fix the problem with the audio - Which It Did!
So now that I can make a final subbed video with everything where it's supposed to be, I will spend some time fixing up the subtitle file. I got to about the 36 minute mark and ran into something that needs another style defined. By that point, I was too tired to continue, so I'll finish that soon but not now.
I still have a little work to do on the laptop I've been working on. The parts got here and the flux pen did its magic on the one broken off post I wanted to re-attach. Now to get the energy to remove the varistor, clean up the area and work on getting the new varistor fluxed and tacked in place. I have the thermal transfer stuff for the heat sinks. I truly hope after the time I spent on this laptop that it still works.
I need to get another O ring for the DVD drive I was handed to work on because the size of the one I got in the first place doesn't offer enough grip for the motor and mechanics to disengage the magnetic disk clamp from the top of the drive housing. So it needs to be smaller.
And then the power supply board for a DVD player a friend dropped off got the capacitors replaced (the originals had leaked everywhere) and I have to check more of it because when I put it back in place, the player wouldn't turn on. So I missed something though I'm sure the capacitors were installed and soldered in correctly (they're polarized electrolytic caps). It started out not being able to eject the DVD... I was hoping that the problem was with the power supply board and fixing that would help. One problem at a time.
But I'm more excited about a Flash Video file I was able to grab. It came with closed captioned subtitles. At first I thought I wasn't going to be able to grab the data for it, but I found the link for that data. A simple Java application turns it into an SRT file, and then I was able to turn that into a stylized subtitle file. Subs, got.
The video file was more of a pain in the butt. VLC played the video just fine, but conversion to AVI with one tool I like resulted in the video playing too slowly and got out of sync with the audio but somehow the subtitles remained in sync with the audio. Odd. I ran it twice before trying something else, after making darn sure I told it what I wanted it to do.
So I used another tool and got a raw MP4 from the original file, but that tool saw it necessary to insert 70ms gaps in the audio it converted, so the later parts of the conversion played out of sync with each other. But I was able to convert that to a subbed AVI where the subs were in sync with the video. I figured I'd do what I've done before - grab the audio from the original file as an MP3, remux with Virtual Dub and it would fix the problem with the audio - Which It Did!
So now that I can make a final subbed video with everything where it's supposed to be, I will spend some time fixing up the subtitle file. I got to about the 36 minute mark and ran into something that needs another style defined. By that point, I was too tired to continue, so I'll finish that soon but not now.
