Jon Simpson’s Weblog

After upgrading the computer that holds the majority of the files on my network to Windows Vista Ultimate, I had a few problems accessing it from the Mac running Tiger. Turns out some of the network security options and authentication defaults have changed between XP and Vista.
As Mac OS X 10.4.9 does not appear to [...]

Since mplayer got decent support for SSA/ASS subtitles, complete with embedded fonts I’d been meaning to check the feature out. Recent subversion builds of mplayer had required an upgrade to freetype 2.2.1 from whatever ancient version Apple ship with OS X 10.4, and after enabling passing ‘-ass -embeddedfonts’ to the media file, I was slightly [...]

Amongst other things, the s-video port got lost from the new MacBook. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the replacement is an adapter to go from DVI to s-video. If you happen to have a Powerbook around, you may wish to plug in both the s-video and DVI out simultaneously and observe the results. [...]

So it seems Microsoft have discontinued Windows Media Player for mac to reduce the size of their mac business unit, and are going to focus more on going forward with business applications. (source). So what replaces it?

So today had lots of interesting announcements on the Apple front at Macworld SF and a few other cool tidbits. Mac OS X 10.4.4, a Google Earth beta for Mac OS X and the new hardware announcements. Interesting to see the new MacBook Pro announced. It’s not perhaps as big a leap in terms of [...]

This is a simple/step-by-step guide to building mplayer’s CVS on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. There seem to be quite a few issues going around about this (and I have experienced quite a few of them first hand..)

Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9) has been the root of many issues for Mac users in dealing with media playback for a long while now. Due to its prevalence on people’s desktop computers, a lot of small video clips that float around the web often carry the .wmv extension, and the playback of these files [...]

Further to my earlier attempts at compiling mplayer from cvs, the bugs that were previously causing errors in the compilation (I believe, due to library dynamic/static linking strangeness and the stripping of symbols) have been fixed quite a while now and I’ve been enjoying up to date builds of mplayer on Mac OS X Tiger.
There [...]

OS X’s weird changes to the unix layers on which it builds are usually bearable. Mainly because they don’t get in the way, or create any real problem in everyday use (Including the fact that the Finder loves to hide unixy pieces of the filesystem away). However, sometimes it can be a real pain in [...]