Adobe CS5.5 Mercury Playback Engine [NVIDIA CUDA Acceleration]

Adobe and Nvidia worked together to include Nvidia CUDA support in CS5 and CS5.5, which gave birth to the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration. Essentially MPE GPU Acceleration drastically cuts down video encode times and enables real timeline editing with multiple layers of video and effects! No more choppy video playback, no more render to preview, and no more transcoding because it can be done in real time. What this means for us normal folk is that the price of a professional video editing machine is now attainable, and all for the price of a video card upgrade.* 

For some real world usage, at the beginning of 2010, I took a backpacking trip through Vietnam, and I wanted to video blog the entire trip. Armed with an Asus G60VX w/Nvidia GTX260M laptop and a Canon 5D Mark II, I was able to capture 1080p footage and import the raw files straight into Premiere to edit. Recording was done during the day, and at night the footage was edited, encoded, and uploaded. The encoding times were unbelievably fast. Yes, and all on a portable laptop! If you were to ask me to do this 2 years ago, I'd tell you I'd need thousands of dollars worth of equipment and a team to lug it around.

Fast forward to today, I upgraded my old trustworthy Dell XPS 420 rig with a Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 560 1GB DDR5/336 CUDA cores/256-bit and a 600 watt OCZ ModXStream Pro power supply. I took a video project that I encoded before, which encoded via CPU around 20 minutes, and with GPU acceleration encoded the project in under 5 minutes. The yellow render bar was racing to the right to completion--this still amazes me today.

Dell XPS 420                                                      

Intel Q6600 2.4GHz CPU

4GB RAM

Western Digital Velociraptor 10K 300GB drive

Transcend 32GB SSD

Tandberg TS400 LTO2Tape Drive

*Upgrade must be to a base system that's decent i.e. at least Quad Core CPU, 4GB RAM, 7200RPM drive. You may need to upgrade your power supply to power the new graphic card. Check out Studio 1 Productions for all the info on card comparisons, instructions to enabling GPU accleration, and more.

Dolphin HD reopen a closed tab [How To]

The Dolphin HD reopen a closed tab feature is real nifty...if you can find it. Because it wasn't so obvious for me. Long press an open tab, and a menu will pop up with the option to reopen a closed tab.

Happy browsing

iDEN Bluetooth DUN tether for Android [Dial Up Networking]

In this post, we will connect to Boost Mobile's iDEN network to provide internet access to our Bluetooth Android device. The speed is capped at 19.2 Kilobits per second, so we'll run an optimized internet browser, Opera Mini, to maximize the bandwidth. Cost of keeping the pay as you go plan active is $10 for 3 months of use with unadvertised unlimited internet. You also get friendly and helpful Boost Mobile customer support and $0.20 a minute pay as you go minutes. Time and time again, I've had positive experiences with their customer support. I digress...

This setup is particularly useful for those looking for a WiFi only Android device (no carrier) with basic internet capabilities to check email, text, navigation, etc. Personally, when I'm going out, I only use Google Navigation, Voice, Places, so these apps run smoothly on the 19.2K connection. I want to balance between being human vs. being a machine plugged into the net, so this way, my internet access will be limited.

(leave me a message if you're interested in linux or palm device instructions)

Tutorial

My setup:

Boost Mobile Motorola i576
HTC EVO 3D rooted
Cyanogenmod 7 ROM

Phone Requirements:

• Boost Mobile Motorola iDEN phone (i335, i576, i776, etc.)
• Rooted phone with a stable version of Cyanogenmod 7 or 9 with packages hcitool, rfcomm, and pppd OR stable kernel with packages hcitool, rfcomm, and pppd
• Stable Bluetooth connection

Check to see if you have these packages by going into Terminal Emulator and typing hcitool --help, rfcomm --help, pppd --help. You should see a Version number and list of Options. If not, your kernel will not support Bluetooth DUN.

App Requirements:

• Terminal Emulator 
• ES File Explorer
• Q5Bluetooth Dialup Network
• chat binary (I compiled this using lophyte's guide. My chat binary is for Ice Cream Sandwich pppd 2.4.3, and it worked on my CM7 running Gingerbread pppd 2.4.3. Lophyte compiled a ppp 2.4.4 for Gingerbread to download here.)

Instructions:

Download and install above Apps and download the chat binary to your Android device 

Open ES File Explorer and go to Settings. Scroll all the way down and check/enable Root Explorer and Mount File System. While in Settings, go to Directory Settings and change the Home Directory to just /. Now go back to /sdcard/download/ and copy the chat file to /system/bin/ by long pressing the chat file and Copy to. 

Then browse to /system/bin/ and look for the chat file. Long press the chat file and a pop up will say Operations. Scroll down to Properties. Change permissions to rwx r-x r-x.

Pair your Android device to your Bluetooth Boost Mobile phone. Paired but not connected is what we want to see.

Go to Settings and turn off Wi-Fi

Open up Bluetooth Dial Up Network App

To get your Bluetooth Address and Channel, touch the Settings button to bring up "Search Device" and "Search Channel." Select "Search Channel" and you'll see your Bluetooth MAC address show up as XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX. Copy that down and copy the address down. Now go back to Bluetooth DUN App and paste the address and channel in.

Copy and paste the following Boost Mobile DUN Chat

ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' ABORT VOICE ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE' ABORT 'NO ANSWER' ABORT DELAYED
'' ATZ
OK-AT-OK "ATDTS=2"
CONNECT \d\c


Open up Terminal Emulator

su

setprop net.dns1 8.8.8.8 

Now you're connected. Bluetooth Tethering FTW.



For Developers Only:

Boost DUN Peer & Chat scripts for download

Boost Mobile DUN Peer Script

# This optionfile was generated by pppconfig 2.3.18.
# 
# 
hide-password
noauth
connect "/system/bin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/boostchatscript"
debug
/dev/rfcomm0
38400
defaultroute
noipdefault
user replace_with_your_login_name
remotename boost
ipparam boost
usepeerdns
logfile /etc/ppp/peers/ppp.log

Peer and Chat Scipt for Android [Bluetooth DUN]

Check out the Boost Mobile Bluetooth DUN Tutorial

A trick to get the peer and chat script is to use pppconfig in Ubuntu to create a working peer and chat script. Use software manager to get pppconfig and then run pppconfig from Terminal. Follow the onscreen instructions, then once completed, the peer and chat script will be located in /etc/ppp/peers and /etc/chatscripts

If you have Bluetooth on your machine, before transferring the files to your Android device, you can test the Bluetooth connection to your Bluetooth CDMA/GSM/iDEN phone by using Terminal to

Connecting

Here, I've named my connection 'nameofyourconnection' while using pppconfig. sudo su will give you root rights. rfcomm bind will create a new rfcomm0 connection using your Bluetooth device's address, and followed by the Bluetooth channel. pppd call will connect the Bluetooth connection. pon will set up the DNS settings.

Code:

sudo su
rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX X
pppd call nameofyourconnection
pon

Now you can browse the Internet

Disconnect

Code:

poff

Downloading Android Source Tree Error

While setting up my Android Dev Environment on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, I ran into some errors. No matter how many times I reran repo sync, repo sync -f, etc. the errors would continue to show up. I believe it was due to some corruption during download. Either way, the two folders I had trouble with were Gallery.git and Exchange.git.

The Errors:
computer@ubuntu:~/WORKING_DIRECTORY$ repo sync
Fetching projects:  75% (166/221)  fatal: Not a git repository: '/home/computer/WORKING_DIRECTORY/.repo/projects/packages/apps/Gallery.git'
Fetching projects:  76% (168/221)  error: unable to resolve reference refs/remotes/aosp/ics-factoryrom-2-release: No such file or directory
From https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Exchange
 ! [new branch]      ics-factoryrom-2-release -> aosp/ics-factoryrom-2-release  (unable to update local ref)
...
...
error: Cannot fetch platform/packages/apps/Gallery
error: Cannot fetch platform/packages/apps/Exchange

error: Exited sync due to fetch errors


Solution/Fix

I went to WORKING_DIRECTORY/.repo/projects/packages/apps/Gallery.git
and Exchange.git and deleted them.

Then I reran repo sync, and the dev environment completed successfully.

Custom Desktop User Agent String for Android's Dolphin HD

Ever want to view websites in their Full Desktop display mode? How about watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report on your Android device? Comedy Central is an example of a site that automatically switches to their Mobile site, which doesn't allow viewing full episodes. We want full episodes because our Android hardware is fully capable of viewing full Desktop sites including Adobe Flash content. In this post, we'll go over how to view all websites in full Desktop mode on Dolphin HD Browser.

When we visit a website, our web browser's User Agent lets a website know the capabilities of our browser. Then the website serves up the page in a readable format suitable for our device whether it be on a PC, Mac, Android, or iPhone. The problem with Dolphin HD is that it's built in User Agent still shows Android in the User Agent String, so some sites we visit still serve up their Mobile site.

To fix this, we're going to paste in our own Custom User Agent String:

Go to More => Settings => Dolphin Settings => User Agent => Custom

Then Copy and Paste the following User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1)

Then go to Data Storage Settings => Clear data

Check Clear cache
Check Clear history
Check Clear all cookie data

Press OK

Exit out of Dolphin HD

Open up Dolphin HD, and now any site you visit will display in full Desktop Mode.

If you're curious what the User Agent String above means, then this is what websites see when you visit:

Mozilla/5.0	Web Browser
Windows NT 6.1	Operating System	Windows 7
WOW64	Web Browser	32-bit Internet Explorer running on 64-bit Windows
AppleWebKit/535.7	Rendering Engine	WebKit Rendering Engine
KHTML, like Gecko		Apple WebKit is based on KDE KHTML
Chrome/16.0.912.63	Web Browser	Google Chrome Browser

Enjoy

Unlimited Free Text Messaging :: GV :: Boost Mobile iDEN

So by now, you're having a blast with your GPS tracker/free internet boost mobile phone. Well, we're going to kick it up a notch with free unlimited text messaging through Google Voice.

Here's how it works:

We're going to use the Boost Mobile iDEN Pay-As-You-Go phone network to access the internet--this is free and we do not need a data plan. Then we'll use Opera Mini Browser to visit http://voice.google.com. Once logged in, we're free to make and receive text messages through the browser.

The cost breakdown is $10 every 3 months for unlimited free text messaging/GPS tracking/free internet/tethering/emergency phone.