Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Manually add libdvdcss.dll to Handbrake on 64-bit Windows 7

I was looking for a process that would allow someone to manually add  libdvdcss.dll to a 32-bit Handbrake version 0.9.6 install on 64-bit Windows 7.  After a bit of web searching the process that seems to work for many is:
1. Download GStreamer WinBuilds v0.10.6 GPL (x86) (GStreamer-WinBuilds-GPL-x86.msi ) from OSSBuild Downloads.
2. Install GStreamer.
3. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\OSSBuild\GStreamer\v0.10.6\bin
4. Copy libdvdcss-2.dll to C:\Program Files (x86)\Handbrake
5. Rename libdvdcss-2.dll to libdvdcss.dll

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Check Handbrake Windows 7 64-Bit DVD Ripping for a 64-bit oriented guide.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Digital Curation / Digital Asset Management TTPs for digital forensics artifacts

Started looking into Digital Curation / Digital Asset Management techniques, tactics and procedures.  I’m mostly interested in curating and preserving digital forensics artifacts -- hard drive images, memory images, network trace captures, event log files, etc.—to support team oriented forensics analysis and annotation of large scale digital corpora.  I prefer to use open source technologies. Fortunately for me, professional digital archivists are already working the issues!

The Council on Library and Information Resources provides an overview of the challenges in their December 2010 report  titled “Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections”.  A bit on the lighter side…the “Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report” from IDEALS investigates preservation of video games and interactive fiction.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Netzob–Reversing protocols

Just saw Netzob on free(code) today.  It looks like it combines protocol format recovery (vocabulary) and control flow recovery as automaton.  They use grammar inference (specifically Angluin L*)  to generate a modified Mealy machine.  Very cool!  I previously did some work inferring protocol control flow as FSM  using a few GI algorithms.  I’m off to the netzob code repository to have a look…

Storage Virtualization for home use

I have several odd size SATA drives that I might be able to put back to work…so I’m looking for a storage virtualization system.  At the moment it looks like Windows 8 Storage Spaces or the Linux based Greyhole might be the best fit for my home use scenario.  Greyhole is the storage pooling system used in Amahi.

IQEmu–Launch Windows apps in a VirtualBox sandbox on Linux host.

IQEmu launches  Windows applications in a virtualized sandbox on Linux hosts.  Currently works best with VirtualBox for the virtualization backend.  Source is available via github.

Alternatives to Objective-C that target iOS

While some have fun with Objective-C and despite neat features like automatic reference counting I have no deep love for the language.   So I started looking for some alternatives to target iOS devices.  So far my list is very short:
  • RubyMotion – based on MacRuby is a Ruby implementation built in Objective-C.  The backend is a LLVM derived compiler that emits iOS native code.
  • MonoTouch – from Xamarin, the developers of Mono, it’s a version of C# that targets iOS.  They also have developed Mono for Android so there is the possibility of sharing some code between platforms.
  • RoboVM - translates Java bytecode into native ARM or x86.  One advantage RoboVM has over RubyMotion and MonoTouch is that source is available at GitHub robovm/robovm.
WikiPedia has a longer list of platform development environments in a  Mobile application development article.  Also, Simone D’Amico summarizes several cross-platform mobile development SDKs.  Finally, there are some mutterings around about developing with other languages, besides MacRuby,  then emitting iOS binaries via the LLVM middle-end optimizers and LLVM back-end code generators.