I’ve been searching for a while for a way to make VideoLAN – VLC media player the default DVD player in Windows Vista (32 and 64 bit). After, several minutes of fruitless searching I finally came across a lifehacker reference to Autoplay Repair and a guide explaining usage.
To use VLC I created an entry for DVDs with Autoplay Repair
See the VLC documentation for command line parameters. I used dvd://%L for now.
Then ran the Vista AutoPlay tool to make sure that VLC is the default.
Inserted a DVD and was off to the movies.
Fred Flintstone | Wilma Flintstone | Pebbles Flintstone |
Barney Rubble | Betty Rubble | Bamm-Bamm Rubble |
Dino | The Great Gazoo |
Googling about for an open source OS that would work for a Wii (embedded PowerPC 740/750 work alike) homebrew project and I’ve narrowed my choices down two categories: a real-time OS or an embedded Linux based OS.
While I’m more comfortable with the toolchains and feature sets provided by a “full blown” embedded Linux, BlueCat Linux for example, I like the configurability and architectural layering philosophy of eCos, while RTEMS has cool points for being used in space projects.
My main concerns with eCos are: it does not have a USB stack (only USB Slave code is included); no Bluetooth stack; and does not appear to support dynamic loadable libraries. Probably, need to just go check out the GameCube/Wii Linux scene.
I’ve been searching for an automated way to use the GNU build system to build autoconf based GNU libraries like libiconv using Visual C/C++ compilers instead of GCC. The end goal is to create Windows DLLs that I can integrate into Visual C/C++ projects.
Found two alternatives that I want to check out: simacros from Systems in Motion; and parity by Markus Duft and Michael Haubenwallner. The two have a similar goal and similar approach. Both include source to shim/proxy software that translates GNU GCC command line options into Visual C/C++ command line options; and both require modified autotools.
A big difference is that simacros uses cygwin for it’s execution environment and parity is designed for the Windows Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA). Another difference is ease of access. Parity is readily available as a stand alone SourceForge project. I found simacros is a bit difficult to extract out of the various web links and downloads at the Coin3d website.
Based on initial code spelunking and the ease of getting to the parity source code I’m leaning toward porting parity to cygwin.
DVD Flick is a straight forward way to make simple video DVDs from all the random AVI clips I collected over the holiday. Now I can haunt everyone with DVDs of family Christmas videos. Source available at SourceForge project page.
