Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 July 11

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July 11

DVD drives

If you have a DVD drive, do you have to have some sort of software or hardware to go with it? Is there anyway you can use it without these? ---Scarce |||| Talk -Contrib.--- 01:05, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

You'll need a computer to plug it into (unless it's the kind that plugs straight into a TV), and you'll need driver software so the computer knows what to do with it. Algebraist 01:10, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

If you're using Windows, you'll need driver software, which will probably auto-install for you once you hook up the drive and power the computer on. If you want to view movie DVDs, you will also need DVD playback software, like WinDVD or similar. This sort of software is often bundled along with the drive if you purchase a "retail version" instead of an "OEM version"; check the package before you buy. Tempshill (talk) 01:39, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Of course, you do not need any third-party DVD player software, for you can use Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 11:47, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

On XP, WMP/WMC doesn't ship with a DVD decoder, and depends on a third party install (so if you install WinDVD it installs the appropriate dlls, allowing WMP to also play DVDs); if no DVD player is installed, WMP can't do it itself. I don't know about Vista or Win7. 87.115.94.112 (talk) 12:55, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

I know, but I do not think that this is the case in Vista and Windows 7. At least, on several different Windows Vista systems, I have always been able to use WMP and WMC to play DVD's, without having any third-party DVD player (GUI application) installed. But I do not know if the decoder really is included in Vista, or if the computer manufacturers have included any third-party decoders, although I do not think that that "sounds" right. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 16:12, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't see why people care about WMC when there are far superior players like BSplayer out there, or even the free Media Player Classic. Both of these handle DVD's just fine. Sandman30s (talk) 20:41, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, personally, I love WMC, and wouldn't want to live without it (yes, that was a POV comment, but I got slightly annoyed by the POV comment above). --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 23:50, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

The POV is from the angle of DVD support, not to mention other HD formats. Why bother with something that doesn't come with automatic DVD and HD support, and doesn't always succeed in downloading the correct codecs? I meant superior in terms of DVD format, which was what the OP was asking. We are also assuming that he uses Windows, otherwise all this advice was in vain. Finally, my POV was after evaluating many players over many years; was yours? Sandman30s (talk) 10:32, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Decorative 1 line ASCII art

On message boards, I've seen users doing creative things like

.ılılıll|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|̲̅̅=̲̅̅|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|llılılı. Boombox

°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸

(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.· hello!

,.-~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-(_SURPRISE!_)-,.-~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸

What is this called? And where can I find some more examples? --70.167.58.6 (talk) 01:21, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

You named it in the section header: ASCII art. Tempshill (talk) 01:36, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Ironically, many of those in the examples above are not ASCII characters and rely on a larger character set (such as UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. Some of the characters appear to be Turkish or Cyrillic Dotted and dotless I, while others are glyphs. Nimur (talk) 02:32, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

How to find web pages that contain a given phrase and link to some other given page?

I'm trying to better understand the Kasey Chambers/Shane Nicholson song "Monkey on a Wire", which I heard for the first time today. So I googled "monkey on a wire" (with quotes). One of the results was our article on the psychologist Harry Harlow, which does not actually contain that phrase, though he did do some experiments involving surrogate-mother monkeys made of wire. So I clicked on Google's cached-page link, where the header informed me that "Monkey on a Wire" appears only in pages linking to our article. Naturally, I want to see the page that both contains the phrase "monkey on a wire" and links to Harry Harlow. Google obviously has this information; how do I coax it out? Thanks! --Allen (talk) 04:48, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

The Google cache says "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: 'monkey on a wire' " which means the terms (monkey, on, a, wire) are only in LINKS to the page, not the page itself (meaning links as in their own search results). This makes sense, as those were the search terms that first brought up our page. Near-identical results come up for the phrase without quotes, a rather nasty Google habit of considering shorter words insignificant. (Although you can see how a search for "on a" could bring up 98% of English pages on the World Wide Web, so be useless). Close inspection of the article shows all four search term words DO appear in it, albeit never as the single phrase you'd expect after having put it into quotes. Monkey wire and monkey+wire bring similar but not identical results, the Harlow article being in the top 15 items each time. - KoolerStill (talk) 16:07, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Ah. So there may not actually be a page that both contains my exact phrase and links to the Harlow article. (How weird that Google, upon my explicitly searching for an exact phrase, would give me a page that has no relation to the exact phrase.) Thanks for the help, KoolerStill. --Allen (talk) 19:52, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Cut up an MP3 stream

Hi I "record" an MP3 stream off the internet with mplayer (on ubuntu linux). As things stand at the moment I get a big and ever growing MP3 and to keep the size of individual files down (and so I can delete bits I've listened to or don't want to listen to) I kill and restart the streaming process regularly.

To make things easier I want to chop chunks of the file off every few hours, or otherwise end up with mp3s each covering a few hours is there a way of doing that automatically? --203.22.236.14 (talk) 06:27, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm assuming you're doing something like mplayer -somelongoptions > foo.mpg ? The standard shell way of splitting things into chunks is split, but you can't split mp3s so easily (because all the subsequent chunks won't have valid mp3 headers). You should, however, be able to have mplayer emit raw streams (just samples), split those, and have another process compress those into mp3s. So the main command line would be mplayer -somelongoptions -optiontoemitraw | split, and your encoder would run (say on a cronjob) that periodically found each file in output directory (but check that they're all old, otherwise you'll be encoding the one that's still being written), rename them (say to the date and time and channel they were recorded), mencoder them to mp3, and move them off somewhere else. If you tell us exactly what mplayer options you're passing, I'll have a go at actually doing this myself. 87.115.94.112 (talk) 09:25, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

If it would work for you to just record a giant mp3 and then split it up later, there are tools that can do that without re-encoding the mp3. That would be good because decoding and re-encoding degrades the audio quality. I haven't used any of these programs, but googling "split mp3s without recompressing" turns up several links. There might be one that runs on linux natively, but if not, I've heard that mp3DirectCut works with Wine. --Allen (talk) 14:34, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks all, 87.115.94.112's suggestion looks like what I want. I'm using the following:

   mkfifo pipeline
   split -b 500M -a10 < pipeline & 
   mplayer -ao pcm:nowaveheader:fast:file=pipeline -vo null -vc null -playlist http://site.net/stream.m3u

--203.22.236.14 (talk) 14:52, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

google code

how do i download from google code, like this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.91.128 (talk) 12:44, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Install Subversion (software), then run that command svn checkout http://drydock.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ drydock-read-only that they describe. 87.115.94.112 (talk) 12:52, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

If you are using Windows, I would recommend installing TortoiseSVN. Once installed, the whole interface is available on the right-click menu: to start, you right-click on an empty folder and select "SVN Checkout". - IMSoP (talk) 12:15, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

text fitting boxes with html

I know that if I use wikimark-up tables eg.
{|
|
|} and I have text in the braces, the table will automatically fix to the text.
Is it possible to get this auto fit to text affect when using <tr> and <td>'s? If so, could I have an example? The reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to format this page and am having trouble making the tables auto fit the text. Thanks-- penubag  (talk) 18:43, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

It is apparent that the main problem is the fixed width and height attributes on the cells and the fixed positioning and size for the background images. Together with the Wikipedia side bar, the minimum page width of about 1200 pixels. I would start by removing all of the fixed width and height parameters and temporarily remove the background images. You can leave the 100% and 50% width specifications, since those will cause the table to fill the available space and to allocate the columns evenly. Once you get that layout you can try adding the background images back in. The trick will be getting them to achor in the lower right corner of each cell (assuming that appears is your intent). I am no HTML expert, so I am not sure the best way to do this. There should be a way to right align the image, but I'm not sure about bottom alignment. Perhaps when you get closer to your desired result, someone else can help. -- Tcncv (talk) 01:28, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

thanks for your reply but I'm still trying to figure out how to do this. Removing height and width makes the whole table blank-- penubag  (talk) 07:13, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

My computer won't restart!!! HELP!!!!!!!!!!

I put my computer in hibernation mode yesterday, and now when I try to restart it, I get a message that says "The system could not be restarted from its previous location due to a read failure. Delete restoration data and proceed to system boot menu." I don't have a boot CD, so I don't want to proceed and lose everything! I'm panicking right now and I don't know what to do! This is the first time this has happened to me. I'm using Windows XP. Please, can someone explain this to me without using fancy computer slang? HELP!!!!!!!!!!!! 69.122.188.52 (talk) 22:10, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

You don't need a boot cd, and nothing is seriously wrong. Hibernation has failed for some reason, so your computer is going to have to restart (boot up) from scratch. All you'll lose is whatever stuff you left unsaved before hibernating. Algebraist 22:22, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, what do I do? 24.189.85.202 (talk) 22:29, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Just press enter when it asks you if you want to delete the hibernation data and reboot. Algebraist 22:41, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Whew, thank you. I nearly lost my head for a minute. 24.189.85.202 (talk) 22:48, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Glad you fixed the problem. Now back up your data in case something wrong with the PC caused the corruption. Just in case. 98.14.223.143 (talk) 23:05, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

How to change video cards in Linux Ubuntu?

I have an old computer that I have installed Ubuntu on. I wanted to see if another video card was working, so I removed the existing card and replaced it. The computer started up Ok, with no Bios beeps, but the LCD monitor just had a black screen, (It did have a signal, because otherwise the monitor would have given its "No Signal" message). When I unplugged the monitor plug from the graphics card and plugged it into the mobo video socket, I did get video although it was rather faulty. But when I put the original video card back again, it was the same as with the other card - black screen, no video except rather faulty video direct from the mobo video socket. How can I force Ubuntu to use the graphics card rather than the onboard mobo video please? 78.151.124.180 (talk) 23:28, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Do you see any video at all? Not even the bios boot stuff? If not, then the problem isn't to do with Ubuntu or anything Linux-ish. The way the bootup stuff works, initially, the BIOS uses the card in a default VGA-emulation mode that all video cards can handle. It's not really until X-windows starts up that the graphic card drivers really get involved. It sounds to me like you aren't even getting to that stage - so your problem is of a hardware nature. Perhaps you should describe what you see PRECISELY in great detail to give us a better chance of diagnosing things? Do you ever see any video at all after hitting the power-on button? SteveBaker (talk) 03:05, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

If you are running a mobo with on-board video, plus an add-on video card, how is it to know which to use? when it starts to boot, go into the BIOS setup and tell it which to use. This may involve guessing, as I've known some that will only run a PCI card if told to use on-board only. But you can't see the screen once it's going....So try first using the on-board video only, with no other card installed. Then change the setting to use an add-on, and save it, before turning off and actually installing the card. Put the card into the closest appropriate slot to the power supply. - KoolerStill (talk) 04:54, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Just to re-iterate, the computer has a video output plug directly from the mobo AND also from whatever videocard is slotted in at the time if any. As I said above, ever since I removed the original videocard that came to me with the computer, I have only been able to get a blank black screen from either the original videocard, or another PCI video card I tried. The only video has been from the mobo output plug (only a max of 800xsomething resolution according to the Ubuntu display thing). What ever plug the monitor is plugged into, the computer starts up normally, but video can only be seen when the monitor is plugged into the mobo video socket, as the videocard sockets just gives a blank black screen. Even when the monitor is plugged into the videocards plugs, the computer still starts up.

The events after reading the two comments above: I now appreciate that the problem could have nothing to do with Ubuntu, but I would still very much appreciate some help. After some effort I got into the BIOS setup. The BIOS is EA81510A - this seems to relate to this mobo: http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/d815eea/A3204910.pdf I then noticed that the AGP videocard could be pushed into the socket rather more, in other words it had been loose. When I restarted, the computer gave a beeping error signal, indicating a videocard fault. I removed the AGP card. (I think it must have been damaged when I tried it in another computer whose motherboard had in turn been damaged by an incompatible AGP videocard - but thats another story).

The bios only gives two options relating to video - AGP or PCI - nothing else. I changed the BIOS setting from the default AGP to PCI and inserted the PCI videocard. The computer started normally, but there was no video from the videocard, only directly from the mobo. Another point is - although the mobo manual indicates that you are offered the options of changing the priorities or whatever of the PCI slots, this option is MISSING from my bios setup menu. What can I try next please? 89.241.44.245 (talk) 18:46, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Update the BIOS. And your onboard video card shouldn't be limited to 800×600, but rather Ubuntu being safe and falling back on a low resolution because it's unable to detect supported resolutions. You used to be able to manually configure it by reconfiguring the X server but it doesn't work now; Otherwise I have no idea how to fix it, but someone else might know. --antilived^{T | C | G} 23:00, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

The option to prioritise the PCI slot should be in the form of jumpers on the mobo, not in the BIOS. The default PCI slot is the one closest to the power supply. If in doubt, use the same slot that originally held the original card, but first thoroughly brush and blow it out.

A damaged AGP card should just plain not work, not ruin other things on the machine.

Updating the BIOS is not going to work...it was fine before the cards got changed around. But it would be worth finding the global Default Settings switch in the BIOS and setting everything back to factory, then changing other settings one by one. I'd do this with on-board video only. Also, the card(s) used should have a driver to let it be run in better resolutions; especially try to keep the refresh rate low initially. - 125.63.156.249 (talk) 04:58, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

From what I have read, using incompatible AGP stasndards can sometimes cause damge to the mobo and the graphics card, something not emphasised enough in the Wikipedia article although mention in the external links. My mobo seemed to have been made before AGP2.0 and AGP3.0 existed, so it had no defences against the different vottages they have. 78.149.198.158 (talk) 10:41, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. A few seconds ago I tried increasing the screen resolution on this working Windows computer, using an old monitor. When I did that, the screen went black. Until Windows reverted it after I did not confirm the new resolution. Could that be the problem - the old monitor I was using could not handle the resolution coming out of the video cards. How could I find out if that is the problem please? Thanks. 78.149.198.158 (talk) 10:37, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I have tried another more recent monitor - the graphics card is still just black. When I restarted the computer it unexpectedly gave a higher resolution display. Regarding the BIOS: there is no option in the BIOS to turn off the on-motherboard graphics. There are no jumpers on the motherboard either. Maybe its got missing drivers and I should re-install Ubuntu from scratch? 78.146.166.2 (talk) 19:09, 13 July 2009 (UTC)