Smoother MKV playback with VLC

If you're seeing stuttering in any MKV videos you've ripped, try out wipe0wt's suggestion and turn off loop filters in VLC altogether.  It results in a dramatic improvement in playback quality.  The gist is:

1. Open up VLC and choose Tools -> Preferences from the menu
2. In the bottom left corner of the preferences window you'll see a "Show settings" area.  Make sure you change it from "Simple" to "All".  This will change the left side of the preferences window so it's a tree view instead of a collection of icons.
3. Navigate to the following preferences group from the tree on the left: Input / Codecs -> Video codecs -> FFmpeg.  The right side of the preferences window will now change to "FFmpeg audio/video decoder".
4. Check the "Allow speed tricks" checkbox
5. Set the "Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding" to "All"
6. Click on the Save button on the bottom right of the preferences window.

Enjoy!

Mounting MSDOS/FAT filesystems under Solaris

I needed to copy over a bunch of photographs to my EON NAS so I put them on a USB stick and attached the stick directly to the NAS to get the maximum speed while copying.  It turns out, while on Linux you type something like:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdd1 /tmp/usbstick

to mount the FAT or FAT32 filesystem from /dev/sdd1 to /tmp/usbstick, that command doesn't work on Solaris which is what EON NAS is running on.  Here are all the steps I took to mount the USB stick under Solaris:

• Run the "format" command to see the device name of the new USB stick.  The output looks like:

#formatSearching for disks... 

The current rpm value 0 is invalid, adjusting it to 3600done 

c3t0d0: configured with capacity of 465.74GB 

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c0t0d0
     /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@0,0 1. c0t1d0
     /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@1,0 2. c0t2d0
     /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@2,0 3. c0t3d0
     /pci@0,0/pci1458,b002@11/disk@3,0 4. c3t0d0
     /pci@0,0/pci1458,5004@13,2/storage@5/disk@0,0 

Specify disk (enter its number): ^C

Use Ctrl-C to break out of the format command.  Based on the output of the format command, I know my Seagate FreeAgentGoFlex USB drive is /dev/dsk/c3t0d0.

• Create a mount point for that USB stick using:

mkdir /tmp/usbstick"

• Mount the FAT filesystem on the first partition of /dev/dsk/c3t0d0 using the command:

mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c3t0d0s0:c /tmp/usbstick

Et voila!  You should have the disk mounted and writable.  Finish copying to/from the disk and then issue a umount /tmp/usbstick command to unmount.  Don't forget to clean up and remove the /tmp/usbstick directory.

cwRsync, Windows 7 and UNIX Targets

Lately whenever I've had to rsync anything to my E O N-based NAS from my Windows 7 machine, I've had permissions issues on the NAS.  Specifically, any sub-directories I sync over are created with ridiculous permissions e.g. 0500 or something odd.  No files are able to be transferred until I manually login to the NAS and run a something similar to:

find -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

That got annoying very quickly.

I came across the rsync --no-perms flag which alleviated the problem to some extent in that the directories were at least writable during the initial transfer but the permissions still had to be resolved before transferring anything else over.

I'd gotten used to the whole issue but then came across this post and self-researched answer by karikas that talked about exactly my situation.  Turns out it's a known issue of cygwin (which is what the cwRsync application is using) and Windows 7.  The solution is to set the following environment variable in Windows 7:

set CYGWIN=nontsec