At 8:58 AM Pacific time (4:58 AM GMT), Firefox rolled over the 50 million download line. For the Firefox team, this is a validation of 5 years of work and the beginning of 5 more. The “50 million” minisite features some of the tales of spreading Firefox that have won submitters one of 50 limited edition coins minted especially for the event.
There are still 38 coins available, so keep your stories coming to fifty@spreadfirefox.com!
The SpreadFirefox team are celebrating the fact that they are blazing a trail towards 50 million downloads, and are giving away some unique prizes to those who do something “cool, unusual and spectacular” to promote the browser.
Details are here.
Update: Check out my Firefox downloads counter underneath the sidebar to the right —>
As a special reward to all you loyal Firefox users, check this out! It’s an extension which lets you play Pong from within Firefox, perhaps while waiting for a long download :)
I’ve just installed the Windows version iTunes to have a play with (I don’t own an iPod, but have heard good things about it in its own right) and it came bundled with QuickTime.
I had shunned QuickTime way back when they started showing an annoying “Upgrade to Pro” nag screen when starting the application – what did it for me was that there was no “don’t remind me again” option. Instead I opted for QuickTime Alternative which was able to handle any .mov files I encountered. Both this and the excellent Real Alternative (I’m not a fan of RealPlayer either) are available here at the time of writing.
Anyway, it seems that you can get rid of the splash screen by setting your date forward a few years, launching QuickTime then clicking the “Later” button. Then set your date back to normal and you shouldn’t be reminded for those few years.
I’ve found that this works even if you have run QuickTime before (i.e. not from a clean installation). Strangely, QuickTime seems to crash on startup if you’re a little over-zealous with your date-setting: I tried both 2099 and 2050 with no joy, so settled for the more conservative 2010, by which time I expect I will have at least re-installed my OS and QuickTime.
After capturing two and a half hours of video with PCTV Vision, I was a little disappointed as the audio and video were horribly out of sync. Reading around various forums revealed that this is a common problem.
I had heard that Showshifter ($74.99) was supposed to be good, so gave it a try but experienced the same problem. I believe the loss of sync is caused when video frames are dropped and the sound card continues to capture audio as it is a separate subsystem. Note that I only tried Showshifter with the default Pinnacle drivers, which I believe are to blame rather than the product itself.
Once again I tried the BtWinCap drivers, and tried a different piece of capture software, WinDVD Recorder ($99.95) from Intervideo. This worked well, and had the advantage of being able to capture straight to MPEG-2 for input into a DVD authoring package.
I then used TMPGEnc DVD Author ($68) to transform the raw MPEG-2 video into DVD object files complete with menus. It also let me to set up chapters and perform some limited linear editing.
I also used a different VCR – a Panasonic 4-head model – which despite its age still produced superior output to the newer Matsui (urgh!) model I was previously using. With phono A/V outputs, this also negated the need for my dodgy custom SCART converter.
The final product (finished at half past midnight on Christmas morning!) was satisfactory, but next time I would like to use the original 8mm footage – the 12-year-old camcorder still works at least on mains power – and find some software enabling me to perform finer editing.
Note that this was a cheap project as I was able to use trial versions of all software products, but I would like to find free or at least cheaper alternatives for future use, so any recommendations are welcome.
Hope you all had a great Christmas!
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