Having trouble enabling DMA on your nForce 3 mobo?

After getting jerky DVD playback I noticed that DMA was not being enabled for my IDE DVD drive. The canonical hdparm -d1 /dev/cdrom resulted in a rude “Permission denied”.

It seems that to enable DMA, the amd74xx, ide-cd and ide-generic need to be loaded in this order, or you’ll loose DMA and end up with something like this in your system log:

NFORCE3-250: port 0x01f0 already claimed by ide0

This program monitors a bunch of files and runs a command when any of them changes.

The idea was pilfered from Pragmatic Automation. This program uses fcntl and thus only works on Unix derivatives.

Here’s how you might use it:

find -name \*.py | xargs ./stakeout.py src/TestAll.py

Download: Python source, Example shell script

The Archos Multimedia Jukebox is a nice portable player but unfortunately picky when it comes to playing AVI files. Thus, here is an empirically crafted script that will encode almost any movie file to an Archos-friendly format.

The script uses mencoder from MPlayer, specifically with the following options:

mencoder -audio-preload 0 -oac copy -o OUTPUT -ovc lavc
         -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vqmin=2:vqmax=20:vhq:keyint=250:vme=4:v4mv INPUT

Note: If the audio track isn’t encoded with MP3, replace -oac copy above with e.g. -oac mp3lame -lameopts preset=standard

Usage:

  make-archos-video.sh input.avi output.avi

Download: make-archos-video.sh