Hana & Sarah’s blog

I wanted to buy a new camera. Current Canon A530 ’s battery door is broken. I started with Ebay looking for the spare battery door part for my camera first. But have changed my mind to search for a more recent model - A560. The LCD screen of A530 is too small anyway and wanted to have that 2.5 inch LCD of A560.

Practically this was my first time hunting for an item in Ebay. And I found it very hard to go up against all these people to bid for the good values. Especially, all these remaining times are not suitable for me to monitor all day long.

When the bid ends in between 9AM and 5PM, the only thing I can do is to bid on the item on the previous night since I have to work during the day time. And this is a serious disadvantage not being able to monitor the exact moment when the auction ends. It is said that you have higher chance to win that auction if you bid into right before the auction ends.

So I have searched the google and some popular DIY sights such as Lifehacker and luckily I found and tried JBidWacher the first time and really love it! You know there are too many craps out there so called and they even cost you. But JBidWatcher has all the functions that I needed such as multiple item monitoring and Snipe function.

What is a Snipe? You can set a maximum amount you desire to pay for the auction item using Snipe menu. Then JBid will bid few seconds before the auction ends within the maximum limit. The default is 30 seconds. Let’s say if your maximum amount $10 and the last bid amount was $5 , JBid will bid with the next mimimum amount (for example $6 ) instead of $10 just 30 seconds (can be changed) before the bid ends.

Also there is Multiple Snipe function that monitors similar items together and JBid stops checking other items when you win one of the items. But I have not tried this function yet.

It would be nice if there were some kind of FireFox plugin or software that helps to add items into the JBidWacher. You need to copy and paste the auction number of the item manually to monitor.

But all in all, this is one of the best Ebay Monitoring Software.

It’s a java based application, so you can run it on Windows , Mac, and Linux. Just make sure that you have the latest Java runtime installed.

JBidWatcher

If you want to provide streaming video service (For example, seeking any position in the video file) using Flash video, you need to embed Metadata in your flv data file.

The most well-known free tool is ‘flvtool2′ which was created by Norman Timmler (http://www.inlet-media.de/flvtool2) .

It’s pretty easy to use. You just have to type the command with -U option 'flvtool2 -U sample.flv' in the Windows command console.

However, if you have multiple FLV files to work on, this can be rather boring repetitive work. Yes, you may create a batch file and execute them all at once, but still the task requires too much manual typing.

So I decided to create a simple front GUI frontend to embed Metadata for the multiple flv data with few clicks. And, here is my SarahFlvtool2. It is a Windows GUI helper for flvtool2.

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You are using too many softwares running at the same time and you feel that you need a bigger monitor. Well before buy that new monitor, you might want to try Virtual Dimension first. This is a SourceForge hosted free GPL licensed virtual desktop manager. You can manage multiple virtual screens as many as you want .

Actually Virtual Dimension gives you full control over the how to manage and process applications, I was just surprised and never use any other virtual desktop manager.

Some of the nice things that you can with Virtual Dimension are

• You can move application around between virtual desktop so easily by moving the icon from one desktop to another
• You can easily make the application to show in all desktop by right click on the icon and click on “All desktops” menu. For some applications, like application launcher, you will need to access from all desktops.
• It comes with a very nice transparency function. You make the windows transparent! By using the short cut key, you can easily turn on and off the transparency. Or you can save the settings so it is transparent whenever you execute the application. So great!

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Now that I have converted my old video files into Flash Video files, what do I need to do to add them in my website? I wondered.

The answer: You will need to have the Flash swf component that will play your FLV video files which will be embeded in your web page. And install or save it in your website. And add addtional javascript or embed elements in your webpage. See Wikipedia page for more information.

So I spent some time googling and tried to find free or open source (So I can probably improve it after I learn Flash ) FLV flash player. In this Wikipedia Flash Video page, there are several players listed.

• Web-Anatomy FLV Player : for Web, but Free only for Non-Commercial
• Applian FLV Player : This is Desktop FLV player which we don’t need
• Martijn DeVisser’s FLV Player : Also desktop player
• Sonettic Cinema FLV Player : It has a free version . Doesn’t say anything about non-commercial , so I guess I can use it, but it says something about the latest Flash Player is required to play it. Hmm.
• Wimpy Desktop FLV Player : Desktop player
• Flowplayer embeddable video player : This is for web.
• OS FLV - the Open Source, embeddable FLV player : This is for web, too
• Moyea Desktop Flash Player : Desktop Player
• nFLV Player - Able to play unrewindable/unforwardable .flv videos : Desktop player
• SWF & FLV Player (Mac OS-X) : Desktop for Mac OS-X

Also another player , JW Media Player is well-known but it is also free only for non-commercial. According to the website, you should buy commercial liscence if you have ads in your website such as Adsense or display banners. So basically this is not a solution for me at least.

And I do not like such limitation. Free for all cases is what I would really want. So I choose FlowPlayer and OS FLV as they are under GPL licenses.
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I have been searching for some good free video format converters for a while. I have actually installed and tried in my desktop PC. The results were astonishing! Some of them do work better than the commercial ones.

Most of them are based on the FFmpeg LGPL software and other open source utilities. FFmpeg is a great piece of software, but it contains only console commands and does not come with any fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Basically these freewares that I will initroduce act as a the front GUI for FFmpeg. So FFmpeg is not for a casual innocent PC user.

I tried several freewares. Some are worthless to mention and some are very nice. There are the three finalists.

• MediaCoder
• Any Video Converter
• Super

MediaCoder

This is probaly the most powerful video format converter with the every options that you will ever need.
You can drag and drop the source files just like Any Video Converter. And you can play around with the option contol in the lower pane. Note that it shows nice little summery of the output file format and expected size if you click on the ‘Summery’ tab. When you’re done with changing the options, you click on the ‘Start’ Button to execute the conversion. The output file will be created in the same folder where the original source file is located by default.

Here is the description from the website.

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

And Here are the supported formats ( * supported as input only)

MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

When I tried to convert wmv to avi, it did work fine. But when I tried wmv to flv conversion. ffmpeg.exe has crashed and MediaCoder did not respond properly so I had to close it.

• Interface: 7 of 10
• Easy to use: 5 of 10
• Available functions/options: 10 of 10
• Stability: 6 of 10
• To Flv conversion: Didn’t work
• Final Verdict: It’s OK if you want to control all the details of the output video.

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