Expert Blogs
You may well know the built-in Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts feature allowing for using short shortcuts to get the system entered a predefined, even long string into the current cursor position, no matter what program you're in. In this article, I present you with more advanced forms of text macroing with particular attention being paid to inserting the current date and/or time with as little effort as possible.
If you know older but, in many respects, not necessarily worse mobile operating systems like Palm OS and Symbian, you well know these systems offered dynamic(!) macroing capabilities out of the box (without third-party tools), allowing for, among other things, quickly entering the above-mentioned date/time.
UPDATE (06/Oct/2012): I've posted an entirely new section to the second half of the article on MKV audio editing. Please scroll down to today's update. Original article:
UPDATE (11/Oct/2012): the latest BUZZ Player and Good/PowerPlayer updates removed AC-3(A52), E-AC-3 and TrueHD(MLP). The developers of GoodPlayer stated (link) the patent holder asked for quite a lot money for the license. I've asked the developers whether the decoder(s) could be provided as optional In-App Purchases. HustMobile answered it might be possible.
As I've explained in some of my previous, Blu-ray-specific articles, I prefer ripping my own Blu-ray (BD) discs to purchasing any movie from Apple's iTunes store because:
- (after ripping,) the lack of any copy protection aka DRM: I hate not being able to play the videos I paid for in a third-party and, in several cases, much-superior-to-the-stock-Videos-app player. See for example the excellent, and, in many circumstances (too bright or noisy environment (e.g., a gym) where the maximal brightness and/or volume of the device just wouldn't suffice), compulsory DSP's in It's Playing (dedicated article).
You may remember the simple video player I've written as an answer to a reader's request, allowing people to watch a video while entering / editing text (article, with full sources, HERE).
In the AppStore, a similar app, “Video DS - DualScreen Video Player”, has recently debuted with a built-in Web browser, letting for browsing the Web while watching a video from both the stock Video's database and videos directly transferred to the home folder of the app. (AppStore link; $1.99)
With the recent Pwn2Own mobile challenge results (more info; I particularly recommend Joost Pol's advice: “The CEO of a company should never be doing e-mail or anything of value on an iPhone or a BlackBerry. It’s simple as that.
I'm seriously into shooting both stills and videos (no wonder I'm a regular poster on several imaging forums) and have dedicated several articles to, among other things, storing / reviewing EXIF, including geolocation, information in stills shot.
Windows Media (WM for short) and Silverlight (SL for short) Internet TV streaming is a very popular TV broadcasting method, particularly outside the U.S. For example, on, in my opinion, the best national TV station directory, wwiTV (“World Wide Internet TeleVision”), there are at least ten directly accessible WM / SL streams for Germany (list HERE; look for the green (WM) and light blue (SL) links). And that's only the number of streams directly accessible through wwiTV – I bet many of the external links (the red / black-background “LINK” ones) also lead to WM / SL streams. (Brown links are Flash streams not covered in this article.
Today, I've found another WMV video player, ASF WMV Player, in the AppStore ($1; link). As usual, I've very thoroughly tested it.
The app is advertised as mainly a WMV player (please see THIS for my previous WMV Playback bible), but, as I've found out, it's capable of playing back almost all the other, generally used file formats. However, the playback of most of them is pretty weak at higher (generally, at 720p and over) resolutions, particularly at Full HD (1080p).
You may already have run into the problem of having to import AVCHD videos into Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), iMovie or Aperture on your Mac. You may know that if you have the original(!) archive the way your camera has saved it into its memory card, you can easily do this. However, should you want to manually create a file archive you want to import to these apps (or add videos to existing archives), you'll soon realize there aren't tutorials explaining this at all.
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