NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2017. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2016 with an older processor, see this article. With the release of Media Server Studio 2017, Intel provides Linux with the ability to leverage QuickSync on Skylake processors. This is a welcome development, as Skylake’s graphics capabilities are […]
Author Archives: priebe
Building FFMPEG with support for DeckLink capture and h264_qsv encoding
NOTE: this document covers Intel’s Media Server Studio 2016. If you want to use Media Server Studio 2017 with a Skylake processor, see this article. ffmpeg has come a long way since the pre-1.0 days. With its elaborate system of routing filter outputs, its ability to capture video from video cards, and support for GPU-based […]
Galaxy S7 default config not using full display resolution
I recently discovered that my Galaxy S7 Edge was reporting its display resolution as 640dpi, when I expected it to be approximately 534dpi. What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, it’s causing dynamically sized elements on screen to be approximately 17% bigger than they were intended to be drawn. Some users might like this, as […]
Ruuvu: building an Alexa Skill for IMDb ratings with alexa-app
We’ve enjoyed using our Amazon Echo for the past few months. Its built-in features provide some useful and fun capabilities, but the availability of the Alexa Skills Kit promises to really help the device maximize its potential. ASK allows third-party developers to build “skills” to add all-new features to Echo. Naturally, I couldn’t help but […]
Why is changing the hostname for a WordPress site so hard?
Recently, some changes at work have me doing more WordPress work than I’ve ever done before. I am mainly helping a group within our division deploy the sites they are building for clients. After doing a few of these, I’m just stunned by how difficult it is to move a site from one domain to […]
Compiling titanium mobile SDK from scratch
I recently needed to compile Titanium Mobile SDK from scratch. I was a little intimidated by the process. And as I feared, I ran into some nasty issues.
Titanium Mobile Gotchas (volume 2)
Here is another compilation of weird Titanium gotchas that we encountered while building a fairly large-scale (100+ JS modules, 40K lines of JS) app with Titanium Mobile SDK 3.4.x.
Google Play Services SDK Version History
A couple of times, I’ve found it necessary to know what version of google play services I’m dealing with. For example, when I was using a number of Titanium modules that were dependent on google play services, I had version conflicts. But Google Play Services versioning is a nightmare. This article tries to make sense […]
Building a custom CentOS 7 kickstart disc, part 1
Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 7; for CentOS 6, see this series. CentOS (and of course, it’s upstream distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has an extremely powerful, but somewhat poorly documented, tool for rapidly deploying machines and managing their configuration: kickstart. Kickstart lets you build a custom installation that can run hands-free. […]
OpenELEC 4 upgrade woes
I was very excited to see that the OpenELEC team had released version 4.0, based on XBMC Gotham. I read a lot before attempting an upgrade, and I still had huge problems with the upgrade from OpenELEC 3.2.