Crashing Spotify - probably solved

I really love Spotify, because of tons of music I can browse. I usually use its Windows desktop client. I find it kinda usable, no worries and I'm keeping it updated.

Perhaps, since one update (cca. 2 weeks ago) app crashes appeared. Especially in Radio feature, when I rapidly switch between the tracks. The weird thing about the crash was, that there was no system message about application crash, the app window - and naturally the Spotify process - just disappeared.

Today, after installing Windows updates gave it a second try and business as usual :( . After some rapid switching Spotify crashed again, but I didn't give up. In advance, I must admit I'm using it on a really old HP notebook, with Core Duo T2050 processor, but in combination with Windows 8 (no 8.1 of course :D).

While browsing Spotify's prefrences, I noticed some Hardware Acceleration tweaks. I found them interesting and most interestingly they were enabled. After disabling them and restarting Spotify I haven't encountered any crashes, yet. Win situation - finally I can browse the music with no limits :D.

I love pictures, so here is one about Spotify Preferences dialog, with Hardware Acceleration settings working on my old workhorse:

Is hwinfo.com infected?

My story starts with my mother's problem. She complained me about her computer which turned off after several minutes of working. I decided to clean its heatsink, but it was pretty clean, so I decided to not take apart the notebook, because I didn't yet have any thermal paste.
Well this isn't special thing, but I really wanted to make sure, that the CPU's overheating, so I downloaded and sent her the hwinfo32 application, which I use to monitor the CPU temperature. Then surprise happened:

PlayStation 4 introduced

The first presenter at Playstation meeting 2013 introduced the new gaming console Playstation 4.

Google's Youtube has some problems

According to several user reports Youtube has some technical problems causing monkeys have lot to do. On the other hand , it seems, that not only Youtube is facing some internal server errors, but there is a problem to Google's HTTP servers, too.

So what are, the symptoms?

The most well known problem is Youtube's internal server errors, making videos unreachable. The problem is present at least since yesterday, make me beleive, that this is not a planned maintance action. Moreover, the fact that they haven't still fixed it, tells me it's some serious problem. Fortunately, not the whole service is down, perhaps due to load balancing, so you can get the video from a working server.

Also it seems, that the storage isn't affected, because nobody reported any data loss, so don't panic. But if I were you, I wouldn't upload any video, until this issue is present.

Google's ad service also facing the same issues, causing some ads unavailable. What a shame, isn't it? :-D ( Perhaps, due to the new feature, where ads are videos. too )

 

Finally, even I can't get the message about highly trained monkey ( probably Skipper's chimp partners ), because of HTTP service's unavailability.

We cannot speed up recovery, so have one choice...live our offline life. So, go for a walk and enjoy air!

Margin Call - Krízispont - Kevin Spacey most is a kaszinóban, de a kártyát otthon hagyta

2008 őszén csődbe jutott egy patinás New York-i brókercég, a Lehman Brothers. Ez az esemény, azonban nemcsak az ő végüket jelentette, hanem egy gazdasági válság kirobbanásához is vezetett. Bár a filmben nem szó szerint erről a pénzintézetről van szó, de a történet a Lehman Brothers körülbelül két napjáról szól a válság kirobbanásának kezdetén. Egy újabb tőzsdés film mondhatnánk, viszont később kiderül, hogy valami sokkal mélyebb mondanivalója van. Nem csoda, hogy 2012-ben Oscar-díjra jelölték a legjobb forgatókönyv kategóriájában.

A film trailere:

Székely hónapnevek

A Maradj talpon vetélkedő egyik kérdésében vetődött fel, hogyan nevezik februárt a székely naptárban. Érdekelt a többi megnevezés is, ezért barátunk a Google egyik találatában megtaláltam a többi megnevezést is:

Downmixing 5.1 channel audio to stereo

I had some recordings, that contain AC3 audio with 5.1 channel audio, but I needed a copy from these video files with stereo sound. I usually use ffmpeg for video recoding stuff, so primarily I searched for a solution for this program.

Firstly, I found several forums, where other guys were talking about similar problem. It seemed, that the only solution is to add a patch to ffmpeg's source code and rebuild it.

Other guys used Audacity to downmix the audio. They used a WAV-files, which contained the 6-channel audio and for decoding 6 channel audio was used ffmpeg.

Well, I was more satisfied with the second solution, but a didn't want to use Audacity for this task, because I considered, that making a WAV file with 6-channel uncompressed sound data isn't very elegant :).

So my final solution became this:
- I extracted with VirtualDub the AC3 sound data to a WAV file ( which contains the compressed audio data, so it's a single AC3 audio file )
- Using ffmpeg tha AC3 audio file was converted to a stereo MP3 file (It isn't clear to me why it works, perhaps the patch was included in the latest versions)

The ffmpeg command was: ffmpeg -i audio.wav -ac 2 -ab 160k audio.mp3

The -ac 2 option says, that the user wants a 2 channel output.