Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Using old help files with windows 8 (and 7, vista)

When you need to use older software in windows 8 (or windows 7 and vista) then you probably have seen the message that the help file can not be opened.

This is because the old .hlp file format is no longer supported by microsoft.
The new help files are in html format which does not macht the old windows help system.

If you still need to open the old help files (otherwise you would probably not be here), then you can download and install the old winhelp application.

You can download it from the microsoft download center

Monday, March 4, 2013

Video encoding with Java

After some reasearch for a good performing java library to do different video conversions, we stumbled over many projects.

On closer inspection we found that most of them are old projects, with no one maintainig them any longer.

We finaly got to the jave project which did what we needed.
Unfortunally it is based on a old version of ffmpeg, which has some problems depending on the input/output formats used.

So we did upgrade the binaries, adapted the parsing code and added a few new features to the library.
After some time trying to contact the original author to push back the changes upstream, we descided to create a new project which is maintained by us.

We named this Jave2, to show the difference to the original jave probject.
The project is hosted on github, you can find it here.