Order of the Bath

These are some rough notes on my progress and developments in this project.

The first job was to download Ubunto 7.10 workstation i386 and cut it to a CD, a little tricky because I lost my CD Writer software on a previous rebuild but ISOrecorder came to the rescue. Then an experiment booting from the CD. That was a curious experience, all the initial graphics, logo and whizzing orange stripe, worked fine but when it all stopped I was left with a plain off white screen and a mouse pointer (which worked). Nothing else. I can only assume that there is some problem with my graphics card that it doesn’t support. I did a similar experiment with a very old Win98 machine and the result was similar except that the finished result was a plain while on black terminal, no graphics at all despite the boot time graphics all working.

For the next stage, I installed the free VMware Server edition. I can’t see any differences to the workstation edition which costs money but that can always be a future route. There are two parts to the download; the platform software (Win or Linux) and the tools. I haven’t found any use for the latter as all you need is built into the base product. When installing on Windows it complains if you don’t have IIS (web server) installed. You can ignore this as it is only needed for remote control of the system (as you would in a real server environment). Installed, as usual, under admin authority, it runs without any problems under a limited user account creating all the run-time files in C:/Virtual Machines

VMware lacks any “Quick Start” instructions but diving in it quickly became apparent what was needed. I created two virtual machines, one for XP pro and one for Ubuntu taking all the defaults. I booted the first and it immediately recognised the CD in the reader and proceeded to install. I used the same key as the host machine and there were no complaints. The performance was sluggish to the extreme but improved considerably once the VMware tools were installed on the guest using the button provided—This is very slick, what it does is to mount a pseudo CD-ROM onto the guest O/S which initiates an Autorun and proceeds to install. I also spotted that the default memory size that VMware gives XP is 256MB which is a bit low. Increasing this to 512MB improved things. Another thing learned by experience was not to go to full screen mode until the virtual machine is fully booted and the O/S loaded. Doing it before can get you stuck there as it doesn’t respond the the CNTL-ALT hot keys to break out. As soon as you can you need to turn off any screen saver and disable hibernate as it is not only pointless but also can use up all the host CPU resources when activated. I have also seen a recommendation not to activate the Windows install until after all the “hardware” customisation and VMware Tools is installed else it could trigger the MS alarms about pirated software.

Installing the Ubuntu guest was similarly easy though the install of the VMware tools wasn’t as slick. It required using a command line instruction (which I have now forgotten again) to actually initiate the install. It does say that you should be experienced with the Guest operating system, which is fair. Another thing that surprised me (about Ubuntu itself) were the 201(!) security patches that it wanted as soon as it settled down—and these took a couple of hours to download and install. I agree that it is now as easy as Windows Update but I wasn’t expecting that quantity. I presume it is because it is a fully loaded distro with many packages pre-installed. At least they are all handled by the same system. A minor glitch is that it complained about a proprietary driver in use. This turned out to the the VMware Ethernet emulator. For smoothness this should be incorporated or whet ever is necessary. The default guest configuration for Ubuntu was 512MB and it worked just fine. Both had a fixed size 8GB disk which was plenty for a base O/S install and a modest number of applications but you would need more if you were storing data there as well. Suspending a running O/S (of either sort) was very easy and they were very quick to restart and be ready for action.

Both machines were also quick to boot from the start but the Ubuntu login was a bit slow. A disconcerting feature of VMware is that, as the machines boot, the window size jumps about both in shape and size as the graphics emulator allows for the resolution requested by the guest. It is probably possible to fix this but it is OK when you get used to it. The finished size is set using Display properties in XP as usual but is set by the VMware tools for Ubuntu. I would suggest that if you plan to use your guests full screen then you chose the same size as the native host but if you plan to use cascaded windows then chose a size smaller to avoid scroll bars (which are impractical) and allow room for the window furniture.

Running both together was very very slow. My system has only 1GB memory and running the host and two 512MB guests was too much for it. Future experiments are to get the sound working (that is not in the default guest config), test things like cut and paste, USB connections, storage on the host file system and duplicating these sample builds to create working versions with the required applications.

Meanwhile…

The PC has become even more unstable to the extent that I can’t continue with the trials. I spent an afternoon refreshing the BIOS and all the hardware drivers and, if anything, it got worse. It has crashed once while writing this, during which it seems to have un-configured all of my Firefox settings. Grrr. This means that I will need to replace the hardware now, accelerating what was to be phase 2.

In the light of the performance issues, the specification of the new box needs to be: As fast a processor as economically sensible, 2GB+ memory, dual head graphics, decent sound and RELIABLE.

Curiously this matches very closely with the base level Mac Pro: 2.8GHz quad Core Intel Xeon processor, 2GB 800MHz memory, dual head ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, 320GB SATA drive at £1,429.

As a comparison the DELL XPS720 configured with 3.0GHz quad core Q6600, 2GB 800MHz memory, dual head Nvidia 8800GT, 2×250GB SATA raid 0 disk system comes to £1609 and the difference in performance probably wouldn’t show. There are no guarantees that it would run Ubuntu either as, although they do sell them now, there are only two and relatively low specification.

Will the few users who have swelled Microsoft coffers by buying the exorbitantly unnecessary Office 2007 please stop sending us documents in “docx” format. We can’t read them—not if we use the free OpenOffice.org nor even if we use any other Microsoft product. You have an option to “Save as…” a Word 97-2003 document which we can read so please use it—everytime.

As I explained in an earlier post I have a problem with the unreliability of Windows. In there I looked at all the applications I currently use and mooted the possibility of changing over to Linux and using a virtualisation system to ease the transition, or possibly permanently to resolve the problem of legacy systems that could not be ported.

Having now looked at it more deeply I see that if it was viewed from the opposite direction—embracing virtualisation for its own merits—then further benefits could be obtained. Normally I am in favour of a single tool for a single job. I apply this to software (not liking integrated suites) and Hi-Fi (preferring separates to music-centres) but I don’t seem to have applied it to the PC very much. They are sold as general purpose, do it all systems so, as a result, they have a huge mish-mash of applications installed. It is assumed that there are great benefits to this; the data from one system can easily be passed to another, but is this actually the case or even necessary? I have already isolated a few roles for other reasons; data storage and archive has been offloaded to a NAS and music playback has it’s own dedicated systems; so we can start from this position.

To look at it we need to see what the data flows are for typical regular tasks. I have analysed 5 regular jobs that I currently perform on my PC to discover interaction between them. These were 1) Rip/Digitise a music album, 2) publish a census transcript, 3) research and update the family tree, 4) prepare a projector schedule for a Sunday service and 5) update a web site. On top of this is the routine everyday activity of email, web browsing and editing text and word processed documents. Coincidentally, or perhaps by premonition, the tasks closely match the application groups that I used for the previous article.

Apart from a lot of interaction with email, browsing and documents, part of which was by copy and paste and part by manual retyping, I discovered that there was very little interaction between the jobs. Tasks 2 and 5 share a lot of data handling techniques but it was largely low level text editing and spreadsheet work which are core activities. Tasks 3 and 5 share a web upload requirement. If I had separate machines, the work could be divided between them so that each one performed a single function and there would be little data passed between them. Where virtualisation comes in is that it would not be necessary to have the expense, space or overhead of multiple hardware and software licences. It also offers the benefit of allowing cross pasting of data on the occasions when it would be useful. New versions of major applications can be tested in their own Virtual Machines (VMs). Finally, most virtualisation systems have the facility for suspended machines which make for a much faster setup as the typically used applications in each can already be running and just require data to be loaded.

A proposed design would be…

A Windows host platform

There has to be a base upon which the dedicated task VMs run. For reasons of economy this needs to be my existing desktop system as described in the previous post. Also for reasons of direct access to the hardware, some applications will need to remain on the host system. Many of these also have “Windows-only” constraints so that forces us to go for a Windows host operating system. For reliability (the reason we started this whole exercise off) we need to minimise what runs natively. Although it looks like there is a lot of stuff in this list, with the exception of the first two items, they are light and pose little threat.

• Patchmix DSP interface to the sound card, the Matrox driver for the graphics card and ScanGear, the Twain driver for the SCSI scanner. These specialist drivers possibly pose the greatest threat to the stability of the machine as a whole.
• Wave Corrector + LAME—probably needed here so that it has native access to the sound streams.

• Pen Drive Manager and PINS. Other VMs will need access to the memory sticks and passwords.
• Notetab & WinZip—because they will be useful.
• Backup4all—to back everything up.
• AVG—for safety.
• ZoneAlarm—to protect the whole system.

The specialist task guest Virtual Machines

Legacy applications (those that have to run on Windows and for which there is no viable alternative) come in five groups each of which could be defined as a separate guest VM.

• Presentation—EasyWorship + K-Lite + PowerPoint Viewer. I am not sure how EasyWorship will cope with a VM as it is really a dual screen program. ChipmunkAV could also be installed here for development as that is where it would belong. There is an opportunity here to create a VM which closely matches the live system used at church and it is a system that would benefit from a separate development environment for new versions.
• Music processing—Exact Audio Copy + Accurate Rip + LAME, MediaMonkey and Audacity + LAME for convenience (even though a Linux version is available).
• Family History—Family Tree Maker, Resource File Viewer, GED2HTML and DjVu as it is not used for anything else. Also these functions which are not used enough to warrant a separate VM.
  • GPS—Garmin Mapsource and waypoint manager. Our Advent GPS is managed from Mary’s laptop.
  • Web maintenance—Zoom possibly with CuteFTP because it is available and OmniPagePro for OCR. I haven’t seen any information about whether the Twain interface can be passed to guest VMs nor have also not seen any decent Linux OCR systems.

The remaining applications can be ported to Linux guest VM(s).

• General home office—Firefox, Thunderbird + PopFile, a Jabber Client, OpenOffice, Adobe Reader, GnuPG, a Pop Peeper replacement and a picture editor.
  • An FTP system (initially, command line FTP would probably do)
  • A torrent client. Despite my putting µTorrent as “music download” in the earlier post I realised that the majority of my torrent traffic is not the typical music/video bootlegging that it is often used for, but mostly open software and data sharing. It would be run here because this VM is likely to be running most of the time. You could argue that it should be on the base host for this reason but I suspect that the Windows version may be contributing to the current machine instability.

  This VM would be used for all the routine email/browsing activity plus the census publishing and general web maintenance which uses similar tools (hence the FTP client). Turboprint will be needed for printing.

• Software and Web development—A CVS system, Gnu C++, Home Grown Software, HTML Tidy. The VM gives the opportunity for running a local web server which would allow test and development of web applications such as WordPress locally.

That is 5 guest VMs—not all running at once of course but is this overkill?

Lingering Questions

• Where do I keep the data? Application specific data would be better on the local VM but how, then would it be backed up? VMs use the concept of virtual disks for their operating systems and data. These are seen by the host system as just big unstructured files so backup from there is limited. Some also allow for the use of real disks or partitions but this creates the problem of drive fragmentation.
  Would it all be better on the NAS? It has the flexibility of floating sized share points which are visible from any machine. What are the implications for backup there—a NAS with live data would suggest the need for a backup and archive on a system separate again; at present there is only a weekly disk shadow.
• Will the single Windows XP licence be sufficient for the host and multiple guest systems? MS Virtual PC presumably allows it. I am told that other VM systems work ok too.
• Do guest VMs run under Windows Limited User account or do they need an Administrator host?
• What issues are there for file sharing between Windows and Linux? Plain text files could be an issue with different line endings.
• Is there any point in running the guest Windows VM’s at all? Why not just run all the legacy applications on the host platform.
• Does this solution provide any benefits to justify its relative complexity? Will it make the overall system any more reliable and, in particular will it isolate the failures to just a single component?

The Future

Considering how little remains on the host, it suggests that the next time I need a machine replacement then, presuming that it is not actually broken, I should retain this machine for the sound card related applications and build the new one with the “General home office” configuration as the Linux host platform and run the other specialist VMs under that. The need for the digitising function should be quite low by then.

Appendix—the task analysis and data flows

1. Rip/Digitise a music album.
   1. Ripping a CD. Exact Audio Copy reads the CD and passes the data internally to LAME and the MP3 is passed directly to the shared NAS. AccurateRip references its online dtabase. Media Monkey indexes the MP3, re-tags from internet sources and downloads the cover art. All data involved is already on shared media so there is no problem in devolving the processes.
   2. Digitising a vinyl or tape album. Wave Corrector records the audio stream to a temporary WAV file on local disk. As a separate process, Wave Corrector is used to edit and de-click the recording and pass the data internally to LAME and the MP3 is passed directly to the shared NAS. From there it is the same as the process above except that the cover art may be downloaded manually (using Firefox) and may need some picture editing. The temporary WAV file and the Wave Corrector log (session file) are archived to NAS.
2. Publish a census transcript. The transcript arrives by email in a ZIP file. This is extracted using WinZip. The processing involves a mixture of SpreadSheet, a text editor and home written software to generate output HTML pages and a zipped archive. Email is used to distribute the results. As a secondary task, the browser is used to update a progress log (via Google Calendar) and IM is used for communication.
3. Research and update the family tree. Input is by web search and email. The dedicated database is updated using Family Tree Maker. The web version is created by a piece of software that I had forgotten called GED2HTML and uploaded using FTP.
4. Preparing a projector schedule. The order of service arrives by email as a word document. This is transferred, generally manually, into EasyWorship except. New songs and liturgy are cut and pasted either from the order of service or from a web based database. The output is transferred to memory stick for transport. A secondary task may involve obtaining/scanning images and editing them. These are imported into the EasyWorship system. Video clips and PowerPoint scripts are taken without modification, though may be viewed as a check.
5. Updating a web site.
   1. The majority of this is done using a text editor (for the plain pages), or a browser (for the content managed pages). Secondary tasks include scanning and editing pictures and for some pages, data manipulation using OCR, spreadsheets etc. Server software comes in ZIP format. Upload is done using CuteFTP. The search engine index is created using Zoom which reads a local copy of the web pages and generates data files which are uploaded to the server – sometimes using an internal FTP process or sometimes using CuteFTP.
   2. Maintaining the online WordPress software and themes. This is done rather tediously using a text editor then FTP upload to a sandpit web site and test. It is a very slow form of software development.

…some may say “at last!” But why am I now considering doing it? It really comes down to only one thing—reliability and hence for the sake of my health as I get so mad with it every time it Blue Screens. After all this time they should have made it self correcting. It is no excuse to say that “Windows has shut down to avoid damaging something or other…” or whatever it says, everything is still in memory so it just needs an integrity check and refresh anything damaged, not just to throw it’s hands up in despair.

A second and lesser reason is that to move on I would have to consider Vista and things would need to be rethought anyway as some software I use is very old and almost certainly not compatible.

Arguments against are that it would mean learning a new interface, software and admin but that is mitigated by the fact I am already familiar with server unix. Also that some things that are essential are Windows only which leads me to considering the options.

The options

• Linux, but which flavour? Ubuntu seems to be the current front runner.
• Mac. There are a lot of ready made applications and it is a unix based OS but requires proprietary hardware.
• Dual boot. It takes too long to switch over.
• Virtual machine, e.g. VMWare is attractive. I don’t know much about the alternatives available or the costs.
• I need to use the existing hardware as it is not very old and I can’t justify replacing it at the moment.
• The existing XP licence is available for legacy applications.

When designing a system the first and most important question is “what applications are required?” In this case, as it is an upgrade, the question is “How can the existing applications be migrated?” This is a list of what I use and do at the moment and will need to be considered for replacement.

Browsing/Web

• Firefox. With addons and plugins. Linux and Mac versions are available.
• CuteFTP (Paid-up) for upload. mac available but not Linux I think.
• Zoom search engine generator (Paid-up). The engine is CGI, PHP or JavaScript, the problem is the builder which is Windows only.
• [edit] HTML Tidy—another one I had forgotten because it is not “Windows installed”. Many other platforms exist.
• [edit] Xenu Link Sleuth broken link detector.

eMail/IM

• Thunderbird. I would want to transfer my mail archive. Mac and Linux versions are available but I don’t know how compatible the data files are.
• PopFile anti spam system. Written in perl so portable.
• Pop Peeper minimal POP server status. Windows only so an alternative will be needed.
• Exodus Jabber IM client. Windows only but there are a number of alternatives.

Document processing

• OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. Other platforms are available.
• PaintShopPro (Paid-up) for picture editing. Windows only but I am not locked into this so anything decent would do. Ideas?
• NoteTab (Paid-up) for plain text editing. Windows only. I will miss this as it is an excelent program though I would probably have used vi(m) if it was available.
• Adobe Reader—because PDF’s keep coming.
• OmniPage (Paid-up). OCR (not often used). There is a Mac version but not others. I doubt that there is a viable competitor on the Linux desktop.
• CutePDF pseudo printer driver (not used much). GhostScript may be usable direct.
• DjVu image viewer (occasional use). There do seem to be other platforms available.

Family History

• Family Tree Maker for Windows (Paid-up). Not available for other platforms. As the database is large this would probably remain as a legacy Windows application.
• Resource File Viewer—Windows only, another legacy application though there may be alternatives.
• [Edit] Ged2HTML—I had forgotten about this. It is not used often and is not “installed” in the Windows way. There is a Unix version which uses the same base code but without the GUI but I am not sure about which flavours.
• Some home grown software. Written for Unix anyway.

Music—preparation only, not listening

• Rip—Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip. It looks like this is Windows only. The alternative, dBpoweramp, looks like Windows only as well.
• Digitise—Wave Corrector (Paid-up). Windows only, but they do say it works on Linux under Wine.
• Encoding—LAME. Multi-platform.
• Edit—Audacity. Multi-platform.
• Library & Tagging—MediaMonkey (Paid-up). Not available for other platforms. I have media in WMA and MP3 formats.
• Control—Sonos Desktop (occasional use only as it is rarely needed, most control being done by the hand-held unit). Mac version available. A shareware alternative exists driven from a web server.
• Download—µTorrent. Windows only but there is bound to be an alternative. [edit] I realise now that, although this was first installed for music download, in practice that is not what it is used for. It is more for software download and project data sharing.

GPS/Mapping

• Garmin MapSource (Paid-up). Another Windows only product. No alternative that I can think of so will remain on the legacy system.

Presentation

• EasyWorship to maintain church master database and prepare schedules. Not available for other platforms and would remain as a legacy Windows application.
• Video rendering—K-Lite codec pack (for testing only). Interface to EasyWorship so only Windows needed.
• MS PowerPoint Viewer. Interface to EasyWorship so only windows needed.
• ChipmunkAV (Paid-up). Never actually used but for Windows dev. purposes only.

Security

• AVG anti virus. Windows only but less critical on a non Windows platform anyway There may be alternatives.
• ZoneAlarm firewall. There are native Linux firewalls but they are notoriously unfriendly.
• GnuPG encryption. Available for other platforms but may not have the GUI interface
• PINS password manager (Paid-up). This went out of effective support years ago. I rely on this being portable between office, home and other places and really needs cut and paste into applications so it is a bit of a problem.
• [edit] PuTTY secure shell. Although other systems are supported there is not a lot of point as most other systems have native ssh clients.

Programming

• MinGW Minimal GNU for Windows with C compiler, make etc. This won’t be necessary as the alternatives are Gnu compatible environments anway. I will just need to get the compiler.
• Tortoise CVS versioning system. There must be a good alternative.

Backup/Restore

• Backup4all (Paid-up). Managed backup system (uses ZIP files). A backup systems needs to be simple, foolproof and reliable. This one is Windows only and I haven’t looked at alternatives yet. If a Legacy Windows system is kept then it will still be needed anyway.
• Pen Drive Manager (Paid-up)—replicates and backs up memory sticks, no longer supported.
• WinZip (Paid-up). I get and send a lot of stuff in Zip format. As the name suggests this is Windows only but there are bound to be alternatives. Even command line would be acceptable.

Other software installed but only occasionally used

• Eraser—disk nuke system. Windows only but I think GnuPG can do a similar job or use the bootable DBAN for whole disks.
• FreeUndelete—File recovery.
• MediaInfo—codec viewer.

What hardware

Will it work with selected software?

• AMD 2600+ with 1GB memory. I would get a new Hard drive to build a replacement system on.
• Matrox P650 dual head graphics card. A Linux driver does seem to be available.
• 2 x 1280×1024 LCD monitors running an extended desktop.
• EMU 0404 Professional sound card and its interface Patchmix DSP. I can only find a Windows version of this. [Edit] The ALSA project offers hope that there may be a community supported driver.
• SCSI connected Canon Scanner & ScanGear driver.
• External NAS for music store and backup. No problem.
• Network connected Canon MP600R Printer/Scanner—I can’t find any Linux drivers. Turboprint claims to support it.

Is there anything else to consider? It is only when you go through the stuff like this that you realise how much of a monopoly that Microsoft has.

I will be looking for help and suggestions in the coming months while I consider all the options.

[This post will be updated to add additional information as discovered]

This has gone into RC3 - i.e. the last patching before production release. More about it at MajorGeeks but beware this is still an unofficial release and may (will) contain bugs. I would expect the final release in January. This will be good news for anyone with a slightly flaky system or who is planning a rebuild. Having all the updates together in one place makes it so much easier and guarantees that you haven’t missed one.

Windows Home Server looks like it might be an interesting product. More interesting than Microsoft imagine perhaps as that definitely looks like a white Apple Macbook that they guy is using on the sofa! I got the picture and story from IStartedSomething. The Question is which is the original? Who has retouched the picture? Even so, it could be a Macbook Pro.

It seems that Microsoft has been engaging in a little underhand patching. People are reporting that changes are being made even when they have automatic updates turned off. There is apparently nothing to worry about, they are perfectly good patches, but the deceit is troubling. To see if you have been hit, check the version of \windows\system32\cdm.dll (use right click - properties - version). A pre-patch version should be 7.0.6000.374. If you have been stealth patched then it will be 7.0.6000.381. There is a little discussion about it on the Microsoft Forums but nothing official yet. The only justification I can think of is that, as this is a patch to Windows Update itself, there may be no other way it can be done, but even that doesn’t excuse the silence.

Update: Microsoft have explained what is going on and it is just as I thought, but I still maintain that if they can detect and action that an update is required then they can just as easily tell you about it so you can make an informed decision.

All of a sudden, my PC had started to distort the sound of playback of anything, even the internal Windows “bonks.” Especially it would no longer allow me to play one piece of music off my network drive whilst ripping another, but any activity, especially disk activity caused the music to take a back seat only getting attention in the gaps. Awful! There may have been some impact on the overall performance as well.

The solution was totally unexpected but made a little sense in hind-sight. Some time earlier I had trouble writing a CD-ROM creating a coaster. It seems that in the process of all the errors, Windows in its wisdom, had downgraded my IDE controller which contained both the writer and the hard drive.

This can be confirmed by looking at Right Click “My Computer” / Hardware / Device Manager; then expand “IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers” and Right Click “Primary IDE Channel” selecting Properties. The Advanced Settings tab would show Content Transfer Mode = PIO mode (which is wrong).

To Fix it you need to uninstall the driver. Do this by closing the properties and Right Clicking “Primary IDE Channel” and select Uninstall. Do this for all of them if there is more than one. It will ask for a system restart. When you log back in you will notice various “Found New Hardware” slugs come up—for DVD/CD Drive, Hard Drive and the IDE channel itself. It will then ask for another reboot. This time if you go through the check again the Content Transfer Mode should be “Ultra DMA Mode 5″ (or perhaps other numbers) and it should all be wonderful again.

The way Audio Visual playback works on a PC is that your player software of choice looks at that the file and decides what format it is from a 4 character code in the headers. This will tell it what codecs are required (they are separate for video and audio). It will then read the data from the file and pass it to the relevant codec. This will decode and expand the data stream and pass it back to the player software for display. The decoder parts of the codec have standard algorithms so, assuming they have been coded correctly, it doesn’t matter which one you use.

The best known codecs types are

MPEG-1—used on Video CDs.
MPEG-2—used on DVD and SVCD.
MPEG-4—used on HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Sorenson3—used by Apple QuickTime videos.
WMV—Windows Media Video sponsored by Microsoft.
Realvideo—now used mostly for streaming video.

but there are subdivisions such as mp42 and mpg4 which are both MPEG-4 codecs.

The best known audio codecs are

mp3—the generic and (probably) public domain codec.
WMA—Windows Media Audio which compliments the Microsoft video codec.

Some codecs do other things like the splitter which separate the audio from the video content. There are also surround sound decoders, subtitle extractors, language separators for multilingual files, chroma-key generators and digital signal processors for sound and picture manipulation. Even Audio and Video hardware drivers are considered as codecs by some applications.

Codecs come as installable packages, often in bundles, and are stored in C:\WINDOWS\system32 as .dll or .drv files.

How to find out what you need

AVI Codec Analyser tells you what you have installed and what you need to play any particular file but I can’t relate the two and it doesn’t seem to recognise QuickTime at all.

GSpot is popular doesn’t seem to recognise many for me.

MediaInfo gives similar information in a much more readable format (with many options) and supports QuickTime.

Finding missing codecs

If you find you need a missing codec, the best way is to search for them by name. Many will be found in the K-Lite package from codecguide.com

In part 2, I described a method for getting the three primary applications installed safely on your system. You should be able to run any media files that you come across with it’s optimum application. In the case of generic files such as .wav, .mp3 and .mpg you may not have assigned a player, in which case, ask for the list of options when prompted and select which one you would like to handle it. At fist un-tick the box “Always use the selected program” until you have a feel for which player is best for you (and which ones work!) If you change your mind later, open a file with the right mouse option “OpenWith …” and chose an alternative.

DVD Playback

Note that none of these are actually capable of playing a DVD by themselves. They still needs the relevant codecs from a third party. If you go to The Plugins option table and click on “Look for Plugins on the Internet” you will be taken to a sales page with a number of options (Roxio, CyberlLink, InterVideo and nVidia at present). Fortunately you will find that you probably already have one which came with the DVDROM drive. If not then there is a freeware alternative available called DScaler.

The other thing that you will notice is that whatever you set earlier, Windows Media Player or an application that came with your DVD/CD drive may be the application selected automatically when you insert a disk. This is not directly related to the application itself but the Autorun features set on the drive. What I suggest is that you go to My Computer, right click on the drive icon and select preferences. On the Autoplay tab select each media type In turn and tell it to “Prompt me each time to chose an action.” This will give you a chance to think about it and make your decision later for each type of disk.

Online

One feature that you do want that comes with all the players is the browser plug-ins that enable inline and streaming content to be handled correctly. This is what the question about MIME types was about on the real Player install. Fortunately all three now come with plug-ins for IE, Firefox and, I think, Opera. There is a fourth application that I haven’t mentioned yet which is important in this context—Adobe Flash Player. This doesn’t present too many complications, it is a single function application unlike the others, only works from within the browser and comes with its own codecs built in.

Part 4 will talk about troubleshooting problems.