Mostly Tech. So go away!

Aggregated and migrated content from various scraps/notes/blogs I maintained over the years. Now I use this space to blog about mostly technical stuff. It serves as a reference for self

[jubinjose-blog]

Trying out Microsoft Windows Azure platform

For those that don't know, this is Microsoft's cloud platform, much like Amazon's elastic cloud. Amazon's cloud is already in use by many startups as well as established services. Dropbox comes to my mind.

Last I heard, Apple's iCloud runs on both Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS. Given Apple's secretive nature, more details on this will be hard to come by. 

Nevertheless my interest in Azure is mostly around evaluating it as a service platform in line with some freelancing I'd like to do. I already have Amazon ECS. So this gives me a good opportunity to compare.

[jubinjose-blog]

Problems viewing json response in browser

This is very annoying. While I do agree that real world scenario of someone wanting to view json content on a browser doesn't occur frequently, I would like for that to be possible as a debugging measure. I'm doing a padded json call from my client application.  Troubleshooting requires that I inspect the json response that is being sent from my server side component.

So I had my response type set text/json as below in my server side code which is in AjaxProxy.ashx

C# -> context.Response.ContentType = "text/json";

if I try to view the server side page http://lservername/AjaxProxy.ashx in IE8, it manages to make a mess of it and fails trying to interpret my perfectly valid json Response as XML

Chrome and Firefox tries to download the file (which is still better that IE behavior). But I prefer to be able to just view it in the browser. The correct content type for json is application/json. So below mentioned content type setting shows the json response properly on Chrome and Firefox.

C# -> context.Response.ContentType = "application/json";

IE8 still has the same issue as earlier and this really is an IE bug. application/json is indeed the recommended response content type for json response. 

But if you re not bothered and just want to be able to see it in IE8 , then by all means set the content type to "text/plain"

C# -> context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";

[jubinjose-blog]

F12 won't bring up Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Well this can happen to any window. Just happened that it was IE Developer toolbar window in my case.

Reason is that somehow the window got moved off the edge of the screen or minimized to nothing more than a small dot somewhere on the screen. Easy way to get it back is to press F12 key and hover mouse over the taskbar icon of Internet Explorer. If you see "Developer Tools" window in the hover menu, then you have the same problem. Just right click it and chose 'Maximize' . You should be able to see it now. If you want to get it back in the non minimized state, then right click and chose 'size' or 'move' and carefully drag the window (hidden window really) around until it comes into view!

[jubinjose-blog]

Get your A/V Receiver to output AC3 5.1 (Dolby) when playing content on laptop connected to AV Receiver through HDMI

Seriously this was so much of a pain in the ass that I decided to make a post of it to refer when needed. 

Context: So I got a new Denon AVR-1612 thanks to my former Onkyo crapping out with all HDMI ports dead thus leaving me a very expensive heavy brick to deal with. Now after setting up the new receiver. I just want to play few Dolby 5.1 clips found here - http://www.digital-digest.com/movies/movie_index.php?type=dolby

Obviously these are just demo clips. The real scenario is when playing back any movie/video with 5.1 AC3 (Dolby Digital) track. I want to be able to enjoy surround efefcts/sound from my 5.1 Home Theater speaker system when I am using my laptop to play the video.

So I download mentioned clips from digital-digest, play one of them on my $50 Western Digital Live Media Player. I see "Dolby" on my receiver front panel and sure enough I get 5.1 surround from my speaker system. Next up is to play this on my ~$450 Dell Vostro 3450. So I connect it to my receiver through HDMI and set the default Audio playback device to AV Receiver in "sound properties" under Windows 7.

Tried playback through GOM Player and Media Player Classic. Receiver shows "Multi Channel" on the front panel and there is no surround sound. 

So these are the steps I had to take in-order to get Dolby Digital AC3 5.1 through my speaker system when using laptop for playback.

You can decide which media player to use for video playback. But you must specify the decoder and change settings for the specific player you selected. 

I used Media Player Classic Home Cinema - http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

So instructions below are specific to this media player

1) Download and install AC3Filter. -> http://ac3filter.net/wiki/Download_AC3Filter

2) Find AC3 Filter in start menu and run "AC3Filter config" under it. In the main tab, set the output format to your speaker setup (in my case I have a 5.1 setup connected to my Receiver). Also set SPDIF passthrough for AC3

  Next setup the SPDIF passthrough option in the SPDIF tab. This is how my settings looked like

3) In Windows , set the device Audi device to AV Receiver out and bring up the properties window by clicking the "configure" button. In that window, set the speaker setup to match your setup (mine was set to 5.1 to match my setup)

4) Open Media Player Classic and play the clip. Listen to 5.1 surround sound from your Home Theater speaker system!

I have seen/read different instructions from requiring to change Media Player Classic settings to installing ffdshow to be able to listen to 5.1 tracks. But this is what worked for me. I would assume that if you have multiple filters installed, then in Media Player Classic one needs to select AC3 Filter as decoding mechanism.

I haven't tried a DTS track yet. So can't really comment about that

Hope this helps someone!