CRF Guide (Constant Rate Factor in x264)

Posted on May 7, 2014

CRF stands for Constant Rate Factor, x264’s best single-pass encoding method.

The Constant Rate Factor (CRF) is the default quality setting for the x264 encoder. You can set the values between 0 and 51, where lower values would result in better quality (at the expense of higher file sizes). Sane values are between 18 and 28. The default for x264 is 23, so you can use this as a starting point.

For more information, See http://slhck.info/articles/crf

MFC support for MBCS deprecated in Visual Studio 2013

Posted on Nov 18, 2013

It is time to move onto Unicode. The multi-byte character set (MBCS) in MFC will not be supported in the future versions of Visual Studio. You can still compile the MBCS projects with VS2013, but you need to install the MBCS libraries via a separate download, which is available here. You will see a deprecation warning, when an application is built using MBCS, though. This warning can be suppressed by adding the NO_WARN_MBCS_MFC_DEPRECATION preprocessor definition.

For more information, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2013/07/08/mfc-support-for-mbcs-deprecated-in-visual-studio-2013.aspx.

Installing Cygwin sshd

Posted on Sep 24, 2013

From http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v10r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.taddm.doc_7.1.2%2FAdminGuide%2Ft_cmdb_installssh2.html

To install Cygwin sshd, complete the following steps:

  1. Download the Cygwin program from the following Web site: http://cygwin.com/
  2. Run the setup program.
  3. Select the packages to install. In addition to accepting the default packages, select the following packages:
    • From the admin category, select cygrunsrv (version 1.17–1 or later).
    • From the net category, select opensshd (version 4.6p 1–1 or later).
  4. When the installation process completes, start the cygwin bash shell.
  5. From your system information, use the cygwin mkpasswd utility to create an initial /etc/passwd. You can also use the mkgroup utility to create an initial /etc/ group. See the Cygwin User’s Guide for more details.

    For example, the following command sets up the password file, passwd, from the local accounts on your system:

    mkpasswd -1 > /etc/passwd
  6. Run the ssh-host-config program setup.
  7. Configure SSH. Answer Yes to all questions.
  8. Start the SSH server by running the following command: 
    net start sshd
  9. Open Windows Firewall and allow inbound access to the following file. 
    c:\cygwin\usr\sbin\sshd.exe

Thunderbird failed to send and receive emails after the profile folder was moved

Posted on Sep 24, 2013

Thunderbird could not sending and receiving emails although it kept trying, after my old profile folder was moved to a new location. Error console showed the following message.

Your certificate contains the same serial number as another certificate
issued by the certificate authority. Please get a new certificate containing
a unique serial number. (Error code: sec_error_reused_issuer_and_serial)

For more information, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Certificate%20contains%20the%20same%20serial%20number%20as%20another%20certificate.

Continue…

Error 1067 in MariaDB on Windows

Posted on Sep 22, 2013

After you change the data directory path in MariaDB, you may see the following error, when you try to restart the DB service.

Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly

This is because MariaDB runs as Network Service who does not have read-write access to every directory. To fix the problem, you should either make the directory writable for Network Service or change the user to one that has read-write access to the directory.