Recently I had to integrate video playback on my job’s Java OpenGL engine, which uses JOGL.

Java has a support to media playback through it’s Java Media Framework, which unfortunately, on it’s current version (2.1.1e) does not support many formats for video playback.

So I quickly looked for alternatives, including IBM Toolkit for mpeg4, that hadn’t a sufficient production performance I was looking for, and didn’t offer an easy option for frame grabbing or plugin extensions as JMF does.

Next was Fobs4JMF, which is JMF + ffmpeg. This solution was much more interesting, since it offers a wide variety of codecs (ogg, mp3, m4a, divx, xvid, h264, mov, etc) and is based on the solid ffmpeg solution to decode audio and video.

My implementation, uses the plug-in capabilities of JMF to extend a custom renderer that does a pixel type conversion and rendering to a texture:

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Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, Buffy, Angel… is intending to make some noise on the Internet, as he says

” It is time for us to change the face of Show Business as we know it.”

Dr. Horrible, a three act musical made by him and some friends will be broadcasted for free on the internet from today till the 20th of this month an then will be available for purchase :

“We intend to make it available for download soon after it’s published. This would be for a nominal fee, which we’re hoping people will embrace instead of getting all piratey.”

Kinda of an interesting method of marketing, you get to “taste” it, and if you like it, you can have it. Very indie, and pretty much mimics the way everyone whose is not in the industry do to get their work some attention, (despite the taking away of air part).

So if you wanna watch it for free, check it out:

• Act 1 is already up;
• Act 2 “airs” tomorrow (17th July);
• Act 3 “airs” Saturday (19th July)

On the 20th it will be gone!

And let’s see how far this goes! Good luck Mr Whedon!

It’s been more than 6 months that my Wii was producing an awful lawn mower sound in the disk drive, and I finally decided to open it up and “try” to fix the problem.

Since I’ve seen other people with similar problems on YouTube, such as:

I decided to put my experience on how I fixed it.

You will need Nintendo screwdriver, which you can easily find on eBay.

I’ve used the following video as a guide during the disassembling of my console:

Now how I did it:

There is one screw above your Wii’s drive that is right above the power button, loose it a little and stick something to level the plate a little bit up. You can test this with your Wii still opened until you don’t hear that noise anymore.

Here is a front picture of my fixed Wii (follow the link to see the Flickr notes):

I should have taken a picture from above, but I was too happy that the problem was gone, that I just remember to register how I did it after most of my Wii had been put back together already.

Hope it helps someone!