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I started on PCs … with the venerable TRS-80

You were just a bit before me. For anyone interested in seeing these “antiques” … there is a good site here. Scroll down the timeline to 1981 and click on the Sinclair ZX81 if you want to see my first one. It looked like a toy and really wasn’t much more. Never did manage to do anything useful with it. I heard their shape made good doorstops! (I still have it somewhere in the basement.)

When Hard Drives came around I bought a 40MB hard drive for 350.00.

I bet it’s a little smaller than this one here.

Since we’ve graduated to legs, I’ll toss in a few more cents worth. Has anyone seen Rolf Harris do “Jake the Peg”? The lyrics and a video are here.

I hadn’t heard of Rolf Harris the first time I saw this act. It was done by Greg Donaghey of the Carlton Showband, a great Canadian Irish group formed in 1963. They finally retired in 1996. There are no videos of Greg’s act but there’s a picture of him here. Scroll about 2/3 down the page.

Thus the saying: Liars, Dammed Liars, & Statisticians!

Just adding my $0.02 worth .. this quote is by 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, referring to three kinds of lies. He had a lot of quotes as indicated here.

I have found that the DVD media plays a big role in the quality of the end result. I always use Sony discs; once I used some other brand (can’t remember which, might ave been Verbatim)

I’ll keep that in mind too – Just checked my DVD’s and seems I started with some Sony, then Memorex, and currently Verbatim. Whichever were at the best price when I bought them!

You didn’t mention what you’ve tried – I presume that you would have tried the uninstallers which should have worked, but if not …

I’m using Vista and in the Start > All Programs there’s an Incredimail folder which contains an Uninstall Incredimail function. Have you tried running that? It should remove it.
Alternatively in Control Panel > Programs and Features (for Vista) or Add/Remove Programs (older Windows) Incredimail will be in the list and can be uninstalled from here.

I use Outlook at work but I’ve been using Incredimail at home for some years and I love the graphics (I rarely use the emoticons though – too much junk for my liking.)

Rod

Here’s an update – Now I don’t know whether Pinnacle Studio was creating a problem or not … I’m beginning to suspect not. I made some more DVD’s from video tapes and these were approximately 45 minutes in length which Studio burns at full quality. However after making 4 different ones, I checked them in my DVD player and they all showed heavy pixellation. I was about ready to tear my hair out. So I thought next step would be to just verify that my problem is not in the DVD player (it’s a Sanyo that’s a couple years old but rarely used.) We sell players at work so I borrowed a demo Toshiba machine for a few days.

So to do the test I decided to check the DVD’s again in my machine first, then in the other machine. This time when I played them in my machine, they played perfectly – no pixellation. OK, now I’m more confused. I tried a few more and then came up with one that really was a bad disk – I think it might have gotten scratched a bit (since I originally believed it was bad and hadn’t been too careful with it.) This one wouldn’t play (no picture at all) in either machine (it’ now in the trash.) So then I tried the first disks again in my machine … now I got the pixellation again on all four in my machine but they played fine on the borrowed machine. Then I tried a DVD movie that I’d purchased and it played perfectly in my machine.

That test was two days ago. Today I decided to sample every DVD I’d made with Studio (all 38 of them!) and played a couple minutes of each one in my machine and every one played fine – no pixellation. (Some are approximately 90 minutes long.)

At this point I’m suspecting the problem might be my Sanyo DVD player but I don’t understand why it would play fine consistently on one occasion and give bad pixellation on the same discs on another occasion. I discussed this with our service manager at work who is an excellent electronics technician and he was also unable to explain how this could happen.

I have given copies of some of my DVD’s to other people and I’ve learned of two instances (different DVD’s) where they’ve had some problems playing them – picture freezing. In one of the cases I’d given copies to two people – one had the problem and the other said their copy played fine.

So for now I’m going to continue to use Pinnacle Studio and keep an eye on the results testing in another machine if I see any problems.

Rod

Byron

I had gotten busy and hadn’t had time to try Peter’s suggestion and yours sounded easier so I tried it today. I used DVDFlick … and it appears to have worked. I see no pixellation issues at least in the first 5 minutes (I haven’t checked the whole DVD yet). It was very evident from the beginning before so I’m sure this will be fine now.

Thanks very much.

Rod Corkum

Peter

Thanks very much for the info. I’ll try your suggestions. And no, my Roxio won’t find the VIDEO_TS directory. I’ll download the CDBurnerXP and give it a try.

Rod

By the way, I also use Studio 12 and when creating the DVD image I always use 100% quality. With this quality, Studio 12 will not re-encode the MPEG. Which means that:
a) the quality does not change from the original MPEG recording (note that I record only using MPEG; not AVI or any other format)
b) I do not lose any closed captioned text (this was handier before I got a blu-ray player though…)
c) the DVD creation does not take forever

One other thing I have found is that Studio is overly conservative when it comes to estimating what will fit on a DVD. According to Studio, my 82 minutes of standard MPEG video will not fit on a single-sided DVD – it claims that I have around 20 minutes of overflow. So I tell Studio to create the DVD image on disk only and then use a DVD burning package (I use Nero) to burn the resulting video files to the DVD.

The resulting DVDs are good enough that they look fairly decent when played on an 1080p HD TV, as long as you don’t look too closely.

Peter,

Thanks for the response. Would you have a peek at these screen captures from Studio 12 and based on your experience let me know if I should change anything in the settings? In the Make Disk setup, I had checked “Always re-encode entire movie” but if I understand your comment about not re-encoding, maybe I should have leave that unchecked. There are only two image types available … the VIDEO_TS as shown and an ISO file. I don’t have Nero but I have Roxio that came with my computer and it can burn from an ISO file. So I could select “Create disk content but don’t burn” and then burn the ISO file with Roxio. Does that make sense?

Otherwise I’m about to give up and go get some dual layer disks and try that! The project I’m working on right now is 79 minutes.

Rod

And a hint: don’t let Studio burn your DVD – it incorrectly guesses the size of your video, overestimating by as much as 40% (in other words, it thinks that a video that will fit easily on a DVD is too big to fit). I always tell it that I have a dual-layer DVD and have it generate the DVD image to the disk drive. Then I use Nero to burn the DVD. I also set the WinTV recorder to proper level so that the resulting movie fits on a single DVD – this way the DVD retains any Closed Captioning stream that is present.

Just curious – do you put any videos on DVD longer than 60 minutes … i.e. 90-120 minutes? I’ve been trying to do this with Pinnacle Studio 12 and I have to use automatic quality setting for anything over 60 minutes but I can’t get a good copy beyond 60 minutes. The DVD plays fine in the computer but on a regular DVD player, the picture is pixellated (those little square blocks) and if bad enough also freezes up. I don’t want to have to split a project into two DVD’s and trying to figure out how to get around this as the DVD says on it that it’s “4.7 GB, 120 minutes”.

Rod Corkum

Do the sound files work if you place them in the same folder as the presentation instead of in a subfolder?

Thanks, Hans, for the tip.

I’d tried everything else but somehow that hadn’t occurred to me. I just tried it and it does work that way. But I have to say that I don’t understand the logic of why these three files won’t work the same as all the rest anymore (they did originally.) I had put the sound files all in a sub folder thinking I was keeping things neat and not cluttering up the main folder where the PowerPoint is.

I hadn’t mentioned in the previous post but thinking there may have been some corruption to the file, I had gone back to the web site where the original on location recordings are kept as a podcast and downloaded and recreated one of the files and put it back in the Sound Files folder. That one didn’t work either.

Rod Corkum

Not sure if this is an Access or Excel issue but since it starts with Access, I’ll post it here.

I use an accounting program that is built using MS Access 97 as the database. We haven’t upgraded it to to be compatible with later version of Access (long story – don’t ask why!)

One of the reports that I created and use regularly needs to be exported to an Excel 2003 spreadsheet for some additional “tweaking” and when I export the report, I get some of the columns coming up in the wrong order. Wondering if anyone knows why this is happening? I’ve put some screen shots in a PDF file you can see here: [Link deleted – no longer required]

Note that columns B & C in the spreadsheet are in the wrong location. It’s simple to cut & paste them into the right locations but wondering why this happens in the first place? One would think that Microsoft office applications would be compatible with each other.

Thanks for the solution, Hans – seems that the Top property on the two columns that were out of order were just slightly different from the others. Once I fixed those so all columns had the same top position, the report exports now in the correct order.

As for exporting the query (hadn’t thought about that) it’s simpler to export the report. To get at the query I have to open a separate report writer program and then would have to insert group totals whereas the report is generated from within the accounting program and already has the group totals.

Rod

Paul,

As Homer Simpson would put it … Doh!

I can’t believe I missed that Location tab. It was so simple. Pictures button is now pointing exactly where I want it to go. Thanks. Problem solved!

Rod