Barry Dobson

Since the fall 07 update, the Xbox 360 now has the ability to play DivX/Xvid files through the media blade on the dashboard. This was probably one of the best features to be added to the dashboard.

I use this feature a lot but recently I came across a couple of videos that would play fine in WMP but when played on the Xbox would be audio with no picture. I thought this was a limitation on the part of the way the Xbox does its decoding.

After a bit of digging around the web I re-read the December 2007 Xbox 360 video playback FAQ and discovered that this is a problem with PAL and VGA playback on the Xbox. The good news is that there is a fix, and it actually works. Check out the article:

40. When trying to play 25 or 50 fps content, I don’t get any video over VGA

on the FAQ for details on the fix.

Tags: Xbox 360 VGA DivX

I recently added a contact page to my site. To do this I used a wordpress plug in,  Dagon Design. Its a very good plug in by the way. It allows you to prevent spam by adding a reCAPTCHA image to the form. I’ve always known about reCAPTCHA helping to digitise books where OCR is not working, but I have always wondered how the system knows you are correct, if the word cannot be read by computers.

After I signed up for my free account at recaptcha.net I read about how it works.

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

You can read more about it here.

Tags: reCAPTCHA