How to view malayalam in firefox

Excellent info via: Curious Onlooker

"How to read Malayalam newspapers using FireFox

Most of the Malayalam newspapers use dynamic fonts. FireFox and Mozilla browsers do not support Dynamic fonts by default. Here is how you can read Malayalam and Other Indic publications using Firefox:

Option 1: Use firefox extension padma.

This works on all recent stable versions of Firefox at the time of this writing.

An advantage worth mentioning — padma converts those pages to Unicode for you – This saves you the pain of installing individual fonts for the content you want to read. In other words, if you have an Unicode malayalam font installed already, thats all it takes…!!

A little bit about padma from the extension’s page: Padma is a technology for transforming Indic text between public and proprietary formats for Mozilla based applications.

Ok, now how to get that done:

Step 1

Install Firefox’s extension padma.

If you have a fairly decent Unicode font installed already, you are good to go now. Otherwise, read on:

Step 2

Download Anjali Oldlipi – perhaps the best unicode Malayalam font. Open up this url, download the latest version of AnjaliOldLipi. (At the time of this writing, 0.730 is the latest).

Copy the downloaded font file into your Fonts Directory (Settings->Crontol Panel->Fonts).

In case you are running Linux I am going to assume that you already know how to add a font.

Now, fireup Firefox, Tools ->Options -> Content and set your Default Font to AnjaliOldLipi as seen in this screenshot:

That is it…!!

Enjoy browsing Malayalam publications like: Deepika, Madhyamam, Manorama, Mangalam, Mathrubhumi and more...

Oh, did I mention that you can kill all the annoying ads using AdBlock Plus?

Option 2:

Note: This is dependent on a Firefox extension "AutoCharacterEncoding" which does not seem to be in active development anymore. (Hey, developers are people too, and they move onto other things as well..!!) At the time of this writing, said extension does not work on Firefox 1.5.Another disadvantage is that, you are required to download and install the individual fonts of the malayalam publications you want to read, onto your computer.

Step 1

Download and install the fonts from the newspaper’s website, unless you already have them. (Download the .ttf file, and copy it over to your Fonts directory.)

Step 2

Install AutoCharacterEncoding from mozdev.

(It merely sets the fonts for userdefined character encoding automatically.)

Step 3

Restart FireFox, and browse, saving yourself from annoying ads and popups. "

Slickrun

SlickRun has been my favorite tool. I have deleted all my quicklaunch icons and desktop shortcuts and have replaced all that with slickrun. I have reduced my mouse use to a large extent. Recently I came accross Vinod’s blog and saw the command line reference for most of the windows tasks. I have created a slickrun magic word list for almost all of it in Vinod’s list.  Download the file, open with notepad and replace foobar with your Active Directory name or Windows username.  Then use SlickRun and import these.

 

Some of the magic words that you may not associate with your tools and programs are all under mydocuments or under c:program files.

 

Remember all that you need to know after installation of slickrun  is Windows+Q and setup command for slickrun.

 

Enjoi.

 

Ah! another item to msn spaces wishlist: file upload

 

RSS feed module

MSN Spaces has a cool module called RSS feeds. I am using it for the oddly enough list on the left. It’ll be cool if I can use my OPML list.

Static Readonly Vs Const

Just as a reminder for myself: http://msmvps.com/blogs/rakeshrajan/archive/2005/05/01/45260.aspx

Though both would appear similar – they are both read only and generate almost
similar IL code – they have a number of differences.  Here they are:

Constants are evaluated at compile time, whereas
static
(or
static readonly) variables at runtime.

So, when the compiler generates the IL, the value of the constant is burned
into the IL wherever it is referenced.  Consequently, when you change the
value of a constant, all the client applications referring the constant will
have to be recompiled. 

However, if you change the value of a static field, you only need to recompile
that library and none of the clients.  This is because the IL generated
would only be referencing the static field, and will not have the value burned
into it.

Though constants and
readonly
variables are both read only,
readonly
is a runtime constant, and can hold references types (like
DataSet
etc.).  Constants on the other hand cannot hold reference types except for
string
and
null.

Yet another difference is that constants need to be initialized at the
declaration itself, whereas
readonly
fields may be initialized either at the declaration or in a constructor (or in
static constructors/type initializers).

Build ffmpeg in Windows

An amazing step-by-step approach to build ffmpeg in windows.

 

via: http://soenkerohde.com

original url: http://soenkerohde.com/tutorials/ffmpeg/

 

 

 

 

FFMPEG

Sunday 27 February 2005 @ 2:22 pm

This tutorial is about transcoding video fom one codec into another using FFMPEG. I got deeper into FFMPEG when I wanted to transcode into FLV (Flash Video) and it works very well. I developed the Riva FLV Encoder, a GUI for FFMPEG.

We install the Minimalist GNU for Windows MinGW (Compiler) and MSYS (Minimal SYStem) which is a kind of unix-shell to access the MinGW-commands. Next we download, compile and install Lame, an open-source mp3-codec, with MSYS. Next we install WinCVS and checkout the latest cvs-release of FFMPEG. Finally we compile ffmpeg and I will show a few examples how to work with Flash Video (FLV).

1. Download MinGW " MSYS current releases (Window Exe Binaries MSYS-1.0.10.exe & MinGW-3.1.0-1.exe)
Install MinGW Install MSYS
(Aditional Instructions: go to http://sf.net and search for same to go to their respective project site. Ensure to select g++ and make in the latest  MinGW installer. I had to do it after I installed MinGW)
HINT: During the Postinstall be sure to set the right path to MinGW with a "/" instead of a Windows-"". If you did it wrong anyway re-install MSYS to the same directory and do the postinstall right (I missed it a few times) Download and compile Lame
2. Extract Lame to your MSYS home-directory
   Open MSYS and change to your lame-directory (cd ../lame-XXX)
   Enter the following commands:
   CODE:
   1. ./configure //(takes a few minutes)
   2. make //(lame is being comiled; takes a few minutes, too)
   3. make install
   After installing you will recognize that there are new directories and files in MSYS/local which we will use while compiling ffmpeg with mp3-support
3. Download WinCVS (http://www.wincvs.org) and install it (addn instr: install cvsnt and open winCVS.exe )
   Open the Command-Line window (CTRL-L) and enter the command:
   CODE:
   1. cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg
   Select "Execute for directory" and browse to you MSYS-Directory and select your home-directory ("home")
   Press "OK" and the current cvs release will be checked out into your home-directory (addn instr: a better option I feel is to download source from http://sf.net  and copy it to mysys/home/ffmpeg. Sometime latest is not always the greatest.  )
4. Compile FFMPEG
   Change the directory in MSYS to your ffmpeg-directory (cd ../ffmpeg)
   Enter the command:
   CODE:
   1. ./configure –enable-memalign-hack –enable-mingw32 –enable-mp3lame –extra-cflags=-I/local/include –extra-ldflags=-L/local/lib
   HINT: you can paste into MSYS by pressing your center mouse-button
   1. "–enabled-memalign-hack" is a Windows hack. Without this option ffmpeg always crashs with the message "removing common factors from framerate" when encoding AVIs.
   2. "–enable-mingw32". I see no difference without it but we compile with MinGW and it would not do a harm when ffmpeg knows this
   3. "–enable-mp3lame": Enable transcoding audio with the open-source mp3-lame-codec
   4. "–extra-cflags=-I/local/include –extra-ldflags=-L/local/lib": The cflags- and ldflags-parameter sets the right path to your lame-installation which you did in step 3.d.
   Enter command: make (ffmpeg is being compiled; takes a few minutes)
   With "make install" you could now copy the ffmpeg.exe to c:Program Filesffmpeg. But there is no need to.
5. Use FFMPEG
   Copy your compiled ffmpeg.exe from your MSYS directory to the directory where you like to transcode with ffmpeg
   Open the Dos-Shell and change to the directory where you copied the ffmpeg.exe
   Copy a test.mpg into your directory and enter the following command:
   CODE:
   1. ffmpeg -i test.mpg -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -r 15 -s 320×240 test.flv
   Your first FLV should be encoded now
6. Render Images from a Video
   Enter command:
   CODE:
   1. ffmpeg -an -y -t 0:0:0.001 -i test.flv -f image2 test%d.jpg
HINT: With -t you set the length of images to be extracted. Above we entered 1 millisecond the extract one image. If you miss this parameter all images of the video will be extracted

---

ZLib Support (e.g. for TSCC and Quicktime codecs). This should be compiled into FFMPEG. It is not an explicit compile in the configure statement. Do the following steps and after configure you should see that zlib is "on".
Download and compile ZLib
Extract the files to your mysys directory
Change the directory in MSYS to that directory
Enter command ./confugure, make and make install.

CODE:

1. cp /local/lib/libz.a /mingw/lib/.
2. cp /local/include/zlib.h /mingw/include/.
3. cp /local/include/zconf.h /mingw/include/.

AC3 Support
Add "–enable-a52 –enable-gpl" to your configure command

3GP Support
If you want to enable 3GP support you have to add the AMR audio codec. Download the TS26.104
REL-5 V5.1.0 26104-5??.zip here. Extract the codec into libavcodec/amr_float and add "–enable-amr_nb" to your configure command

XVID Support (thanks to garvin.thornten at datel.co.uk)
Download and install the codec from www.xlib.org (see xvidcore-xxxx/doc/install). Add "–enable-xvid –enable-gpl" to your configure command. When compiling with xvid codec in MinGW or cygwin you will get a "mkstemp" error when compiling "xvidff.c". To fix this edit "libavcodec/xvidff.c" and add the following after the #includes. This will probably be fixed in a future ffmpeg release: ´

C:

1. /* Added for windows compile —————– */
2. #include <windows .h>
3.        
4. int xvid_ff_2pass(void *ref, int opt, void *p1, void *p2); void xvid_correct_framerate(AVCodecContext *avctx);
5.  
6. int mkstemp(char* template)
7. {
8.   char temppath[512];
9.   if(GetTempPath(512,temppath)!=0)
10.   {
11.     if(GetTempFileName(temppath,"fil",0,template)!=0)
12.     {
13.       FILE *pFile;
14.       pFile=fopen(template,"w+");
15.       if(pFile!=NULL)
16.         return (int)pFile;
17.     }
18.   }
19.   return –1;
20. }
21. /* ——————————————- */
22.  

Link about qscale
removed "-f singlejpeg" as its identical to "-f mjpeg"

ffmpeg is a great encoder for converting between many video formats. Here’s how to install and use ffmpeg in windows.

 

note: ffmpeg is great for flv conversions.

 

1. install MinGW and MinSys

2. install Lame

3.