Month: March 2007

QuickTime for Java doesn’t let you access B-frames

From a a post to the QuickTime-Java mailing list, Apple’s response regarding QuickTime exception -1409=Unknown:

QuickTime for Java currently provides no B-Frame sample-level support. The movie FigtreeChurch.mov, as provided by you, is encoded using H.264 (Main Profile) which utilises B-Frames. As verification, replacing FigtreeChurch.mov with a movie of another codec type functions with the your application as expected.

Chris Adamson (author of QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook) says:

QuickTime 7 adds new image compression API’s, which were necessitated by the addition of the frame-reordering H.264. These API’s, like ICMCompressionSessionEncodeFrame, were never wrapped by equivalent QTJ calls, and sending the new codec to the old image compression API produces an error.

Exceedingly cool

I was looking for the little green light that tells you you’re “on air” on the new MacBook Pro’s inbuilt iSight camera. Whilst the MacBooks and iMacs have a little black spot for the LED there’s no such LED obvious on the MacBook Pros. So I fire up iChat and sure enough, a green spot appears, apparently through the aluminium.. Sure enough, turn off the camera and there’s no sign of the LED at all, just brushed aluminium. There are photos on Nobilog. Insanely great engineering.

Something broke

Either the switch to Intel or the update to 10.4.9 has broken something in Perl, and thus in Fink. Now when I try to do a fink selfupdate (after installing the Intel version of fink), I get:

fink selfupdate-rsync
Use of inherited AUTOLOAD for non-method Term::ReadKey::termsizeoptions() is deprecated at /Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Term/ReadKey.pm line 289.

It turns out that moving these ‘out of the way’ seems to have done the trick:

  • /Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/
  • /Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/
  • /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/

I’m not sure if they arrived with Intel, 10.4.9, or thanks to my use of Migration Assistant.

LogTen Pro 3 flight logging software

If you’re looking for flight logging software for the Mac you could check out LogTen Pro from Coradine Aviation Systems. Amongst other things it includes aircraft, people and places database and aviation certificate management and iPhoto/iTunes like interface. It also allows you to put photos into LogTen’s Journal. It also uses CoreData (although from what I keep reading on Apple’s cocoa-dev list that may not be a good thing 🙂