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Dr. DivX – Seemlessly Convert Any Video Format File to DivX

Published on May 16th, 2007
Category: Audio and Video, Entertainment, Utilities
16 Comments

Take a look around in the cyber underworld. Search and download a video file with uTorrent or Gnutella. What do you see? I see DivX everywhere. Online video piracy takes a couple of forms. You have the *.flv Flash format popularly seen at YouTube. Of course, you will find the uncompressed, mammoth *.iso files directly ripped from DVDs. Then, you have the smaller compressed versions of the *.iso files as various MPEG formats. Sometimes they are in the highly-redundant, DVD-native MPEG2 format or the cross-compatible MPEG1 format. Other times, they are in one of the newer types of MPEG4. DivX, Xvid, and other MPEG4 formats have become staples in both the cyber underworld and the mainstream Internet. Out of all these variations of MPEG4 formats, the most popular is undoubtedly DivX.
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Music Brainz – Automatic Mass MP3 ID3 Tagging

Published on April 12th, 2007
Category: Audio and Video, Cool Stuff, Entertainment, Utilities
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The landscape of the music entertainment industry has never been the same since the late 1990s. A new form of audiophile music distribution using MP3s, Napster, Winamp, CD Ripping, and CD Burning contributed to this change. Unfortunately, with this new music revolution, we also had to deal with the byproducts of unlabeled files. One of my pet peeves is when I see an audio file mislabeled -or worse – not labeled at all. I can’t stand it when some of my MP3s are generically tagged as “Track 4” by “Unknown Artist.” I even have to make sure that the album graphics cover, in addition to the track information, shows while it is playing on my computer and portable multimedia player.

Whether or not your music was legally or illegally obtained by file sharing, CD ripping, or iTunes purchasing, it is still vulnerable to the danger of not having a label. Usually, the number of unlabeled files slowly accumulates. Then, it becomes a pain to actually hand edit each and every unlabeled file.
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StepMania: Free, Open-source DDR for Computer

Published on December 18th, 2005
Category: Entertainment
20 Comments

Note: This article was written for my other blog, The Information Bank, to continue my DDR series. I have also included it here because it deals with great freeware.

Continuing on the long-awaited sequel to the Dance Dance Revolution series, I bring you Part II! In my last article, I gave a crash course introduction to the concept of “DDR” and DDR games. As promised, I said that I would reveal how to play DDR on the computer.

Why Play DDR on the Computer?
At home, I attend the Fil-am International SDA church. About 50% of the members there are of Philippines decent. Now, for some reason, DDR seems to be prevalent with the Asian population. During one of our church parties, some of the kids busted out the DDR Extreme for PS2. That night, I was hooked! I wanted to play DDR at home and bring it to my boarding school so that my friends and I could stay up all night DDRing (which, by the way, we ended up doing many times). Problem was … I didn’t have a PS2, or a PSOne, or an Xbox, or a Gamecube. And I didn’t feel like buying one either. I only had a computer. Surely, there must be a way to play DDR on PC. But, how would I connect the controllers? Were there already controllers that hookup to USB or parallel ports? If there was a way, how did it work?
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