Thursday, June 12, 2008

Indeo Codec

I've some video clips captured by a Logitech Webcam 8 years ago. The video clips has an extension of AVI and no longer able to play back in Mac OS X Leopard. I don't quite remember if it can be play on Mac OS X Tiger. The codec they used is unknown. QuickTime just complains a missing codec without any useful information. I tried to play back the video on XP with Windows Media Player. There pops up a dialog saying it requires Indeo Codec.

Okay, so, let's download the Indeo Codec, from official website? Check this out: http://www.ligos.com/index.php/home/products/indeo/. And it said: "Ligos Indeo Software® Codecs for Windows - $14.95". What!? That definitly does not worth my money to just play back 10 clips. After some googling, here you can Download Ligos Indeo Codec 5.11 for free. Yes, since 5.12 they charge, and all we need is the older version.

It is time to convert the video to some common or widely used format that will not have licensing issue in future (at least no one would change the license to a pay-license mode), such as MPG-2 or QuickTime.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Preview - PDF editor

別人都說Mac裡的Preview很強大,以前都試過一部份功能,除了它可以看圖、修圖外,還可以讀PDF文件,這是Windows比不上的部份。

今日打算列印一份四十頁的PDF,見其中有很多沒有用處的頁,像字體細小得叫人不去看的legal statement、或者章節間的白頁等。突然想,Preview能否幫我去掉那些空白頁呢?

在Preview裡打開了PDF,按delete真的可以去掉一整頁,不過無法Save as,只可以Print、再按下PDF,選Save as PDF。雖然有點奇怪,but it works!四十頁的文件縮小到三十頁,除了用少五張A4紙外,起碼可以減少攜帶的重量(少許)。