I think someone at the BBC was having a laugh when they created this news-title-masterpiece!

It was soon changed this more suitable title.

Even Google have a cached page/link for it!

Yet another publicly displayed crashed windows machine.
Add this to the cash point and the petrol pump and you’ve another reason why mac’s should be used for commerce!

Adrian and I have spent the best part of two days working on a movie in iMovie HD on my mac. We finished it up around 11pm last night and exported it into iDVD for some funky DVD menu creation.
I set the DVD to burn overnight after we’d dragged some pictures over to be used, adjusted some text, put in some background music and created a picture slideshow. I estimated it would take around four to six hours to render the content and burn the DVD.

This morning, the DVD had been ejected from the drive, so I took it downstairs, put it in the DVD player and switched on the TV. I smiled as the DVD menus started playing, exactly as we’d made them in iDVD. There’s something satisfying about seeing the project you’ve been working hard on start to take form in front of you!
I waited for the menu to play through a little, then tried out the slideshow and the scene selection menus; All fine. Now I go to play the movie.
It starts playing but what’s that… there’s no audio? So i skip to the next scene, just in case stupid here forgot to toggle the sound on the first scene. Nothing. No audio. Shit. Next scene is the same, as are all 45 minutes of the movie. Shit shit shit.

A frantic search through Google this morning churns up lots of articles of a similar problem. This obviously isn’t a one off and I’m certainly not the first person to be affected. Shit.

I sit here writing this, waiting for another disk image to be created, so I can try again.
I have a few suspicions. The audio could be corrupt, my hard drive may have gone to sleep at the wrong moment, quicktime could be buggered, etc. Either way, I’m pretty annoyed as I now have to let my Mac sit there using all of it’s power, processing the DVD elements again.
I’ll be sure to update this when I get things rectified. Most articles I’ve come across don’t follow up whether the solution worked or not.

Update 1
iMovie has an annoying quirk with regards to video format. Even though my language preference is set to UK English and my DVD region set to 2, it still insists on importing video in NTSC standard and not PAL. NTSC is generally used in America, Asia and very few parts of Europe.

I tried deleting encoded assets inside iDVD and then re-burned the entire project again to a disk image. Four hours later I still have no audio.

I’ve now exported the video to DV-PAL via iMovies Quicktime export option. I then imported the movie into iDVD. I don’t have any of the chapter marks I spent ages putting in, but if I get audio on the movie, I couldn’t care less! Stay tuned.

Update 2
Corrupted audio. That was the problem. I say corrupted, I really mean duplicated audio files.
There was a three minute section of video where we sourced a song for the credits. When I duplicated the audio to put over the credits, I accidentally duplicated it five times, instead of once!
The only reason I found this out, was because I was trimming down some audio to try another DVD burn yesterday and noticed that if I dragged the audio slide along slightly, another copy would be made.

I’m glad I worked it out eventually!

Update 3
Now that audio is present on the movie, a new problem has appeared. Whenever the play head passes a chapter mark, the audio and video go out of sync slightly. This means that after passing several chapter marks, the audio is about two seconds out with the footage.
Hopefully setting iDVD to delete the encoded assets and burning again will solve the problem.

I just want a DVD that works!!

Update 4
Deleting the endoced content, toggling “encode assets in background” off and setting the DVD contents to Quality over performance all played their part in getting a fully functional DVD.
Two 45 minute DVD’s in a week isn’t too bad really! Now to burn the other 35 of them!

I’ve been working on a 404 error page for the theme that I use here, Subtle.

I wanted to add error page support to the theme so I could utilise the error tracker plugin for Mint and also get search engines to adjust their listings for the website.

I wrote a funky bit of PHP code, which was inspired by A List Aparts: The Perfect 404 post.
What it does is look for a referral from a listed search engine and then get the keywords used in the search. It then assigns those keywords to the variable $new_search . That variable can then be used to populate your own search form.

< ?php
// Here we do some intelligent search engine 404 checking
// This allows us to show some links to possible relevant content
 
if(strlen($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) > 0) {
 
    // We have a referer value somewhere
    // Look for a search engine query
    $engines = array('google.co', 'looksmart.co', 'altavista.co', 'msn.co', 'yahoo.co');
    for($I = 0; $I < count($engines); $I++) {
        $found = strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $engines[$I]);
    }
    if(strlen($found) > 0) {
 
        // We have a search engine..
        // Split the referal up to get query used
        $query = explode('?', $found);
        $parts = explode('&', $query[1]);
        $part_count = count($parts);
 
        // Find specific search terms based on differing search engines
        $style = array('q=', 'p=', 'ask=', 'key=');
        $style_count = count($style);
 
        // start by looping through the URL parts
        for($s = 0; $s < $part_count; $s++) {
 
            // Match url parts against search query types
            for($t = 0; $t < $style_count; $t++) {
                $terms = strstr($parts[$s], $style[$t]);
                if($terms == true) {
 
                    // finish loop as we've found what we need
                    $s += $part_count;
                    $t += $style_count;
                    $terms = explode('=', $terms);
                }
            }
        }
        // Search terms to echo in the search box
        $new_search = str_replace('+', ' ', $terms[1]);
    }
}
?>

I’m sure the code could be tidied up a bit, but it does its job. Feel free to use it for your purposes!