All posts by FoxTwo

Tech

Black Border Around Video In Windows Media Player

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Recently, I ran into a very puzzling problem.

One fine day, my videos suddenly had a black border around it. I remembered clearly that previously they played fine in full-screen (Alt-Enter), but now in full-screen, they have this black border around it.

I tried playing the same video in VLC, and it played fine in full screen. So that implies that the video only is affected by DirectShow filters.

I then tried to recall what I did recently just prior to this problem, and I remembered that I turned on the ATI Catalyst “Steady Video” function.

 

It was set to “95%” when I first saw it. So, I moved the slider to 100%, but yet the black border persisted.

In desperation, I un-checked the “Enable AMD Steady Video” option, and my videos went back to full-screen!

So, if the normal fixes of making WMP stretch the video to fill your screen doesn’t get rid of black borders, and if you’re using an ATI graphics card, try looking at this option and see if it will fix your problem.

 

 

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hardware

I’m A Logitech Man (Part 2)

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About 2 years ago, I noted that I have unwittingly become a Logitech person – every PC peripheral I purchase would be a Logitech product. Yes it’s not planned at all, it just happened this way.

Well I just did it again. Recently while just “window shopping” with a friend, I came across this product from Logitech:

It’s the Logitech G105 Gaming Keyboard. Now, I’ve been meaning to get a backlit keyboard for awhile now. However, they are still expensive to me. Usually they cost about S$150 (US$119 or so). Imagine to my surprise and glee, that this one was only S$65. It was a no-brainer. The “window shopping” resulted in me lugging home this keyboard and quickly setting it up.

Continue reading I’m A Logitech Man (Part 2) →

hardware, self

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) Pitfalls

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Currently I’m sorta “forced” into going on vacation. I have too many vacation days leftover from the previous year and the company says I need to go on one, RIGHT NOW!

So here I am.

So I was just talking to a gaming buddy yesterday about… yeah games, what else. During the discussion we were just talking about system specs and such, and suddenly I thought – why not? It’s been almost 3 years since I had my “budget” PC. At the time when I got it, I was under some financial restrictions and had to “make do”. Again, I went to Bell Systems on the 5th floor of Sim Lim Square. Again, the guy there was helpful and suggested a few cost-saving items. All in all, eventually I got a pretty dang good system – AMD Phenom 2 1055T (6 cores), 8 GB DDR 1333 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and the usual chassis, DVD drives etc. The only thing I didn’t get was the hard disk. I was going to bring the old one over from the previous PC, and let Windows auto-detect everything on the new one. After all, I just just done a reformat recently back in June. I don’t want to go through all that again!

True enough, once I got home and moved the harddisk over and booted the new PC up, Win7 autodetected the changes, needed me to re-activate it, and I just had to re-install my Catalyst drivers and everything was back! Continue reading Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) Pitfalls →