Eastfist

Stuck CD tray

How To Fix Locked CD Tray Caused By Cyberlink PowerDVD 17 for Windows 7

Copyright © 2019 By Chongchen Saelee

If you’ve previously used Cyberlink PowerDVD 17 (or previous versions) to watch your Blu-ray disc movies, you might encounter a problem the next time you use the program again when you seemingly cannot open your CD tray. The CD tray might eject partially and then quickly return into the slot. It’s as though gremlins have hijacked your CD tray and messing with you!

Fear not, it’s not a virus. It’s definitely not gremlins. It’s because PowerDVD 17 has stored some data in it’s cache system thinking a disc is still in the CD tray. I assume it does this for DRM (digital rights management) purposes, to prevent users from copying the movies. Anyway, while that data is still in PowerDVD 17’s cache, you won’t be able to get that CD tray open. So you need to CLEAR THE CACHE. (more…)

How To Fix
PowerDVD 17 Error Message
CL RC Engine3 Dummy Winidow: PowerDVD.exe – No Disk
“There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive D:”

By Chongchen Saelee

UPDATE: April 27, 2018 – It seems all I had to do was click the “Reset to Defaults” button at the bottom of the AutoPlay window, which grays out all the options to “Choose a Default” and no more problem pop-ups now when I eject a Blu-ray from PowerDVD. Of course, this is only a Windows 7 problem.

Symptom: Occurs on some Blu-ray discs upon ejection. Sometimes might even freeze Windows or lock the BD-Rom Drive

PowerDVD 17 Error Message
CL RC Engine3 Dummy Winidow: PowerDVD.exe – No Disk
“There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive D:”

Solution: Apparently, for Windows 7 anyway, there was no option during installation to prevent PowerDVD from setting the Windows Autoplay hardware associations, despite providing a file format associations page. The Windows Autoplay associations deal with hardware rather than software and seems to be automatically set by Windows (you might notice the Autoplay pop-up whenever you put in a new disc of USB with media files on it). To prevent the error from happening, you must disable Windows Autoplay for any devices that were set to call PowerDVD, in this case for the Blu-rays (or any other media).

For Windows 7:
1. Go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > AutoPlay
2. Under the Media pane, for every media option that lists “Play {media} using PowerDVD 17” change it to “Take no action”.
3. Click Save.

Change Windows 7 Autoplay settings to fix PowerDVD 17 error

Now when you eject a Blu-ray disc through PowerDVD, it won’t give the error message.

If you’re still getting the error message, it might be due to something else. Good luck!

Had to revert back to Qt 4.8.5 but it works nonetheless. The video is choppy because I’m screencapturing the video as it’s running, but on my quadcore it runs at steady 60 fps. On duo-core it runs a steady 20 to 40 fps, so it really depends on your hardware, or I just need to optimize it more. But check out pure 3D in Qt and c++, no third-party dependency on OpenGL or DirectX!

How To Download m3u8 videos from Twitter
By Chongchen Saelee

If you’re browsing websites like Twitter or Facebook, you may notice videos may not be accessible for download. Back in the day, it was quite easy because the actual video file is embedded right into the page. These days, with privacy concerns (and copyright issues), Internet videos are becoming harder to “save for offline viewing”. But with a little know-how, you could successfully save these videos for offline viewing. After all, the data has to be sent to your computer anyway.

So particularly for m3u8 file format, which is just a plain text file that includes a playlist of urls to source videos (and sometimes other playlists), what you’re looking for are ts video source urls. Of course, you have to track down the url of the m3u8 file first. In Google Chrome, there is the very helplful “inspect” tool in the Developer Tools menu. Or, if it hasn’t been obfuscated, you can right-click on the part of the webpage where the video will render and click on “Inspect” if that option is enabled. Then you want to track down that url for the m3u8 file. Download the m3u8 file and open it with a plain text editor like Notepad. (more…)

By Chongchen Saelee

I thought I’d write a quick cheat sheet on how to prepare your first comic book for Lulu.com publishing. This is for their US Trade paperback format of 6 inches by 9 inches per page. Your page count may vary. What you get with this setup is a color glossy cardstock cover, and black and white pages.

Setting up the interior pages

If you don’t intend to have any full page bleed artwork, you can setup your page template to be exactly 6 inches by 9 inches. Even then, make sure you set a safety margin of at least 0.125 inches so your content is properly visible in case it gets cropped off. (more…)

By Chongchen Saelee

Now, I don’t know if there is a precedent, but my journalistic tendency is beckoning me to find some goober who would be ballsy enough to let me document their attempts at getting laid via Craigslist or Backpage. I bring my camera and film the entire process: hours emailing/texting, line-by-line play, getting groomed, meeting up, doing the deed as proof of concept, and then the aftermath. Confidentiality will be guaranteed. The only catch is that I get to reap the benefits from the documentation. Your identities will be concealed of course. This is probably the only time you’ll get this kind of protection by law, where journalists don’t have to give up their informants, which is what you’d be considered.

And who knows, maybe I can submit the story to Vice or something.

Real tutorial. You don’t want violent and sloppy diarrhea do you?