Poojan's Tech Blog

What does this menu choice from Windows Live Movie Maker look like to you:

Well, to my wife, it looked like Windows Live Movie Maker could make DVD’s. I don’t blame her. I mean, the thing has “Movie Maker” in its name—and it has a “Burn a DVD” menu option. She spent about an hour putting together a slideshow for her grandmother using Windows Live Movie Maker.

Except Windows Live Movie Maker isn’t the same thing as Windows DVD Maker. How ever would you confuse the two. Windows Live Movie Maker can’t make DVD’s—at least not the kind that you play in a DVD player. It can, however burn a movie file (windows media video file) to a DVD—which is playable on a computer, but not on a DVD player. So, it lets you do things that you probably would just use a flash file for.

I had to figure out how to get all her pictures into DVD maker. The one great thing about Microsoft is that they’ve embraced XML file formats—everywhere. So, all these programs read and write XML. I wrote a small Python program to translate (approximately) from Windows Live Movie Maker to Windows DVD Maker. It’s in Python 3.1:

[cce_python]

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree

tree = etree.parse(‘D:/Users/Poojan/Documents/My Movie.wlmp’)
outfile = open(‘D:/Users/Poojan/Videos/2010-12-28 For Grandma.xml’, ‘w’)
outfile.write(‘<BurnWizard><Content>’)

root = tree.getroot()
media_items_roots = root.findall(‘MediaItems’)

for m in media_items_roots:
media_items = m.findall(‘MediaItem’)
print(media_items)
media_items.sort(key=lambda m: int(m.attrib[‘id’]))
for media_item in media_items:

print(media_item.attrib[‘filePath’])
outfile.write(‘<ContentFile Filename=”{0}”/>’.format(media_item.attrib[‘filePath’]))

outfile.write(‘</Content><Title>12/28/2010</Title><Style>Soft Focus</Style><Font Name=”Segoe UI” Color=”0xFFFFFDA4″ Bold=”1″ Italic=”0″/><Button Play=”Play” Scenes=”Scenes” Notes=”Notes”/><Notes></Notes><InsetVideo></InsetVideo><BackgroundVideo></BackgroundVideo><MenuAudio></MenuAudio><SceneButtonName>Circle</SceneButtonName><SlideShow Transition=”Cross fade” PanZoom=”1″ MatchMusic=”0″ Length=”7.000000″/></BurnWizard>’)

[/cce_python]

Update:

One thing you should be aware of is that WLMM supports .mov files (quicktime movies), but Windows DVD Maker does not. In fact, Windows DVD Maker will fail–but only after going through the process of trying to transcode all your files to DVD format. If the .mov files are at the end of your slideshow (which was my case), you’ll watch patiently for a long time, and then be dissapointed.

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Sometime ago, I setup a ZFS system using glabel on FreeBSD. I recently stumbled across this FreeBSD diary entry, which describes to do almost the same thing using gpt. I like this method better, because it results in a partition that is on a 4kB boundary, which works better for some hard drives (whose sector size is 4kB).

Here’s what I did:

#gpart show da0
=>        63  1953525105  da0  MBR  (932G)
63  1953525105       – free –  (932G) 

OK: that’s the starting point. I have a MBR-style partition which is set up as one 932G partition and some free space.

I wasn’t sure exactly how to get rid of it, so I tried:

I still have a MBR-style partition table. Next, as I read in the FreeBSD diary, I need to figure out how many sectors I have:

OK: 1953525168 sectors of 512 bytes each. However, for some reason, that isn’t what gpt shows:

I’m not sure if this smaller size is because 34 sectors are taken up by the partition table, or if it’s a cylinder-boundary thing.

As the article recommends, I want to leave the first 1MB free (Windows does this, too). I also want to leave around 200MB free at the end of the disk (to allow for some slack in case I want to replace this disk). So, I have 1953525168 sectors (total) – 2048 sectors (1MB) – 409600 (200MB) = 1953113453 sectors:


fbsd2# gpart add -b 2048 -s 1953113453 -t freebsd-zfs -l Hitachi_1TB da0
da0p1 added


# gpart show da0
=> 34 1953525101 da0 GPT (932G)
34 2014 – free – (1.0M)
2048 1953113453 1 freebsd-zfs (931G)
1953115501 409634 – free – (200M)


Looks good: the partition is 931GB large. I have 200MB of slack at the end, and it starts 1MB into the disk. Now, let’s replace the old glabel-based partition with this one:


# zpool replace tank label/hitachi_1tb gpt/Hitachi_1TB


# zpool status
pool: tank
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 0.01% done, 95h54m to go
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
tank DEGRADED 0 0 0
raidz1 DEGRADED 0 0 0
label/fantom_500gb ONLINE 0 0 0 6.27M resilvered
replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0
label/hitachi_1tb OFFLINE 0 1.83K 0
gpt/Hitachi_1TB ONLINE 0 0 0 9.41M resilvered
label/fantom_1tb ONLINE 0 0 0 6.25M resilvered


Pretty cool.

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