Chris' Musings

Well, it's official, after a week or so of answering questions I've become an official expert on Experts Exchange, now I've just got to amount 50,000 points in one particular area to become a "Master" ;-)

For anyone who hasn't come across this site yet it is enormously helpful to any computer professional, hundreds of experts, on almost any subject available night and day, the majority of questions are answered within 10-20 minutes.

You can either pay for a subscription, or, if strapped for cash do what I did, become an expert. Answer about 8 or 9 questions and you'll get free full subscription as long as you answer a few every month.

Here's my profile: http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_4058338.html

As you can see I've not been a member long, but the points rack up pretty quick ;-)

Hope you enjoy it.

As a (mainly) Perl developer I often have to write scripts involving regular expressions. As anyone knows that has worked with these before, they can be amazing helpful... and amazingly frustrating.

On one my many trawlings of the interweb I can across this perl module: YAPE::Regex::Explain (it's CPAN description page can be found at http://search.cpan.org/~pinyan/YAPE-Regex-Explain-3.011/Explain.pm ) I found this module so useful, I knocked up a simple CGI script that allows users to get their Regular expressions explained online, this can be found here: http://www.hampsonism.co.uk/regexp.cgi.

After mentioning this at work, one of my senior colleagues (a gentleman MUCH cleverer than myself) pointed us at a tool, Rugular Expression Coach (found here: http://weitz.de/regex-coach/) which by far surpasses my own little tool. I believed that it deserved a little more publicity, hence this blog post (my firt for quite a while in fact), to bring a little more light to the sterling work they are doing.

Your videos on your Wii

I've been looking into the best way of playing videos (from my main machine) on my Wii recently. I'm sure lots of people have a stack of video files sitting on their main computer, tucked away in a spare bedroom and a Wii hooked up to a nice large TV in their living room (with comfy sofas etc), and I've often thought how handy it would be to have an interface to be able to watch them on the big TV via the Wii.

This is a subject I have spent alot of time on recently, and my endeavours have only recently started to show any real merit, so I thought it was time to write a little bit about them. This is the basic theory.

If you have a wireless network...

With your main machine on it...

And your Wii...

Given that the Wii's browser can display videos from sites like YouTube, surely it must be possible to stream videos over to your Wii with relative ease.

There are already a few programs that you can download for this purpose. One of the most popular is Wii Media Centre X, basically a Java app that has it's own webserver built-in which serves videos in Flash Video format to the Wii. Simple. But it has one limitation which prevented me from wanting to use it. All the videos you wanted to watch on the Wii had to be in Flash format, which meant either converting your entire video stash to FLV format (an losing quite  bit of quality on most of them), or make two copies of each video (essentially doubling the space required for your media). Neither of these two approaches I found very favourable, and the hassle of going upstairs, converting a video, then going back down to watch it just seemed silly.

This is where the basic premise for my project comes in. A way of converting videos on the fly, for playing on the Wii. Over the next few posts I wil explain how I achieved this, and give you the source files if you fancy a go yourself.