I could narrow the problem down to the way windows uses cashing of thumbnails. As of windows vista, thumbnails are stored in cashing files that are stored in the users application data folder: C:\Users\**username**\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer . These files are protected however, and can’t be deleted. Cleaning the thumbnails can be done by the “disc cleanup” tool, located in Accesoires -> System Tools. Whenever I cleaned like that, all thumbnails would disappear and leave a blank spot. Not even the default folder icon would return. I could, however, remedy this by killing and restarting explorer in the task manager. (or simply by rebooting). But the missing thumbnails would still be missing!!

Solution: My solution my be harsh, but effective: Disable the cash completely.
To go around disabling the cache, you need to use the “Local Group Policy Editor”. Run it by pressing the windows key + R and then typing “gpedit.msc” after the Open: field. Navigate to “User Configuration” -> “Administrative Templates” -> “Windows Components” -> “Windows Explorer”

Find “Turn off caching of thumbnail pictured” and double click it. Choose “Enabled” from the three radio buttons and confirm with OK.

Now restart explorer (by killing it in task manager. Restarting explorer using the “New Task…” button in Applications where you type “Explorer”). OR simply reboot windows.

Now all thumbnails will be loaded every time you open the folder. This may be a bit slow, but at least you’ll have the thumbnails.

In short:

The Archos Vision 43 …
• … plays AVI MPEG-4 (divx/xvid) ONLY
• … can’t play B-frames
• … can’t play mp4 or mkv
• … can’t play h.264

Tools to use converting:
EASY: PocketDivXEncoder
NOT SO EASY: Mencoder

You can go about this the easy way by using “PocketDivxEncoder”, but it’s rather limited when it comes to making custom configurations. It works however and if that makes you happy, why apply for a headache doing it the hard way. But for those who like to experiment: read on.

Mencoder is “sometimes” part of the Mplayer suite (but is hard to come-by). You’ll find it at Gianluigi Tiesi’s page. Current build is r34118, and you may choose a version for AMD (athlon), Intel Pentium3 (p3), Intel Pentium 4 or better (p4) or Generic 486 (rtm). I chose rtm. Extract the download in a folder on your computer. There is no installation, because it’s a command-line tool. To make it work, I use it in BATCH files.

The package consists of two main EXE files, mencoder and mplayer. A detailed manual with all the command-line options can be found in mplayer.html, also included in the package.

The simplest way to use mencoder is like this:

This will encode input-file into a MPEG4 file with a variable video bitrate of 750kb/s and a constant MP3 audio bitrate of 128kb/s. The container is AVI. The name is output-file.

For the Archos, we want to add some extra options:

This will encode a MPEG4 AVI, allowing 4 motion vectors per macroblock (slightly better quality), shape adaptive (fast) diamond with size 3 (fast encoding) and a variable bitrate of 750kb/s. We also scale/zoom the video so it fits the Archos 480×272 screen nicely. Aspect ratio is preserved by omitting the height.

You can find many more settings to tweak with by reading the mplayer.html. If you find any improvements, please post them in the comments. I’ll gladly test them out.

Now.. let’s automate.

I have a folder on my PC called “to convert”, and I’ve made a sub-folder called mplayer, where the above downloaded package is extracted. The structure looks as such:

Inside the “to convert” folder, I’ve some batch files: doall_mpg.bat and doone.bat.

doall_mpg.bat

doone.bat

What is does is simple. When I put some (*not more than 4) mpeg files (.mpg) in the “to convert” folder, together with the batch files AND I then run the doall_mpg.bat batch-file, the PC starts encoding ALL the mpeg files at once. (*) I use “start” to launch multiple jobs at once, because mencoder uses only ONE thread (core). To fully use the potential of a quad-core, you may launch at least 4 jobs in parallel without suffering a decrease in encoding speed. Mind that mencoder CAN use multiple threads, but the speed-increase is not that spectacular. AND I noticed that using threads=2 (or more) produced a lot of artifacts when playing the encoded file back on the Archos, thus we can’t use that option.

To convert other files, like AVI’s, MP4′s , etc.. just change the (*.mpg) to (*.avi),(*.mp4),..respectively. ( I know this isn’t ideal, but I’m to lazy to change it now). If you know about batch processing and for, you’ll know what to do when you want to change it.

A FEW NOTES:

• Depending on how fast and how big the SD cards is you’re using, video playback from that SD card may be choppy and out of sync. I found that the 16 Gbyte Sandisk SD-HC did not work for me. For smooth video playback, copy the video’s to the internal memory.
• You can use -vf crop=700:396,scale=480:272 to crop letterbox video’s. You may have to tweak the. All is explained in mplayer.html

Have fun.

First open the message you want to print, click on the print icon or choose print from the drop down menu. Now you see a screen like this:

Cancel the print task by clicking CANCEL. ( We need to remove the logo first, only then we want to go ahead with printing ).

Now, RIGHT click the LOGO and choose “Inspect element” from the menu. ( Remember, you need Chrome to do this ). On the bottom half of the browser a window, containing the source code, will become visible.

Inspect element will allow us to manipulate the elements of a webpage in real-time locally. Any changes will be visible immediately.
We just want to remove the logo. The line of code that contains the logo is automatically selected (it has a grey background), so it should be easy to spot.

Now finally right click anywhere in the grey-background line of code (the line will now get a dark-blue background) and from the menu choose “Delete node“.

Now the logo is gone and you can print the e-mail, without logo, by pressing CTRL-P or right-mouse-print.

PS: You can remove whatever you want from whatever website you like by using this method of right clicking the element you want to remove and following these instructions. The changes are local only and will be undone when you refresh the page. Naturally you’re not changing anything on the server.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a small command line app from Mark Russinovich. Now, that sounds like a guy who knows how to kill a blocking app. (just kiddin’). In fact, his app called “handle” is featured at Windows Sysinternals. Here is what it did for me.

I had this demo of Mixmeister and I wanted to “move” the downloaded install-file-folder to my backup drive. But somehow it was blocked. Windows, endlessly informative, told me nothing that I could use:

So I fired up HANDLE. I asked it to tell me who’s blocking Mixmeister.

Handle mixmeister

I then got a list of “handles”, two of them were explorer and one of them was my browser chrome. To chase these apps away from my folder (file), I needed the PID of the app and the handle on the file. Handle provides both. In my case, explorer had pid 3796 and the handle on my folder had 1978. I could now get it off by entering:

Handle -c 1978 -p 3796

I did the same for the other two handles, and see there: The folder was free and I could move it quite happily.

Just remember: Killing handles “can” crash your machine. When attempting this, always make sure any unsaved data is saved!

You can download HANDLE from here.

There is a shortcut, so you don’t need to restart.
Just kill soffice.bin and soffice.exe :

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqfbnRglGjQ&t=2m00s try this link

Format: &t=XXmXXs
XX = Number representing the amount of minutes into the video.
YY = Number representing the amount of seconds into the video.
Make sure to mention both minutes and seconds, and don’t forget to put “m” after the minutes and “s” after the seconds. Alwasy use Lowercase letters, Youtube URL’S are case-sensitive.

To make use of this feature in Facebook, make sure to FIRST add the option to the link, and only then copy-paste that into a Facebook status field. The video will then start at the specified time when fans click on it to play..

When using GS_WMT216_V5.0_ACADEV_BLACK_EDITION, you’ll notice that the “hibernation” function is missing and that the device must be “shut down” or else it would drain the battery until it’s empty. Using this little trick, you can activate the “hibernate” option while shutting down:

- First, go to the market and download a shell app, I used “ConnectBot”.
- Once in the shell, type SU to become root
- Once root (the $ changes in #), type setenv hibernation_ui yes
- Then type reboot

Now your tabled will offer you to hibernate when shutting down (pressing the power button).

more info: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=58954

Note: I will update this list as I test more firmwares.

Note2: BE CAREFULL upgrading the tablet. You MAY brick it. I will take NO RESPONSIBILITY for your actions, when you damage or brick your tablet. I only provide this information as is.

I could not find the original firmware for the QPC617 from QMedia and I don’t know how to make a backup, so I took a leap of faith experimenting with this device.

WMT2.1.2_105_M3CSL_V1.0
This was the first firmware I tested. It works perfectly, but is not rooted. It has the market installed. Processor runs at 174 Mhz. Good performance.

WMT2.1.6_LF-X_V1.0B6
This firmware runs perfect. It is rooted too and has the market installed. Better performance.

PanImage_SGS_ACADEV_2.22.11_Full (link)
This firmware installs ok. HoneyComb (fake) interface. Performance is slow.

GS_WMT216_V5.0_ACADEV_BLACK_EDITION (link)
Installs fine. Nice interface. Rooted and Market. Performance is good.

LIST of NOT WORKING firmwares:
WMT2.50_RSX_TS_A_SPEC_V2

PS: None of the images/firmwares are overclocked. The two most popular overclock apps (OC Widget & SetCPU ) won’t work. Maybe in future versions.

Tips:
- When booting after a flash update, the animate boot-logo ( ANDROID ) may look like it is locked in a loop. Just be patient (maybe 2 , 3 minutes). All following boots will not suffer from this delay.

More info on modded tablet firmwares:
http://androidtabletzone.the-talk.net/f135-honeycomb-for-wm8505-wmt8505-rooted-rom-mod-firmware-development (updated link 2 nov. 2011)