Codec

This is a follow-up to my earlier article Bluetooth Audio Quality & aptX on Windows 10, based on a comment by reader eluxe. Windows makes it unnecessarily hard to identify the audio codec used by the Bluetooth A2DP profile, but there is a way. This post shows how to check if your connection makes use of aptX, LDAC, or some other more advanced codec, or if it falls back to SBC.

Bluetooth is a flexible standard. It defines various profiles that operate on top of the Bluetooth networking protocol stack and implement specific services, such as hands-free communications. Bluetooth devices each support a small subset of profiles, typically only one or two, according to their designated function.

Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video formats, codecs, and GPU acceleration techniques is at work to make it all happen. This post explains what is what.

This is an update to my post on how to convert Quicktime videos in MOV format to MPEG-2. Recently a friend of mine asked me how my conversion script could be used for a slightly different camera model. While I use it for the videos from my Lumix LX3, he owns a TZ7, which uses slightly different parameters that make it necessary to tweak the script. Luckily those changes are small.

My simple yet effective batch file-based solution for converting digital videos in Quicktime MOV format from Panasonic Lumix and other cameras to MPEG-2, MEncode.cmd, now supports wildcards, too. Now you can run the following command to create MPEG-2 versions of all MOV files copied over from your camera:

[Update 1: Fixed bugs in the batch file and made it available for download] [Update 2: Wildcards are now supported] [Update 3: Timestamps are now copied from source to destination files. For this, touch.exe is needed.] [Update 4: File names with spaces in them are now handled correctly]