Mortis has updated MKVToolNix, and as such, my official MacOS X port has been updated as well. Note that mmg, the wxWindows based front-end is currently non-functional, and as such is not included.

MKVToolNix has been statically compiled, so you not need additional support software to use the included tools.

Since I like to keep up to date (and it didn’t work), I’ve submitted my first patch to an existing Gentoo build, specifically, mod_php. It utilized an old patch that was valid for elder revisions of PHP. Oddly, the bugs were fixed in PHP 4.3.5 for Apache 2, but not Apache 1; so I removed the patches for Apache 2, and created a new ebuild. It’s built, and works fine.

[Update: Interesting. Robin Johnson included a patch which is exactly the same, roughly 10 hours later than mine, but only after browbeating me for my submission, and without credit. Shame on you, sir.]

My Optorite CW4002 has been exhibiting an odd issue. It will no burn over 32x, despite being a 40x CDRW drive. I have known good disks (newer build Ritek 40x), and it outright refuses to burn faster.

Here’s a screenshot using Nero’s CDTest on my PC with the 100E firmware:

And now, with the updated 110E firmware:

Yes, it’s now degraded to 12x!

The disk hasn’t fallen back into PIO mode, so I am a bit curious as to issues with this drive. I’ve since downgraded back to the 100E firmware, and will settle for 32x until I manage to find out what’s wrong with the disk. Optorite is also rather confused about this… of obvious reasons!

[Edit:]

Update:

Optorite released firmware 120E, and that seems to have fixed these problems

Without looking too hard into their EEPROM, it looks like they updated their manufacturer codes, thus the drive will burn at this faster, advertised speed for known media.

It seems that Nero NRG format is a fairly trivial overlay about the ISO9660 CD format. The easiest way to convert an NRG to an ISO is to strip the first 307200 bytes; the rest will be your resulting ISO-9660 image.

For example; to mount an NRG in linux via loopback: mount -t iso9660 -o loop,offset=307200 image.nrg /mnt/image

Alternatively, a program exists, which will do this for you. I’ve pre-compiled a MacOS X 10.3.x version. You may download it here.

[Edit: Added link to precompiled build.]

This is very-very-very raw; and not necessarily the best solution. What this will do is obtain a web page specified, then print out the data as it is received.

$site = “http://www.holwegner.com/”; $raw = implode(‘’, file ($site)); echo $raw;

Eventually, I will follow iup with the proper means to encode the data as it is found, with provisions for ‘clicking’ through; having this program rewrite the URLs through itself as a ‘proper’ server-side proxy.