In Case You're Having Problems Accessing Macintosh Garden...

For a couple of weeks I couldn't access macintoshgarden.org. Since the site is prone to going down on occasion I didn't think anything of it until more and more days passed and still no luck. So I tried it on a browser besides TenFourFox and the site worked. Huh?

Turns out macintoshgarden.org switched to https for a few days but then reverted when it was causing some hitches, but TenFourFox would automatically try to connect to a nonexistent https site even if you typed http in the address bar.

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After purging my history of all macintoshgarden links and clearing out all macintoshgarden cookies, I still couldn't get TFF to connect to http. Finally this was the solution to my problems:

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"That's done it. I edited the SiteSecurityServiceState.txt in my Firefox profile, deleting the macintoshgarden entry. Now I'm back in."

Kind of ironic the solution was in a thread I temporarily couldn't access in TFF, but all is well now.

CorePlayer Un*ucked

So this happened in the MacRumors Forum yesterday:

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/coreplayer-is-no-more-rip.1397374/page-5#post-22765728

UPDATED download link: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/coreplayer-mobile-os-x

For a little background, user lotvai77 is the one who compiled Transmission 2.84 for Tiger PPC several months back, and CorePlayer is near legendary among powerpc users as the most cpu efficient video player (zen at PowerPC Liberation was one of the few who had a registered copy).

Now I can see what everyone was raving over. I previously found Mplayer from the shell to have the best playback, though for some 720p videos I had to disable the loop filter to avoid framedrops and this slightly degraded image quality. With CorePlayer this is no longer necessary and it has handled every 720p vid I can throw at it. I don't have any 1080p videos handy at the moment, but I've read from others CorePlayer can handle 1080p on faster Macs with ease.

Caveats: CorePlayer is the master of h.264 playback, but some mkv's I tried with it were wonky and avi's with AC3 audio didn't play any sound. Zen previously reported "little support for AC3 audio," so that's definitely been my experience!

One tip, if your cpu's too slow and you're still getting framedrops, go into Tools --> Settings --> Advanced and check "Disable AVC deblocking filter". I think this is the same as disabling the loop filter and it'll speed things up.

h/t Adam Albrec

Also: CorePlayer File Association Icons