Recently I had to play some mpeg2 files on my Mac and they just wouldn't play. This was odd as under Tiger they would play fine. I had Final Cut Studio v2 installed and this comes with the mpeg2 codec, so all should have been fine. I tried it on my machine at the office and that did the exact same thing. As one final test I went to a machine that had just had Final Cut Studio v2 installed on a new Leopard install. Amazingly the mpeg2 played. What was the difference?

The difference is. The other two machines had been upgraded to Leopard. After some investigation I found that the machines not playing mpeg2 had the codec in library/quicktime, whereas the machine that did work had the codec in system/library/quicktime. The screenshot below shows how it should be. I simply copies the codec from the working machine to the broken one and removed the old codec from library/quicktime.

Tags: video, Work, macintosh, Leopard

Last night I my VPN client wouldn't load. It was complaining it could not connect to the subsystem. It returned an error 51. After doing some research around the web, I found this command. It is very handy. It means I don't have to reboot. Just go to the terminal and type in the following.

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Tags: Leopard, Cisco VPN

I upgrade my Mac to Leopard yesterday and I couldn't logon on to my Windows 2003 server that was running SFM. I could log on to the server running Extremez-ip. I had a feeling it was due to the way Leopard was sending the password, and indeed it was.

I went to Computer Management, right clicked on Shared Folders, and chose, Configure Service for Macintosh.

Set the Enable authentication box to, Apple Encrypted or Microsoft and it will work fine.

Tags: Leopard, 10.5

So, Leopard is finally here. I started my upgrade yesterday. First of all I made sure I had a good backup. Superduper did that for me. I had a complete clone and a user files backup as well. I then made sure as many applications as possible were the latest versions. Some have had patches made available even since I did that. 1Password has had two updates since yesterday morning.

All went well during the process of upgrading. My machine rebooted fine. All in all I have to say, a very smooth upgrade.

I have been working through my applications and all seems to be working fine for the most part. Below are a list of my findings so far :-

* Repairing disk permissions just gave me the stripped progress bar. It didn't seem to do anything.

* Quicktime went back to standard version.

* Final Cut Studio 2 had lost its serial number. When I tried to put it back in, it would accept it, but as I wasn't an admin it would not right the file to the disk. I had to log out and do it again as an admin.

* Growl Mail doesn't work. They are working on an upgrade

* Built in VPN doesn't work with the office Cisco VPN and Crypocard, but the Cisco Client works fine.

* Spaces works great, but I think it will take some getting used to. The preference pane could do with being bigger. Once you add a lot of applications, it is hard to see which Space they are in.

I will post more information as I work more in Leopard.

Tags: Leopard, Computers, os x, upgrade