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There is a caveat - the computers must be owned by the same person, and only one PTE can be active at any one time. If two persons will be using PTE on two computers at the same time then you will need two licenses. The intention is to allow more than one copy of the program but only one can be in use at a time. This restriction does not apply to the finished executable show. You can have and show as many copies of your show/s as you want at any time. This is in line with many other commercial programs' terms of use. Regards, Colin

Hello Eric, Yes I ran a couple of shows made for 1024 x 768, and they went fine, the DLP system produces very good black, so the black bars on the side were completely black, and not grey as with LCD systems. Further, the colour gradation was superb. The projector allows switching various colour gamuts including sRGB (and a custom setting for your own profile), and selecting that gamut gave beautiful pictures. The on-screen brightness was certainly very bright and would be good for a poorly darkened room. It also has two 15-pin d-sub VGA inputs as well as HDMI and USB. I used VGA input from my laptop. I will experiment with USB shortly, but we have no computers with HDMI input.

My camera club has just today purchased a Dell 4320 DLP projector. It is a WXGA machine, 800 x 1280 pixels, HDMI and other options, 4500 lumens. We looked at higher definition machines offering 1080p but considered the on-screen difference to be quite small. For a smallish club, about 50 members, we think it will do us for a while, certainly better than our existing elderly 1024 x 768 LCD Epson.

The whole question of extraneous noise, particularly hum, is a vexing question for a lot of recording applications, including voice and music recording. The two main sources of hum are mains power derived, from 'ground loops' and 50 Hz electromagnetic fields from mains wiring in buildings. Ground loops result from having interconnected pieces of equipment powered from different mains outlets that have a 'potential' - read voltage difference - between the outlet earths. Often only a fraction of 1 volt difference can cause problems. (I remember in my electronic days having a major problem in a garage workshop trying to use an electronic engine analyser console which kept locking out, and found a ground potential difference of five volts between the frame earth of the analyser and the earth pin connection of the power outlet, enough to render the machine unusable.) Electromagnetic fields from house wiring are all-pervasive, and will be picked up by audio equipment, particularly by microphones and preamplifiers as well as cables carrying audio at low levels. This problem is made worse by 'dirty' equipment like digital TVs and computers whose chop-mode power supplies produce harmonics from the mains frequency at 50 Hz right up into the megahertz range. Susceptibility to these fields varies, worse with cheap mics and cables. If your recording gear will run from batteries, and nothing in your house will come to harm by losing power, you could try turning off the power at the switchboard and doing a recording while the house wiring is 'dead'. Alternatively if you have access to an oscilloscope, record a minute of so of silence with the recording gear set up as you would for recording, then have a look at the recorded signal with the 'scope. A few variations of volume level, mic plugged in vs not plugged in etc - use your imagination here - will enable you to get a good idea of just where the hum is coming from, and may suggest a solution to you.

Yes, I second that. PKzip is way in front. It also handles the increasing use of .rar and other compression formats. Personally, I use a program called PowerDesk, a superset of Windows Explorer, which has PKzip built-in among other goodies. Recommended. Regards, Colin

C:\Worlds\PTE\WnLib\\Win32\wpTypes.pas is a directory path\source code file on the computer that was used to compile PTE, i.e. Igor's machine. .pas files are source code files for a Pascal compiler and will be referenced in the compiled program (PTE) for error reporting purposes. However, this does not mean that the program is in error. The most likely problem will be in your use of PTE, something like exceeding the 2-gigabyte maximum file size - likely if you have many video sequences and much music, or maybe some other max or min boundary inherent in the program design. Try reducing your data and see if it will compile an exe then. Or try without your sound files. If it then works, are your sound files mp3? Some other sound formats are known to give PTE trouble - sorry I can't remember specifically which ones.

I've seen a clip showing a Rubiks Cube solveing machine, made from Leggo with a couple of small stepper motors and a camera phone. The camera looks at the cube and drives the motors to rotate cube so all sides in turn are seen by the camera, then the software instructs the motors to move the segments of the cube to produce a solution. This lash-up machine solves the cube in a matter of seconds. Just boggling to watch in action. Here's one version: http://9to5google.com/2011/10/21/android-lego-robot-beats-human-world-record-in-solving-rubiks-cube-puzzle/ and there are others.

An off-the-wall thought, what possibility of invoking some sort of language plug-in to work with the forum software that would say, allow a pull-down menu from which one could select a language, and get an instant translation of the message one is reading? My programming days are long gone, but it should be feasible, even if it just invoked Babelfish or Google Translate to do the work. I think this would greatly aid the non-English speakers in the forum, as they could peruse the boards almost as fast as if they could read English. I'm sure there would be a lot more users if they could do that.

This reply triggered by Davegee's remark about 2ms refresh on his monitor. There are some monitors that display only 6 bits, using dithering to reproduce an 8-bit image, and even 8-bit monitors have to convert to 8 bits from a 16-bit image. I wonder if these factors could be causing the disturbance effects being seen that are the subject of this thread? Colin

Hello again, Jeff, I was excited to download your four latest shows, and they are in keeping with your usual impeccable standards. Some time ago I gained your permission to show one or two of your earlier shows to my camera club, which just blew them (and me!) away with the clarity of image and beauty of music. Unfortunately PTE doesn't seem too common here in New Zealand, most show makers seem to use other software, probably because of better marketing by the producers. Our club is in the process of buying a new projector to replace our 8-year-old LCD machine, and I am insisting they buy a wide-screen format DLP machine - then I would like to blow them away again with these latest offerings from you. BTW, are you still using your 300D, or have you upgraded the camera? The sharpness and almost 3D 'presence' in your images is breathtaking. Kind regards Colin New Zealand

Hello again, Jeff, I was excited to download your four latest shows, and they are in keeping with your usual impeccable standards. Some time ago I gained your permission to show one or two of your earlier shows to my camera club, which just blew them (and me!) away with the clarity of image and beauty of music. Unfortunately PTE doesn't seem too common here in New Zealand, most show makers seem to use other software, probably because of better marketing by the producers. Our club is in the process of buying a new projector to replace our 8-year-old LCD machine, and I am insisting they buy a wide-screen format DLP machine - then I would like to blow them away again with these latest offerings from you. BTW, are you still using your 300D, or have you upgraded the camera? The sharpness and almost 3D 'presence' in your images is breathtaking. Kind regards Colin New Zealand

Sweepstake anyone? Bet I'm older than trailertrash at 77. But he does more PTE shows than I do.

Oops. 'pye' should be 'pi', and x+y might or might not equal pi. Do you need a primer in arithmetic, maybe? Colin

It's gotten to the stage now where the solution is worse than the problem. I ditched all the anti-V programs and now I just have ZoneAlarm Extreme Security. I struck an infected site a day or so ago, and ZAES jumped up, noted the trojan, gave me the option of what to do with it, then quarantined it. None of my collection of PTE shows are stopped by ZAES, and PTE 7 runs smoothly, as does the EXE compilation.

I am a stickler, very fussy about the projected quality of the images as well as smoothness of transitions, and zoom and pan effects. For years I used other branded software but was dissatisfied with the unacceptable loss of sharpness and general picture quality, at least from the moderately priced offerings. I can't remember just how I got onto PTE, but it was a great day when I did. I just make simple slideshows, nothing too fancy, but with the immaculate image quality and suitable sound, I can thrill my audiences, who mostly ask for more shows than I planned to give. The clarity and transparent quality of the images from PTE is just breathtaking. Apart from my own shows, which do not number very many at this stage, I have downloaded a number of other users' shows, notably those of Jeff Lunt depicting travels through Utah. With his unique choice of music, his shows really do justice to PTE, and on occasions when I have shown them to clubs (with his permission) the audiences are simply stunned. PTE is one-of-a-kind, and Igor is to be congratulated on his programming insight and sheer ability. Colin D, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

If you do go for a 1024/768 projector, make sure it is rated at 1024/768 and not 800/600. A lot of people will state that it shows 1024/768 well, but it will be downsizing to 800/600. 800/600 looks really coarse alongside 1024/768 and not worth having these days. Colin

Is the file named autorun.inf?

Hello Dick, I ran your two examples on my Dell laptop - duo core 1.8 MHz 3MB ram and Windows XP SP3. Not a flicker on either sample, they faded into the pic and were rock steady for the duration of each clip. Hope this helps narrow down your problem. This sounds like an OS incompatibility to me. Colin

You could try Bulent's screen recorder, which grabs frames from the screen by a single selectable key press, and stores them in a folder as .bmp files. There are several versions of Bulent's, ver. 1.5 is free and works well. Get it from http://download.cnet.com/Bulent-s-Screen-Recorder/3000-2192_4-10198471.html The latest version 5 is more versatile, but costs $US49.95. I have always found 1.5 adequate and reliable. Colin

Eric, Yes, your key certainly looks authentic and if the other chap's key is of identical form then it should work. One other thing is that it's possible his registry is corrupt in some subtle manner. Perhaps you could uninstall PTE from his machine, then run a registry cleaner like Ccleaner (http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER), a free program. Then reinstall PTE and try the reg.key again. Tip: if you rename the reg key file as *.reg, i.e. the extension of .reg, then you only need to double-click that file from anywhere and it will run and install directly into the registry without having to be copied into the PTE folder. It also avoids the PTE program having to do the registry install, thereby avoiding another possible hiccup. Colin

Eric, Are you including the beginning and ending speech marks in the registration key? No speech marks, no workee. e.g. "dxndjfdskj........." Colin

Yes, you can do that, but you will see black areas top and bottom on the screen - which doesn't really matter. For your projector at 1024 x 768, which is smaller than your laptop screen, the projector will reset the screen dimensions so the picture on the lappy will be oversize and distorted. The best way to handle this is to connect the projector to the laptop and turn on the projector before you turn on the laptop. The laptop will see the projector and use its dimensions automatically. If you turn on the laptop before the projector then the image dimensions will be those of the laptop and you will have to go into Control Panel\Display and set the dimensions manually.

If you are running the laptop screen while connected to the TV you may find the maximum screen pixels to be controlled by the lesser screen, i.e. the laptop. Turn off the lappy screen (Fn-F8 keys on my Dell) and see if that fixes it. My Dell screen is 1680 x 1050, and when I use my external AOC 1920 x 1080 I have to turn off the laptop screen to achieve the full 1920 x 1080 display on the AOC. If I turn on the laptop screen the display reverts to 1680 x 1050 on both screens.

What other processes or programs do you have in mind that you want to run during an AV show? I expressly shut down all non-essential processes when showing AVs to avoid any interruption to the show. I hate jerky pictures and stutters in the sound, so I play safe.

I agree to some extent about the sibilants in the recorded speech, but I do not find the intakes of breath very noticeable. I wonder if the frequency response of your replay gear is not accentuating the high frequencies unduly? However, there can be a problem with persons who have false teeth. False teeth cause a number of problems with speech, causing odd sharp sibilants and even whistles when pronouncing 's' and 'c' sounds, and from close listening to Barry's audio I wonder if he has false teeth. I apologise if this sounds a bit personal. Colin