Grr! 30-day trial....

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2003-08-10 06:50am

I downloaded the demo of Adobe Premiere to see if it was any good. It seemed to be quite okay and had all the feats that I need. Too bad the thing will expire after 30-days. Or so I thought it would. Turned out that it expired after ONE FUCKING day!!

Yesterday it said "30 days remaining", today: "Trial period expired"

Goddamnit! And it still wont work even if I reinstall it! Now I can't test all those transitions and stuff that I didn't test yesterday. Fuck!!

All I have now is that fucking Pinnacle Studio fucking 8 that don't even has the capability to add more audio timelines so I have to mix my sounds for my films in a fucking external editor!!!

And it's wierd output codec that makes the filmclips look like purple shit in Axogon Composer

. I have to convert them to Windows Video .avi files which takes a lot of time!!

Embracer Of Darkness · Post by **Embracer Of Darkness** » 2003-08-10 11:58am

Holy shit dude, just copy and paste what you just wrote and send it to those fuckheads at Adobe.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-08-10 01:30pm

AVI is not a codec. Repeat after me: AVI is not a codec. If it's taking you a long to convert over, then you're doing a transcode and not merely enscapulating in AVI.

Copy and pasting that e-mail to Adobe will probably just give them a bunch of laughs and no support. Be polite but firm.

Finally, Premiere sucks anyways

Oberleutnant · Post by **Oberleutnant** » 2003-08-10 01:43pm

What other options are there for video editing? Premiere is versatile and relatively easy to use. My own experiences with other similar programs such as Ulead's MediaStudio haven't been as good.

namdoolb · Post by **namdoolb** » 2003-08-10 02:10pm

Set your clock back a few days. that should work as a quick fix to let you use the program;
Altering your computers clock so that it thinks it's still within the trial period works with most "trial period" things.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-08-10 02:17pm

Oberleutnant wrote:What other options are there for video editing? Premiere is versatile and relatively easy to use. My own experiences with other similar programs such as Ulead's MediaStudio haven't been as good.

A lot of people on the ArsTechnica forums like Sonic Foundry's Vegas.

Avid's products are also quite good, but out of his price range

They might be coming out with a stripped-down free editor, but AFAIK that will be DV only.

On the Mac side, Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express (DV only) are very popular.

Oberleutnant · Post by **Oberleutnant** » 2003-08-10 02:51pm

As an aspiring amateur filmmaker I've sometimes thought of buying a Mac purely for video editing, but I guess I'll stick with my PC and Premiere.

Specialist · Post by **Specialist** » 2003-08-10 03:25pm

namdoolb wrote:Set your clock back a few days. that should work as a quick fix to let you use the program;
Altering your computers clock so that it thinks it's still within the trial period works with most "trial period" things.

Don't these "trial period" software work by using a registery key, maybe he just has to find it and delete it...

namdoolb · Post by **namdoolb** » 2003-08-10 05:13pm

Specialist wrote:Don't these "trial period" software work by using a registery key, maybe he just has to find it and delete it...

That might work, but I'd have thought that the program would stop working if you started removing it's registry keys.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2003-08-10 05:28pm

Maybe if you cleaned the registry AND reinstalled.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-08-10 05:34pm

The simplest way to crack trialware is to get a real-time debugger and find the offending program entry as it's running. Then you do a binary patch to the executable that removes the timer.

However, I think that's pretty far from legal.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-08-11 02:01am

namdoolb wrote:
Specialist wrote:Don't these "trial period" software work by using a registery key, maybe he just has to find it and delete it...
That might work, but I'd have thought that the program would stop working if you started removing it's registry keys.

It would be easier if one dumped the registry to a .reg file before and after installing, then compared the differences using diff or the windows equivelent.

Some might dump files hidden somewhere in the system, so recursively dump a listing of all files before and after.

Unfortunately, nowdays some schemes involve writing directly to disk, bypassing filesystem (Macrovision's DRM for turbotax writes to sector 33 or something of MBR)

Crayz, isn't it kind of difficult without debugging symbols compiled in, meaning you would have to look at ASM w/o coments? How would you make the patch? Disassemble, edit, reassemble, run patch prog?

BTW, why does everything on linux not use binary patches using xdelta or diff -a?

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2003-08-11 01:08pm

Slartibartfast wrote:Maybe if you cleaned the registry AND reinstalled.

That's what I did. I reset the registry to how it was the day before I installed. Then I installed it again. Still didn't work. I tried to install it on my other computer and copy the files from there after I had again uninstalled it reset the registry reinstalled and deleted all files that had with both Premiere and VBox (which is the program that checks the date or whatever it does to see how many days there are left) to do and replaced them with files from the other computer. It still won't fucking work. So I'll have to test it at the other computer I suppose, but it's slow as hell and only has 64 MB of RAM.

phongn wrote:AVI is not a codec. Repeat after me: AVI is not a codec. If it's taking you a long to convert over, then you're doing a transcode and not merely enscapulating in AVI.

No AVI is a file format for movies and/or sound but you have to use a codec to make an avi file. This Studio 8 that I have has it's own weird codec that's called MJPEG[PINNACLE STUDIO] or something like that, which is different from the standard Windows Video codec.
BTW what's a transcode

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-08-11 01:14pm

Pu-239 wrote:Crayz, isn't it kind of difficult without debugging symbols compiled in, meaning you would have to look at ASM w/o coments? How would you make the patch? Disassemble, edit, reassemble, run patch prog?

I'm not sure, I've never done it myself. But the real-time debugger (in this case, SoftICE) displays everything in hex and ASM.

So what most program crackers do is write a small program, using their language of choice, that performs the patching. Then they distribute the program, sometimes with a free virus included.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-08-11 01:44pm

Dooey Jo wrote:
phongn wrote:AVI is not a codec. Repeat after me: AVI is not a codec. If it's taking you a long to convert over, then you're doing a transcode and not merely enscapulating in AVI.
No AVI is a file format for movies and/or sound but you have to use a codec to make an avi file. This Studio 8 that I have has it's own weird codec that's called MJPEG[PINNACLE STUDIO] or something like that, which is different from the standard Windows Video codec.
BTW what's a transcode

There is no such thing as a standard "Windows Video" codec. There has never been a standard "Windows Video" codec. There's Windows Media, but that doesn't use AVI as its container anyways.

As for MJPEG, that is hardly a strange codec. It is a major standard widely used for video capture. It is a good codec, I have much experience with Pinnacle Studio's implementation of it. Your color errors may be stemming from colorspace issues - are you capturing your video in RGB or YV12?

Transcoding means to convert from one codec to another.

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2003-08-12 05:02am

phongn wrote:
Dooey Jo wrote: No AVI is a file format for movies and/or sound but you have to use a codec to make an avi file. This Studio 8 that I have has it's own weird codec that's called MJPEG[PINNACLE STUDIO] or something like that, which is different from the standard Windows Video codec.
BTW what's a transcode
There is no such thing as a standard "Windows Video" codec. There has never been a standard "Windows Video" codec. There's Windows Media, but that doesn't use AVI as its container anyways.

Maybe it means that there's no codec at all then. But when I choose the output format in Studio, I can change which codec with which to compress the file. There is one called Windows Video 1 and I asumed that is was the standard codec. All other programs seem to be able to read it just fine.

As for MJPEG, that is hardly a strange codec. It is a major standard widely used for video capture. It is a good codec, I have much experience with Pinnacle Studio's implementation of it. Your color errors may be stemming from colorspace issues - are you capturing your video in RGB or YV12?

RGB, I think. Where do you change this?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-08-12 02:19pm

Ook, I forgot about WV1. Don't use it, it's a very old codec dating from the Windows 3.1 days that is fairly low quality.

Usually you can fiddle with colorspace when you're capturing.