Extract BINK to PNG Sequence (with transparency)

BINK movies are widely  used in games because they provide transparency in the video from long back. Sometime you have to reverse engineer the BINK file and get the PNGs out of (not JPEG but PNG with  transparency) the movie. I've used FFMpeg to get PNGs out of BINK (.bik format) file as followed.

1. Download latest ffmpeg static build from http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
2. Extract the .7z build to any folder.
3. Give this command to convert “my.bik” to “output” folder and %d is sequence number in output image.  %d will auto increment by one, you have to just give %d in the command.

ffmpeg.exe -i D:\my.bik D:\output\my_%d.png

Note that this is a general command which applies to any type of movie format supported by ffmpeg. There are hell lot of more things you can with ffmpeg. For example, your popular VLC is built using ffmpeg library :) 

When your 'mktime' is slow as shit

While working on Vanilla Forum, I realized that dashboard was taking around 3 seconds to load on LAN. When looked further using Xdebug and cachegrind log, I realized that a method called "UnixTimestamp" (in Framework.Functions.php) was calling a stupid method called "mktime". What it does is just return the timestamp value (elapsed int value from a stupid start date of C which will create problem 2030). Not sure why on the earth this should happen, but this method is utter slow. So slow that when I wrote got the UTC time from my MySQL server (of local machine), it was 3 time fast.

Conclusion:
If your mktime is slow, throw that shit out and use stupider but faster method.. i.e. tell MySQL to do it for you. Here is what I wrote:

 
  $query = sprintf("SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP('%s') as UTS",
     mysql_real_escape_string($DateTime));
  $result = mysql_query($query);
  if($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
     return $row['UTS'];
  }

May PHP god have mercy on you! Happy Coding!

SqlDateTime overflow Exception with NHibernate

SqlDateTime overflow. Must be between 1/1/1753 12:00:00 AM and 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM.
Exception Stacktrace:
at System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlDateTime.FromTimeSpan(TimeSpan value)
at System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlDateTime.FromDateTime(DateTime value)
at System.Data.SqlClient.MetaType.FromDateTime(DateTime dateTime, Byte cb)
at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.WriteValue(Object value, MetaType type, Byte scale, Int32 actualLength, Int32 encodingByteSize, Int32 offset, TdsParserStateObject stateObj)
at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.TdsExecuteRPC(_SqlRPC[] rpcArray, Int32 timeout, Boolean inSchema, SqlNotificationRequest notificationRequest, TdsParserStateObject stateObj, Boolean isCommandProc)
at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReaderTds(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, Boolean async)
at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method, DbAsyncResult result)
at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.InternalExecuteNonQuery(DbAsyncResult result, String methodName, Boolean sendToPipe)
at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery()
at NHibernate.AdoNet.AbstractBatcher.ExecuteNonQuery(IDbCommand cmd)
at NHibernate.AdoNet.NonBatchingBatcher.AddToBatch(IExpectation expectation)
at NHibernate.Persister.Entity.AbstractEntityPersister.Update(Object id, Object[] fields, Object[] oldFields, Object rowId, Boolean[] includeProperty, Int32 j, Object oldVersion, Object obj, SqlCommandInfo sql, ISessionImplementor session)
at NHibernate.Persister.Entity.AbstractEntityPersister.UpdateOrInsert(Object id, Object[] fields, Object[] oldFields, Object rowId, Boolean[] includeProperty, Int32 j, Object oldVersion, Object obj, SqlCommandInfo sql, ISessionImplementor session)

What is NOT a problem:

As always, I opned SQL Profiler and tried solve the issue but it misguided me by adding few extra zeros in millisecond part of datetime (I don't want to discuss it and it is not the problem).

What IS (or was in my case) problem:

I added an extra Datetime filed which was nullable in database. But I was mapping it to DateTime in my database. When NHibernate was converting my unset Datetime to SQLdatetime for mysterious reason, it was trying to set DateTime.Min in SQL datetime datatype which is not allowed (see exception).

Solution:

Look for any Datetime in your mappings that should be nullabe (according to database). And then use

type="System.Nullable`1[[System.DateTime, mscorlib]], mscorlib" in your mapping.