Author: Rob Nidschelm

Games

EpicInstaller on Windows Server 2022/2025 and Windows 10/11 (error 2738)

Since Microsoft deprecated vbscript.dll in October 2023, several installations, including the Epic Installer, have encountered significant issues. Users attempting to install the Epic Installer are frequently met with the error message: “The error code is 2738”. This error is particularly frustrating as the Windows Eventlog does not provide any helpful information, making troubleshooting more challenging. The root cause of error 2738 is the system’s inability to locate vbscript.dll.

This issue stems from the deprecation of vbscript.dll, a crucial component previously used by many applications and installers. Without this DLL, scripts that rely on VBScript cannot execute, leading to installation failures. Users have reported that this error not only affects the Epic Installer but also other software that depends on VBScript for its installation process. The resolution is relatively simple and shouldn’t take more than about 5 minutes:

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A.I.

Error “Group(s) not found: ui (via –with)” installing PrivateGPT 0.4 on WSL

Note: the below assumes you already have followed any other guide, but you have gotten an error up to that point. The below will pick up directly where you left off in the your original guide.

As of a few days ago, when you try to install PrivateGPT with Poetry on WSL following various guides, the commands: “cd privateGPT”, “poetry install –with ui”, “poetry install –with local”, Poetry returns the errors.

Group(s) not found: ui (via –with)
Group(s) not found: local (via –with)

When going through the commit (which can be found here: 45f0571), it turns out that ui is moved from its own group and has moved to the “extras” group. It’s unclear to me where “local” went though.

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Whisper

Automatic Subtitle creation and translation (to English) with OpenAI’s Whisper

I’ve been having the issue over the last decades that the available subtitles from the well known sites are quite often not suitable for the videos that I have saved locally. Often downloaded videos, especially from YouTube, don’t have sub-titles, which is a requirement in my household, as we speak different languages. (A guide on how to download playlists or even whole channels from YouTube, can be found here) The cumbersome way of getting proper subtitles was to manually extract the audio, upload to YouTube and then download the .vtt.
In this age of emerging A.I., there is an easier way. Hence this Python Script, which will extract the audio and with the help of OpenAI’s Whisper, transcribe it (and translate it to English if so wished) to a subtitle file (SRT) to be placed directly with the video file.

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PowerShell

Automate downloading of Youtube Channels with YT-DLP and PowerShell

Watching or listening to Youtube playlists can be very frustrating with all the ads that are being thrown at you and this seems to have gotten worse over the years. A way around this is to download your favourite Youtube playlists. You can import these into your media-server, like Emby or Jellyfin, and watch the downloaded videos on which ever screen you have setup with this server.

You can add as many playlists and channels for auto-download as you’d like. Add it to a Scheduler or Cron job to keep your local copies up to date (The script won’t redownload the already downloaded files, it checks). The size of your disk is the limit.

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PowerShell

Re-Encode h264/x264 to h265 without noticeable quality loss with PowerShell and FFmpeg

Over the years I’ve gathered a lot of videos from various sources. Some of these are uncompressed and take up various gigabytes of space, each! Even though storage is getting cheaper, I don’t really want to spend €200,- (each) for 16TB spinning disks, so the answer is High Efficiency Video Coding, or HEVC/H265.
Do note that the statement above will not hold up for an uncompressed backup of a UHD Blu-ray disk. There is absolutely no way that a 50GB+ copy will have the same quality as an 1GB compressed file. The statement above is about downloaded x264 content like Youtube clips, Web-Rips, etc.

I put a PowerShell script together below to do the following:

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A.I.

PrivateGPT: ImportError: docx2txt is required to read Microsoft Word files

When trying to interact with Microsoft Word files, PrivateGPT throws out an error and does not want to parse it:
ImportError: docx2txt is required to read Microsoft Word files: pip install docx2txt

When actually installing docx2txt with pip, the error is still there. For some strange reason, PrivateGPT is still recommending pip, while it has moved away from pip for quite a while now. To resolve the issue, the answer is simple: Do Not Use Pip to install docx2txt (or whisper or any of the other converters you may need to upload your files.

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PowerShell

Folder backups with PowerShell

Why pay for an expensive backup solution in your home-lab when you can install PowerShell for free? The script below will handle simple backups for you. You only have to add it to the Windows Scheduler or create a Cron job.

This Script’s features:
– Replicates a Source directory to a destination to be specified in the script
– Automatically creates the destination folder structure
– Identifies changes or new files in the Source folder and only copies the changed or new files files to the destination
– If a file is deleted from the source, it will move the file from the backup destination to a recycle bin folder to be specified in the script.
– The script will delete files from the recycle bin after 30 days.
– Events are logged to a logfile located in the same directory as the script. The logfile is rotated every day the script is run and are auto-purged every 90 days
– Progress indicator is displayed on the console

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Windows 11

“We couldn’t update system reserved partition” error when Installing/Upgrading Windows 11 Insider Preview

Caution: This may cause your system to hang on boot.

I must admit, I haven’t done a fresh install of this system since upgrading to Windows 10 1903, moving the NVMe drive from an older laptop to this machine, updating the OS about every week to the latest version of the Insider Preview in the DEV Channel. This is bound to cause issues at one point, I’m aware.

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Vintage Hardware

Drivers Windows XP x32 for Gericom X5-Force 1830

In the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s Gericom released various laptop models and was fairly popular in western Europe. These laptops were sold under the brands Gericom (mainly Germany), Advent (mainly in the UK and Ireland) and in Spain under a brand named Hundyx. (I’ve restored one Pentium III model of this brand a while back. Funnily enough I really can’t seem to find a lot about this brand name at all) This is probably not an exhaustive list, but this is what I encountered over my years repairing vintage (or just plain old) hardware.

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