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Or, if you have an application that isn't written for a system from the 1990's, it will spawn multiple threads and use all the cores to do that one task much faster. You know, things like video compression which is nothing but massive amounts of math - nobody does that on a consumer level at all.

As I have one of these.

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Advanced+Video/Liquid+Edition/Avid+Liquid+Pro+7.htm

As trademarked by Pinnacle. Hopefully the fact that it's a discontinued product line will keep their lawyers out of attack mode.

Hmm.. no alternatives? I guess you are correct, nothing compares to say Photoshop, or even InDesign ... I mean, not even anyone to compete with Premiere. (sigh) If only there were somewhere to find some options to compete with all these Adobe monopoly products...

Pinnacle has a video input device that converts analog video to firewire and iMovie sees it just fine. I just set this up for a friend. The device is just slightly smaller than the mini but I wonder if it could be used.
Movie Box

Regarding my previous comment, Pinnacle has since renamed the AV/DV Deluxe to the MovieBox DV.

Don't get me wrong - there are others out there that are NOT from Pinnacle. But Pinnacle is one of the better companies IMHO - and they've bought out some of the more prevalent competition, like Dazzle.

Please tell me that there was a ton of sarcasm in that statement. There are NUMBEROUS products out there to be analog-to-digital bridges for the exact purpose of transferring old VHS material to DVD.

Pinnacle Studio AV/DV Deluxe is but one of the many.

Actually, owning a supposedly crappy sofwtare card (Pinnacle PCTV Stereo) http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage_n.asp?Produ ct_ID=1480 and a classy PVR-350, I am actually suprised of the results. On a beefy P4 machine , the recordings from the software card look better than those of the Hauppage, which has a lot of 'ghosting' especially on faces. That said, the PVR-350 runs great on a 2400+ sempron, and nothing beats the quality of it's tv-out for replay, especially with GB-PVR http://www.gbpvr.com/

Not sure if this was suggested, but have you tried out the Pinnacle Showcenter? I'm an avid fan, as it's very easy to use/setup. Plus, it plays my Xvid/AC3 Encoded DVD Backups. http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage_n.asp?Produ ct_ID=1491&Langue_ID=7

and am very happy with.
Very small (pack of sgarettes)
Powered through the USB port
Comes with a remote
Sensitive antenna input
Important for the traveller it will do PAL, NTSC, SECAM.
Good software

But so far no luck on Linux...

No, it's pretty obvious that this is something that an application like Commotion has been doing for years. So, three cheers if they can make the technique easy enough for kids to use, but there is nothing ground breaking going on here. And I thought Microsoft R&D was the cutting edge!

Wake me up when Longhorn gets here, so I can rag on that, too.

The SANs system will be a boon to production companies. The biggest issue with working with video is disk space.......you need LOTS of space.....

How do you control the eyeHome from a (or multiple) remote location(s)? Because silly as it seems, that is usually a fairly hard problem to solve elegantly. Using a Wifi laptop/pda as an RC isn't bad but I prefer a Squeezebox personally.

In the Intel vein you have products like the Pinnacle ShowCenter that look nice but have their own disadvantages. You need a box for every TV and you're stuck with the formats the manufacturer wants you to have. If you want DivX or XviD or tomorrows latest format you're out of luck. My solutions handles every codec available for WMP and could be fairly easily adapted for different players (RealMedia) or different platforms (OS/X).

The video cable problem is indeed a problem, but I solved that by using a A/V over CAT5 solution. That's reasonably cheap and the quality is just excellent. Serving multiple TV's is done with a TV modulator (this is all detailed on my site).

My solution has it's own advantages and disadvantages but in my particular situation it's (not surprisingly) the best solution available.

Not counting the PC & TV's I spent all of $769 (1 SliMP3 at $250, 1 Sqzbx at $300, the AV over CAT5 baluns at $120, the TV modulator at $99) and ended up with a unique whole house audio & video system.

Look up some of the available whole house audio systems and you'll see that's not such a bad deal ;-)

Regards,
Xenna

I just setup this solution for myself that covers the issues he had. The ShowCenter can play VOBs, MPGs, Divx/Xvid, plus a few more. Its a nice set top solution that looks nice and is quiet. If you don't to use windows as the back-end server, there are two open source Apache/PHP projects that will replace their Windows back-end application.

Pinnacle ShowCenter

OpenShowCenter

OXYL-BOX

Supported File formats:

Music:
- MP3
- PCM
- All incompatible audio files (E.G. WMA) will be converted to MP3 at 128kb/s

Video:
- MPEG-1
- MPEG-2
- DivX AVI
- Xvid AVI
- All incompatible video files (WMV, DV) will be converted to a ShowCenter compatible format as set by the user.

Image:
- JPEG
- BMP
- PNG and GIF files are converted. All "Portrait" oriented image files are rotated by 90 degrees in the ShowCenter database and scaled to PAL or NTSC video resolution. The pictures are optimized for being displayed on a TV screen and stored as a copy in JPEG format, while preserving the original image file.

Video standards for A/V outputs:
- PAL 25fps full D1 720 x 576 interlaced
- NTSC 29.97fps full DV 720 x 480 interlaced

Inputs and outputs:

The ShowCenter box provides all audio and video outputs for delivering the optimum sound and video quality no matter what A/V equipment is connected. The A/V connectivity is equivalent to a premium quality DVD-player and consists of:

a) SCART 21-pin connector (Europe-only, also known as Peritel connector or Euroconnector) with composite, Y/C, RGB, stereo audio
b) Component video output ("YPrPb", 3 x RCA)
c) Composite video output (1 x RCA)
d) Y/C ("S-Video") video output (1 x Hosiden)
e) Stereo audio outputs ("Line-Out") (2 x RCA)
f) Additional stereo audio output (for separate connection to stereo system) (2 x RCA)
g) Digital audio outputs, both optical (1 x Toslink) and electrical (S/PDIF 1 x RCA)

Further inputs and outputs:

a) Ethernet 100baseT (1 x RJ45) with associated connection/data LEDs
b) PCMCIA slot for Pinnacle-approved wireless network card
c) Power cable connector
d) IR receiver

Why would it need to burn dual-layer DVDs? Using DVD Decrypter and Pinnacle InstantCopy, you can: 1. rip a DVD to ISO or deCSS-ed format; 2. compress the DVD by re-encoding it or removing parts you don't want; and 3. burn the DVD back to disc. This works with any DVD, single-layered or dual-layered, DVD+/-R, +/-RW.

Oh yeah, I guess you could run windows on your AMD XP XXXX+ and use Windows Movie Maker...not!

No, maybe not. Ya see, Windows Movie Maker is the 'Notepad' of movie editing on Windows.

But you could use Magix video deLuxe PLUS, Magix Movie Edit Pro 2004, Sony Screenblast Movie Studio, Ulead Videostudio, Pinnacle Studio, Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator ...

"Especially watch out for via chipsets as the RTX100 won't work on those at all."

Which is why I went with this. It's not a Matrox and it only runs under windows, but it does get the job done.

"A lot of hardware will never have drivers for anything other than Windows. Is it a "waste of time" to let people use this hardware on their Linux machines?"

Especially this piece of hardware. And yes I and others have asked.

So if this becomes mainstream, will software like DVD-X-Copy and Pinnacle Instant Copy become useless? If you can backup your movies on Dual-Layer discs, then all you need is DeCSS and regular DVD/CD burning software.

There are thre software packages currently available to copy a full DVD9 disc to DVD5. All three will resample the video to fit on a single layer recordable DVD.

DVD2One is incredible fast, and gives the option of 'Movie Only' stripping menus and extras, or 'Entire Disc'. It can process an entire 8GB DVD in about 25 minutes on my 1.4 GHz T-bird.

DVD 95 Copy will preseve entire disc stucture (resampling video and giving option of discarding unwanted audio) Takes about 2-3 hours to process.

Pinnacle Instant Copy will also preserve entire disc. Takes about 4 hours to process disc.

Hope this helps,
.:diatonic:.

Well I have the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe which works well in Windows. However the analog portion doesn't work under Linux. I believe that the Dazzle is the same way. With that being said with my BT848 TV Tuner card & GF3 w/TV out and lots of HD space, I'm ready to convert a large (over a 100) VHS tapes to CDR using maybe Mpeg-4. There's a lot of encoding/decoding solutions for Linux, but their doesn't seem be be any filtering/video processing software for Linux. You know cleaning up video. Correcting defects, etc.

" Ever heard of something like movie-editing? You can get huge files really fast."

Heard of it. Live it. That's why the original stays on the source machine (DV), while a lower quality (preview) is loaded into the computer doing the editing. Once editing is done then the software pulls the higher quality originals from the source and assemble and process appropriately. Outputting in format desired. Keeps file size managable.

I believe the trademark is owned by Pinnacle Systems, for its digital video storage systems. While Pinnacle is big enough to fight back, I doubt that Microsoft would want to pick on a company that is making big inroads with MS operating systems in the video industry (most Pinnacle products run on Windows, even in the professional/broadcast space).

TiVo's lack of support for standard-definition digital cable is no big deal, but HDTV is another matter.

Digital SDTV is a maximum of 720x480 (or 704x486 (704=22x32) or something else close) which is similar to VGA's 640x480 but the pixels are narrower than they are tall. PAL digital SDTV is 720x540 with almost-square pixels.

This maximum is the same as DVD and also known as CCIR-601. However, digital cable might have lower resolution to save bandwidth. TCTI/AT&T/NuevoComcast uses 352x486 on most channels on the HITS satellite and it's likely the content is softened (low-pass filtered) a bit before real-time-encoding.

Therefore, re-digitizing and re-encoding the standard-def analog stream coming out of your digital cable set-top box is only moderately horrible. Motion artifacts will be a bigger issue than resolution because TiVo encodes in real time so can't go back & choose keyframes more wisely later. It also costs 1/100th of the encoders used by HITS and DirectTV do.

Real-time-encoding of SDTV by a sub-$500 box is a reasonable thing in 2003. HDTV is another matter and the digital cable boxes I know of (Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 2000HD) only have analog video outputs (YCrCb component for HD). Pinnacle Systems makes a system where the HD option alone is $1000. HD on PCs now is where SD was 10 years ago- intra-frame (Motion-JPEG/DV-style) or no compression, using oodles of disk space (even with today's 180GB drives). Uncompressed HD @ 1920x1080x30x12bpp (4:2:0) is 90 megabytes per second. That means burning through a 180GB hard drive in about 1/2 hour.

As the poster suggests, you want to get the MPEG-2 stream & just slap it on a disk instead of trying to recompress. For Over-the-Air HDTV broadcasts, this should be no problem. For cable systems that keep OTA in 8VSB...

(something boxes were required to do a few years ago even if the provider doesn't support it- they have to pass through 8VSB with enough bandwidth/low enough noise that a receiver can still demodulate&decode it)

an 8VSB-in-only HDTV PVR would work. Many systems are demodulating 8VSB and re-modulating at QAM64. If they also apply their conditional access (CA), it gets really sticky.

The fact that there aren't digital-cable-ready TVs like there were(are) cable-ready TVs is something the industry, their Cable Labs group and the FCC have been working on for years. The biggest obstacle is Scientific-Atlanta and General Instrument (now Motorola)'s incompatible systems in the US. It's possible to run both on a single network under an agreement called Harmony, but they still see CA as the crown jewels.

POD (point-of-deployment CA, rented from the cable company) was supposed to solve that by putting all the proprietary stuff in a PCMCIA-like card & making the boxes or TV's or VCRs or PVRs use standard interfaces.

Google terms: PowerKEY (SA's system), DigiCipher (Motorola's), Conditional Access.

Other sources: Multichannel News and Communications Engineering and Design (CED) Magazine

TiVo's lack of support for standard-definition digital cable is no big deal, but HDTV is another matter.

Digital SDTV is a maximum of 720x480 (or 704x486 (704=22x32) or something else close) which is similar to VGA's 640x480 but the pixels are narrower than they are tall. PAL digital SDTV is 720x540 with almost-square pixels.

This maximum is the same as DVD and also known as CCIR-601. However, digital cable might have lower resolution to save bandwidth. TCTI/AT&T/NuevoComcast uses 352x486 on most channels on the HITS satellite and it's likely the content is softened (low-pass filtered) a bit before real-time-encoding.

Therefore, re-digitizing and re-encoding the standard-def analog stream coming out of your digital cable set-top box is only moderately horrible. Motion artifacts will be a bigger issue than resolution because TiVo encodes in real time so can't go back & choose keyframes more wisely later. It also costs 1/100th of the encoders used by HITS and DirectTV do.

Real-time-encoding of SDTV by a sub-$500 box is a reasonable thing in 2003. HDTV is another matter and the digital cable boxes I know of (Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 2000HD) only have analog video outputs (YCrCb component for HD). Pinnacle Systems makes a system where the HD option alone is $1000. HD on PCs now is where SD was 10 years ago- intra-frame (Motion-JPEG/DV-style) or no compression, using oodles of disk space (even with today's 180GB drives). Uncompressed HD @ 1920x1080x30x12bpp (4:2:0) is 90 megabytes per second. That means burning through a 180GB hard drive in about 1/2 hour.

As the poster suggests, you want to get the MPEG-2 stream & just slap it on a disk instead of trying to recompress. For Over-the-Air HDTV broadcasts, this should be no problem. For cable systems that keep OTA in 8VSB...

(something boxes were required to do a few years ago even if the provider doesn't support it- they have to pass through 8VSB with enough bandwidth/low enough noise that a receiver can still demodulate&decode it)

an 8VSB-in-only HDTV PVR would work. Many systems are demodulating 8VSB and re-modulating at QAM64. If they also apply their conditional access (CA), it gets really sticky.

The fact that there aren't digital-cable-ready TVs like there were(are) cable-ready TVs is something the industry, their Cable Labs group and the FCC have been working on for years. The biggest obstacle is Scientific-Atlanta and General Instrument (now Motorola)'s incompatible systems in the US. It's possible to run both on a single network under an agreement called Harmony, but they still see CA as the crown jewels.

POD (point-of-deployment CA, rented from the cable company) was supposed to solve that by putting all the proprietary stuff in a PCMCIA-like card & making the boxes or TV's or VCRs or PVRs use standard interfaces.

Google terms: PowerKEY (SA's system), DigiCipher (Motorola's), Conditional Access.

Other sources: Multichannel News and Communications Engineering and Design (CED) Magazine

So how much does this DV500 card cost, and - if reasonable - where can one get it.

Pinnacle Systems

There is no Macrovision for component analog HDTV.

The broadcast flag is for over-the-air (OTA) HDTV broadcasts. It's a proposal by the BPDG (broadcast protection discussion group) subgroup of the CPTWG (content protection technical working group, pronounced see-pee-twig).

The analog hole is the component video connection between an HDTV "receiver" (8VSB for OTA, satellite (?mod) or QAM64 for cable demods + MPEG-2 decoder) and an HDTV "monitor." The concern is that "premium content" (monopolized by Eisner's minions) can be recorded by products like the Cinewave HD, DivX;-)'d and uploaded to Morpheus.

The "consumer" HDTV cards for PCs from Hauppage have the 8VSB receiver/demod built-in & no component inputs, but sub-$200 HD analog-component-in cards are probable given time.

The "analog hole" problem is that even with (relatively) closed networks (cable & satellite) where the net controls the box, the box needs to connect to the TV (monitor). DVI + HDCP or IEEE 1394 + DTCP protection is the answer for new sets, but they don't want to obsolete existing HDTV monitors, so the compromise is that selected content will only be converted to unprotected analog at 1/4 resolution (960x540 instead of 1920x1080). The AV Science Forum people are NOT happy about this.

The EFF has a nice section on DRM for HDTV. There's a presentation of a proposal there that seems to say that broadcast protection would entail a flag or watermark that "compliant equipment" would obey if present.

OTA doesn't have the option of replacing everyone's tuners or simply blocking them out of premium content, so I guess we'd all better buy non-compliant receivers now! There might be law passed in the vein of SSSCA to require compliant receivers in the future, but the CE mfgs aren't fighting this the way the IT mfgs are fighting SSSCA, so it might go down as a voluntary program.

(OTA is a.k.a. "digital terrestrial" to separate it from direct digital broadcast satellite)

-
copyright isn't ownership: it's monopoly control of distribution

I read the patent abstract. They've described a subset of a video server. Video servers in the professional broadcast market predate the patent filing by at least five years. For example, the HP (now Pinnacle) MediaStream video servers or the Tektronics (now GVG) Profile video disk recorders both constitute prior art for this Completely Bogus Patent.

I don't see anything in this patent which was not thought of, implemented, and shipped to customers by HP and Tek prior to the filing of this patent. I'm amazed that the Patent Office did such a remarkable bad job at checking the prior art in this case.

Great idea, though. I've wanted that for some time. It's great for people who create short animation or commercial work, and need to distribute cheap copies. No more dealing with the VHS duplication facility and suffering the generation loss. I hope someone does this.

If you are looking for a Portable Video Encoder look at these turnkey solutions from Pinnacle Systems (Great Industry Reputation, I Love my NITRO system).

Why build it when you can buy the whole thing for less money. Granted you are locked into Windows and a proprietary hardware combination, but thats pretty much the nature of video.... I have a FAST VMSTUDIO that we still use, the capture card is almost 8 years old.

Check out Pinnacle's Studio DC10+ for (US) $100. Hardware based MPEG and there's a linux driver available (which I have not used yet).

With Win98SE it works great; at the highest NTSC rates (S-VHS 29.997 frames) it takes less then %25 of a 700MHz Duron while churning out ~6MBs a sec of video.

I'm going to use AVI_IO(seperate $25 shareware package) with it to turn my box into a digital VCR.

DVD-R Burner. Pioneer makes a DVD-R drive (Model DVR-S201) which according to spec will write a DVD-R which is readable in a Consumer DVD player. It also will support "Cutting Master Format" which will (in theory) allow you to burn a DVD and send it off to be pressed into "real" DVD's. About $5k.

Mastering Software and Capture Hardware. There's a whole bunch of options. I was looking at the stuff from Pinnacle Systems. I was more specifically looking at the DV500 product. It runs about $1000, but includes not only a Video codec (ala capture card), but also all the software you need to get going with DVD production. There are also other options, but this seemed to be the best value.

The best store I located on the net which has all of the above, plus more is videoguys.com

Good Luck!

DVD-R Burner. Pioneer makes a DVD-R drive (Model DVR-S201) which according to spec will write a DVD-R which is readable in a Consumer DVD player. It also will support "Cutting Master Format" which will (in theory) allow you to burn a DVD and send it off to be pressed into "real" DVD's. About $5k.

Mastering Software and Capture Hardware. There's a whole bunch of options. I was looking at the stuff from Pinnacle Systems. I was more specifically looking at the DV500 product. It runs about $1000, but includes not only a Video codec (ala capture card), but also all the software you need to get going with DVD production. There are also other options, but this seemed to be the best value.

The best store I located on the net which has all of the above, plus more is videoguys.com

Good Luck!

If I was building a system from scratch for this, I would go with the Adaptec 8945 FireWire/SCSI controller (one card, both interfaces), and it comes with the Adobe Premire capture plug in. I have just started using Premire and it is great (although the price is high).

For disk space, 1 hour of captured DV take about 13GB, so if you want to capture edit, and then render the output video, look at 30GB of fast disk (will need to sustain about 3.5MB/sec of data transfer). ATA-33 will work with DMA transfer turned on (under Win98), but for best results, you are going to want ATA-66 (controller and disks) or Ultra SCSI (Ultra-Wide and LVD are good, but again, get ready to spend some cash).

On the Linix front, there is dvgrab and Broadcast 2000 (as already mentioned) but one thing still lacking is a DV CODEC so that the AVI's built by dvgrab can be view in Linix.

And Matrox today announced a Real-Time DV Editing PCI card for the Macinotosh G4. Here's that press release.

And then Pinnacle Systems and Apple announced they are bring Uncompressed High-Definition Video to the Mac. Here's that press release.

I use a fairly inexpensive product called StudioDV from Pinnacle Systems.

I have mixed feeling about this product. I like the interface and it's very easy to use, but this program is hell to setup.

First, it requires Windows 98 SE. Yes, not only Win98 but it has to be SE. Some people have made it work with 98 and the latests drivers, but a lot of us couldn't.

Secondly, Windows 98 has a 2 Gig file size limit. They somehow work around this and make it 4 Gigs. 4 Gigs is the equivalent of about 18 minutes of DV. To get around this, they have a nice feature to capture in "preview" quality and then when you output to tape it recaptures. But man, it's really annoying to have that file size limit.

Lastly, Windows 98 is just the plain OS for this type of work. I have a fairly decent machine (128 MEGS of RAM, 400 PII, 20Gig disk UDMA, 13 Gig disk, TNT card, etc) and I have problems capturing video. Pinnacle recommeds that you run nothing while capturing video. They even go as far as to recommend turning off CD autoplay , powersave, networking, and even the little time app that runs in the taskbar.

With some of these conditions, they should have developed their own OS just tailored to the needs of their app.

I don't know about MacOS, but I've heard good reviews of the DV magazines about editing on G3s. And yes, stay away from the iMacs, plus the program that comes with the DV iMac has severe limitations and it's a pain to use.

I use a fairly inexpensive product called StudioDV from Pinnacle Systems.

I have mixed feeling about this product. I like the interface and it's very easy to use, but this program is hell to setup.

First, it requires Windows 98 SE. Yes, not only Win98 but it has to be SE. Some people have made it work with 98 and the latests drivers, but a lot of us couldn't.

Secondly, Windows 98 has a 2 Gig file size limit. They somehow work around this and make it 4 Gigs. 4 Gigs is the equivalent of about 18 minutes of DV. To get around this, they have a nice feature to capture in "preview" quality and then when you output to tape it recaptures. But man, it's really annoying to have that file size limit.

Lastly, Windows 98 is just the plain OS for this type of work. I have a fairly decent machine (128 MEGS of RAM, 400 PII, 20Gig disk UDMA, 13 Gig disk, TNT card, etc) and I have problems capturing video. Pinnacle recommeds that you run nothing while capturing video. They even go as far as to recommend turning off CD autoplay , powersave, networking, and even the little time app that runs in the taskbar.

With some of these conditions, they should have developed their own OS just tailored to the needs of their app.

I don't know about MacOS, but I've heard good reviews of the DV magazines about editing on G3s. And yes, stay away from the iMacs, plus the program that comes with the DV iMac has severe limitations and it's a pain to use.