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Review: Creative Labs Video Blaster - Digital VCR
"Two weeks ago, I dropped by my Local Frys Electronics to pick up the Creative Labs Video Blaster Digital VCR. I picked up the card for the lovely price of $99. I felt at the time that the days of a PVR was upon me. I hooked it up into my modest system and got started right away. My modest system includes:
- Pentium III 1Ghz System
- 512 MB of PC-133 SDRAM
- 1 40 GB 7200 WD Drive, on ATA-66
- 1 60 GB 7200 Maxtor Drive, on ATA-100
- ATI Radeon VE
- LG 24x CD Burner, on ATA-66
- Running Windows XP Pro
Now, at home, I don't subscribe to any digital video services: I get pretty good reception over an old-fashioned antenna. I primarily wanted the card so I could capture my tape collection of Enterprise episodes to MPEG-2, so I could burn VCDs for my DVD player. I also wanted to begin my trek down the PVR road, and eventually do away with VHS forever.
I spent an evening a couple of days ago, playing with settings on screen-size, capture quality and file sizes. One thing I noticed quite quickly is that the Digital VCR system does not encode directly to MPEG-2. Creative sets up many segment files on your system, each in 32mb blocks, to store your recorded shows and timeshifting buffer. It is essentially a filesystem on top of a filesystem. In order to get the MPEG-2 files out of the Digital VCR, you use a 'File Converter' that they provide in the Creative Menu. The results of this setup is that when you setup the system, you specify how long you want to record (19 hours in my case) and it takes up the appropriate harddrive space (45 GB in my case) for use for future recording. The tool works pretty well overall, even going so far as to create new MPG files every 650 MB. The problem with this is that its possible that your recording could be sliced mid-sentence in your show. The other problem though, didn't occur until last night.
I recorded the episode of Enterprise last night, as well as I had some previous shows of 'Friends' in my 'Saved Shows' menu. After watching the episode again, I pulled up the file convert tool to convert Enterprise to MPG, and flipped onto Live TV, so I could watch the news. Then, the unspeakable happened. Digital VCR froze. I tried to kill it from the Task Manager (which worked perfectly well), but to no avail. There was no killing this app at all. This crash spread like a bad flu across the rest of my system and I was forced to hard reboot. Returning to Windows, I brought up the convert tool to start again, this time not to make the mistake of watching television at the same time. There was only one problem: All of the shows recorded in the last 2 days were wiped out. No data on disk, nothing.
In the end, there were very few positive points that I would give to the Digital VCR product: it just doesn't seem ready for primetime. All in all, the issues I found were as follows:
- Jerky on startup
- Processor Intensive during playing (I'd recommend at least a 1.5 Ghz)
- Menu System is slow
- No Linux Drivers
- Instability in proprietary filesystem
- Mpeg Splitting (what about 700mb CDRs or DVDS)
to just download porn from direct connect, where others have already packaged it for your right hand's enjoyment?
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
1). Colin Powell -- Secretary of State, ex-chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, of Jamaican origin, he has one Jewish ancestor on his father's side. He grew up in a heavily Jewish-populated neighborhood in New York, and speaks Yiddish. The first day of being picked (12/16)
he said he wanted to toughen sanctions on Iraq, and will work to "re-energize the sanctions regime."
2). Richard Perle -- One of Bush's Foreign Policy
Advisors. He is chairman of the Pentagon's Defense
Policy Board. He had worked as Bush's Jewish national security campaign advisor. A very likely Israeli agent, Perle was expelled from Senator Henry Jackson's office in the 1970's after the National Security Agency (NSA) caught him passing Highly-Classified (National Security) documents to the Israeli Embassy. He later worked for the Israeli weapons firm, Soltam.
3). Paul Wolfowitz -- Deputy Defense Secretary, Bush's Jewish foreign policy campaign advisor, close associate of Israeli agent Richard Perle, and reportedly has close ties to the Israeli military.
4). Robert Satloff -- U.S. National Security Council Advisor, Satloff was the executive director of the Israeli lobby's "think tank," Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Many of the Israeli lobby's "experts" come from this front group, like Martin Indyk.
5). Dov Zekheim -- Under Secretary of Defense and
Comptroller. He was Bush's Jewish foreign policy
advisor and reportedly holds Israeli citizenship.
6). Douglas Feith -- Under Secretary of Defense and Policy Advisor at the Pentagon. He is a close
associate of Perle and served as his Special Counsel. Like Perle and the others, Feith is a pro-Israel extremist, who has advocated anti-Arab policies in the past. He is closely associated with the extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America, which even attacks Jews that don't agree with its extremist views. Feith frequently speaks at ZOA conferences. Feith runs a small law firm, Feith and Zell, which only has one International office, in Israel. The majority of their legal work is representing Israeli interests. His firm's own website stated, prior to his appointment, that Feith "represents Israeli Armaments Manufacturer." Feith basically represents the Israeli War Machine.
7). Elliott Abrams -- National Security Council
Advisor. He previously worked at Washington-based
"Think Tank" Ethics and Public Policy Center. During the Reagan Adminstration, Abrams was the Assistant Secretary of State, handling, for the most part, Latin American affairs. He played an important role in the Iran-Contra Scandal, which involved illegally selling U.S. weapons to Iran to fight Iraq, and illegally funding the contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government. He also actively deceived three congressional committees about his involvement and thereby faced felony charges based on his testimony. Abrams pled guilty in 1991 to two misdemeanors and was sentenced to a year's probation and 100 hours of community service. A year later, former President Bush
(Senior) granted Abrams a full pardon. He was one of the more hawkish pro-Israel Jews in the Reagan
Administration's State Department.
8). Marc Grossman -- Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs. He was Director General of the
Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources at the Department of State. Grossman is one of many of the Jewish officials from the Clinton Administration that Bush has promoted to higher posts.
9). Richard Haass -- Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and Ambassador at large. He is also Director of National Security Programs and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He was one of the more hawkish pro-Israel Jews in the first Bush (Sr) Administration who sat on the National Security Council, and who consistently advocates bombing Iraq.
10). Henry Kissinger -- One of many Pentagon Advisors, Kissinger sits on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. For detailed information about Kissinger's evil past, read Seymour Hersch's book. Kissinger had a part in the
Watergate crimes, Southeast Asia mass murders, Chile dictatorship, and more recently served as Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's Advisor. He consistently advocates bombing Iraq. Kissinger is the Ariel Sharon of the U.S.
11). James Schlesinger -- One of many Pentagon
Advisors, Schlesinger also sits on the Pentagon's
Defense Policy Board and is another extremist pro-Israel advisor. He consistently advocates bombing
Iraq.
12). Robert Zoellick -- U.S. Trade Representative, a cabinet-level position. He is also one of the more hawkish pro-Israel Jews in the Bush (Jr) Administration who advocated invading Iraq and occupying a portion of the country in order to set up setting up a Vichy-style puppet government. He consistently advocates bombing Iraq.
13). Mel Sembler -- President of the Export-Import
Bank of the United States. A Prominent Jewish
Republican and Former National Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Export-Import Bank facilitates trade relationships between U.S. businesses and foreign countries, specifically those with financial problems.
14). Ari Fleischer -- Official White House Spokesman for the Bush (Jr) Administration. Prominent in the Jewish community, he reportedly holds Israeli citizenship.
15). Joshua Bolten----Bush's Chief Policy Director, banker and former legislative aide, prominent in the Jewish community.
16). Steve Goldsmith -- Senior Advisor to the
President, and Bush's Jewish domestic policy advisor. He also serves as liaison in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (White House OFBCI) within the Executive Office of the President. He was the former mayor of Indianapolis. He is also friends with Israeli Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert and
often visits Israel to coach mayors on privatization initiatives.
17). Adam Goldman -- White House's Special Liaison to the Jewish Community.
18). Joseph Gildenhorn -- Bush Campaign's Special
Liaison to the Jewish Community. He was the DC finance chairman for the Bush campaign, as well as campaign coordinator, and former ambassador to Switzerland.
19). Christopher Gersten -- Former Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Husband of Labor Secretary, Linda Chavez, and reportedly very pro-Israel. Their children are being raised Jewish.
20). Daniel Saul Goldin -- Head of NASA, National
Aeronautics and Space Administration. A leftover from the Clinton Administration, Golding is frequently praised by the Israeli media as a friend of Israel.
21). Mark Weinberger -- Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury.
22). Samuel Bodman -- Deputy Secretary of Commerce. He was the Chairman and CEO of Cabot Corporation in Boston, Massachusetts.
23). Bonnie Cohen -- Under Secretary of State for
Management.
24). Ruth Davis -- Director of Foreign Service
Institute, who reports to the Office of Under
Secretary for Management. This Office is responsible for training all Department of State staff (including ambassadors).
25). Lincoln Bloomfield -- Assistant Secretary of
State for Political Military Affairs.
26). Jay Lefkowitz -- General Counsel of the Office of Budget and Management.
27). David Frum -- White House speech writer.
Now that Bush has hired these pro-Israel Jewish
lobbyists to the highest positions in the land, has escalated the bombing of Iraq, and already sided with Israel in killing Palestinian civilians, it is obvious that the price of the acheiving the White House involves selling out to the Israeli lobby, much like Clinton, before him.
Beating a penis with a stick is just too painful to think about. It's like posting "hit your cunt with my fist". That's not funny.
Ja sä tahdot vain voittajatyyppiä kannustaa
ja heikot nurkkaan ahdistaa
se voittajatyyppiä tyydyttää
kun saa muita sylkeä ja kivittää
We should be worried about the Protestants in our government, not the Jews.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
There are an abundance of mp3 players, cars portibles, home audio etc. But what I want is an 802.11b mp3 player for my car so I can program it and upload to it from the computer in my house. Is there such a product on the market yet and are there plans for it in the future?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.