For Windows, try WinDV. It dumps the DV stream direct to an AVI file. Most DV capture problems in Windows can be tied to Firewire drivers, particularly in Windows 7. Some machines require the "legacy" IEEE-1394 drivers installed.
There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.
Like anything else, people thought they could make a quick buck doing what seems to be an easy process. Most of these places just hooked up a cheapo VCR to a run of the mill DVD recorder and hit record. The results were awful, over compressed, and filled with video dropouts. To do it right requires time and money, something that isn't going to happen at $10 a tape. Doing it yourself properly requires significant investment in hardware and time to get the capture setup "just right". Even the DIYers (like myself) will tell you that its cheaper to send them out to a qualified transfer service. In my case, I didn't have much of a choice since a few of my tapes were in Betamax format, something many transfer places don't handle.
In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be.
This question came up on Ask Slashdot a few months ago. I'll repeat the list here
Recommended VCRs for transfer: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $200-300
Note: They are a a transfer service, they have first hand experience with these decks. You'll see that everyone else recommends the same decks too.
Recommended capture cards: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $25-50
AGP ATI All-in-Wonder cards can be had for about $30-40 with the required dongles and breakout boxes on ebay. Look for a decent Prescott P4 with an AGP slot at the thrift store or scrapper for your capture box. The cards require Windows XP as there is no official support in Vista/7. If you want to capture on your Windows 7 rig, try and find the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB. It has working drivers, and captures clean video with no AGC issues.
External TBC: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... $150-200
Used to keep capture cards happy. Many capture devices are sensitive to unstable video signals found on VHS tapes and either completely drop frames, or falsely flag the video as having Macrovision.
You can optionally pick up things like a proc-amp ($150-200 for a decent one) for correcting video levels. For software, capture with VirtualDub. For compressing video to MPEG-2, one of the better commercial codecs is MainConcept, although most go with TMPGEnc or open source codecs (HC-Enc, etc.). For DVD mastering, the old ULead DVD Workshop 2.0 does a great job.
Along with Lagarith and to a lesser extent, UT Video. All of them are open source (so you can implement them on the platform of your choice in the future), lossless, and support 4:2:2 chroma subsampling.
If your source tapes do not require special handling (water damage, mold, etc), these guys can handle it and the prices are reasonable: http://www.digitalfaq.com/serv...
They'll output to whatever format you specify, including the above codecs. Any decent place should. If the places you looked at are limited to DV, that is a sure sign they are using analog to firewire bridges. With HuffYUV, you can fit one hour of video in roughly 25GB. In the age of TB sized hard drives, that is nothing. So space shouldn't be an excuse, particularly if the customer sends in a blank external HD for the final product.
Most smartphones have a pretty high unsubsidized price tag. If you have a subsidized phone under contract, the insurance is a pretty good deal if your phone goes for a swim.
I don't think he realizes that he is dealing with the insurance carrier, and not the cell phone provider. The store stock he saw and the insurance carrier's stock are two separate inventories owned by separate entities. If I have to make a claim on accidental damage on my phone, I deal strictly with the insurance provider (Asurion). My provider could care less, all they did was offer the policy and handle the premium deduction on the monthly bill.
I've seen commercial programs actually do this to support PDF report generation. They just leverage the existing code they have for printing reports and redirect it to a virtual printer. I think it was the Amyuni libraries which are clearly closed source. One thing I can say is that a virtual printer that directly generates PDF files from the GDI output (we're talking Windows here) tends to create cleaner output files (smaller size, less rendering errors) than the Postscript printer output to PDF route.
Adobe pushes PDF as a method of data collection. People make fancy PDF forms and e-mail them out. Inside of the form is a button that says "when complete, click here to submit form" which attaches the filled out form to an e-mail and sends it back to the publisher. From there, folks somehow extract the fields from the file and dump it into a database, which seems like a messy and complicated process. Honestly a web form would be easier to implement in many cases.
Since 2011, TVs sold in the US are required to have an EnergyGuide label detailing power use. What made 55" TVs popular is the lighter weight of flat panel displays. 32" CRTs were 200+lbs and took up a ton of room, when the average 50" LCD is less than 100lbs and mounts on the wall.
Like any other form of automation, its an attempt to cut costs by eliminating workers. The millennial thing is just smoke and mirrors to play it up as a positive change.
It took a while for the right machine to come up for sale, but it was worth it. I have been wanting a Video Toaster setup for a good 15 years at that point! One thing potential buyers should be mindful of, get the machine with a mouse and keyboard! Both sell for quite a bit more than the average PS/2 equivalent and the adapters to use USB or PS/2 devices aren't much cheaper.
The A2000 was built to be an upgradable platform in Commodore's eyes. It was pretty clear that their R&D was limited, so they created an expandable base machine that could be kept on the market for a long time (1987 to at least 1991ish). Hence the creation of the Amiga 2500 (A2000 with CPU cards) late in the machine's life.
Amiga 4000s are being killed off by leaking batteries and capacitors. Finding a working one is very difficult, particularly here in the US. A working A4000 (ex: it boots to kickstart screen) goes for about $300 minimum here and will require some work to get to 100% functionality.
The A3000 came another ~2 years later -- was a little late to the party -- and delivered in a number of areas, but perhaps tellingly, many professionals would stick with the A2000 + 68030 accelerator boards. Accelerators from the leading company GVP were stable and much faster than initial A3000s, beyond which many video/CGI orientated cards would not initially fit in the A3000. That people moved the A3000 hardware to third-party cases is perhaps saying a lot about expandibility vs sexy cases.
Newtek didn't seem to ship any turnkey Toaster workstations based on the Amiga 3000. They kept building systems based on A2500 machines until the Toaster 4000 card was released. The lack of slots in the 3000 was a problem, since they were usually crammed full of TBC cards. There was nothing great about the A3000 case, but it was way nicer than the joke of a case that the Amiga 4000 desktop came in. Taking that thing apart is.... ugh.
Those Socket AM1s (and Bay Trail Atoms) easily outperform Netburst machines and use a fraction of the power. The power savings alone would pay off the cost of the new rig in a short period of time!
aka, NAVTEQ maps. At one point just about every online map provider was using their data, but have since moved away (Mapquest went to TomTom/Teleatlas and Google went in-house).
Many of the Bay Trail tablets come with less than 4GB of RAM and aren't upgradable. Running x64 on them would be just a waste of memory and flash storage.
Having the ability to ride the nations' only electric interstate train all the way from South Bend, Indiana to Millennium Station in the heart of downtown Chicago for $22 round trip - I can't wait for the museum to open!
There are other electric interstate trains in the US.
Its a shame that none of the major SOHO NAS vendors (Synology, Drobo, etc) use check summing file systems. They seem to be sticking with things like ext4 instead of ZFS.
NTFS has received a few non-backward compatible revisions over the years. The last big update was with Windows 2000. What was evil about it was Win2k would silently upgrade the file system on mounted drives, rendering them unreadable on machines running older versions of Windows NT (NT4 SP4 was the first to add NTFS5 read/write support).
Slashdot Mirror
For Windows, try WinDV. It dumps the DV stream direct to an AVI file. Most DV capture problems in Windows can be tied to Firewire drivers, particularly in Windows 7. Some machines require the "legacy" IEEE-1394 drivers installed.
There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.
Like anything else, people thought they could make a quick buck doing what seems to be an easy process. Most of these places just hooked up a cheapo VCR to a run of the mill DVD recorder and hit record. The results were awful, over compressed, and filled with video dropouts. To do it right requires time and money, something that isn't going to happen at $10 a tape. Doing it yourself properly requires significant investment in hardware and time to get the capture setup "just right". Even the DIYers (like myself) will tell you that its cheaper to send them out to a qualified transfer service. In my case, I didn't have much of a choice since a few of my tapes were in Betamax format, something many transfer places don't handle.
In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be.
This question came up on Ask Slashdot a few months ago. I'll repeat the list here
Recommended VCRs for transfer: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $200-300
Note: They are a a transfer service, they have first hand experience with these decks. You'll see that everyone else recommends the same decks too.
Recommended capture cards: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... Budget: $25-50
AGP ATI All-in-Wonder cards can be had for about $30-40 with the required dongles and breakout boxes on ebay. Look for a decent Prescott P4 with an AGP slot at the thrift store or scrapper for your capture box. The cards require Windows XP as there is no official support in Vista/7. If you want to capture on your Windows 7 rig, try and find the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB. It has working drivers, and captures clean video with no AGC issues.
External TBC: http://www.digitalfaq.com/foru... $150-200
Used to keep capture cards happy. Many capture devices are sensitive to unstable video signals found on VHS tapes and either completely drop frames, or falsely flag the video as having Macrovision.
You can optionally pick up things like a proc-amp ($150-200 for a decent one) for correcting video levels. For software, capture with VirtualDub. For compressing video to MPEG-2, one of the better commercial codecs is MainConcept, although most go with TMPGEnc or open source codecs (HC-Enc, etc.). For DVD mastering, the old ULead DVD Workshop 2.0 does a great job.
Along with Lagarith and to a lesser extent, UT Video. All of them are open source (so you can implement them on the platform of your choice in the future), lossless, and support 4:2:2 chroma subsampling.
If your source tapes do not require special handling (water damage, mold, etc), these guys can handle it and the prices are reasonable: http://www.digitalfaq.com/serv...
They'll output to whatever format you specify, including the above codecs. Any decent place should. If the places you looked at are limited to DV, that is a sure sign they are using analog to firewire bridges. With HuffYUV, you can fit one hour of video in roughly 25GB. In the age of TB sized hard drives, that is nothing. So space shouldn't be an excuse, particularly if the customer sends in a blank external HD for the final product.
While in college, I saw a frighting amount of CS majors that didn't know how to program. Those folks later graduated with a degree.
Most smartphones have a pretty high unsubsidized price tag. If you have a subsidized phone under contract, the insurance is a pretty good deal if your phone goes for a swim.
I don't think he realizes that he is dealing with the insurance carrier, and not the cell phone provider. The store stock he saw and the insurance carrier's stock are two separate inventories owned by separate entities. If I have to make a claim on accidental damage on my phone, I deal strictly with the insurance provider (Asurion). My provider could care less, all they did was offer the policy and handle the premium deduction on the monthly bill.
You can buy such a computer direct from Microsoft. They call it Microsoft Signature.
I've seen commercial programs actually do this to support PDF report generation. They just leverage the existing code they have for printing reports and redirect it to a virtual printer. I think it was the Amyuni libraries which are clearly closed source. One thing I can say is that a virtual printer that directly generates PDF files from the GDI output (we're talking Windows here) tends to create cleaner output files (smaller size, less rendering errors) than the Postscript printer output to PDF route.
Adobe pushes PDF as a method of data collection. People make fancy PDF forms and e-mail them out. Inside of the form is a button that says "when complete, click here to submit form" which attaches the filled out form to an e-mail and sends it back to the publisher. From there, folks somehow extract the fields from the file and dump it into a database, which seems like a messy and complicated process. Honestly a web form would be easier to implement in many cases.
Since 2011, TVs sold in the US are required to have an EnergyGuide label detailing power use. What made 55" TVs popular is the lighter weight of flat panel displays. 32" CRTs were 200+lbs and took up a ton of room, when the average 50" LCD is less than 100lbs and mounts on the wall.
Funny how their most lauded products are the one they were trying to do away with in the design of Windows 8's UI.
Like any other form of automation, its an attempt to cut costs by eliminating workers. The millennial thing is just smoke and mirrors to play it up as a positive change.
and of course I re-read this and realize they meant also changing a webcam or keyboard to be malicious. Man I shouldn't post before my morning coffee.
Let them try reprogramming a Model M keyboard. There is one perk to legacy PS/2 ports, they are secure!
That is basically what I landed up doing. I got one that was free of battery acid, but badly needed a recap (had weak audio output).
Initial delivery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
All fixed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
It took a while for the right machine to come up for sale, but it was worth it. I have been wanting a Video Toaster setup for a good 15 years at that point! One thing potential buyers should be mindful of, get the machine with a mouse and keyboard! Both sell for quite a bit more than the average PS/2 equivalent and the adapters to use USB or PS/2 devices aren't much cheaper.
The A2000 was built to be an upgradable platform in Commodore's eyes. It was pretty clear that their R&D was limited, so they created an expandable base machine that could be kept on the market for a long time (1987 to at least 1991ish). Hence the creation of the Amiga 2500 (A2000 with CPU cards) late in the machine's life.
Amiga 4000s are being killed off by leaking batteries and capacitors. Finding a working one is very difficult, particularly here in the US. A working A4000 (ex: it boots to kickstart screen) goes for about $300 minimum here and will require some work to get to 100% functionality.
The A3000 came another ~2 years later -- was a little late to the party -- and delivered in a number of areas, but perhaps tellingly, many professionals would stick with the A2000 + 68030 accelerator boards. Accelerators from the leading company GVP were stable and much faster than initial A3000s, beyond which many video/CGI orientated cards would not initially fit in the A3000. That people moved the A3000 hardware to third-party cases is perhaps saying a lot about expandibility vs sexy cases.
Newtek didn't seem to ship any turnkey Toaster workstations based on the Amiga 3000. They kept building systems based on A2500 machines until the Toaster 4000 card was released. The lack of slots in the 3000 was a problem, since they were usually crammed full of TBC cards. There was nothing great about the A3000 case, but it was way nicer than the joke of a case that the Amiga 4000 desktop came in. Taking that thing apart is.... ugh.
Have you tried any of the new Bay Trail Atom models?
Those Socket AM1s (and Bay Trail Atoms) easily outperform Netburst machines and use a fraction of the power. The power savings alone would pay off the cost of the new rig in a short period of time!
Verizon does exactly that with FiOS in some MDU installs. They run fiber to the wire closet, and the runs to the units are VDSL2.
aka, NAVTEQ maps. At one point just about every online map provider was using their data, but have since moved away (Mapquest went to TomTom/Teleatlas and Google went in-house).
Many of the Bay Trail tablets come with less than 4GB of RAM and aren't upgradable. Running x64 on them would be just a waste of memory and flash storage.
Having the ability to ride the nations' only electric interstate train all the way from South Bend, Indiana to Millennium Station in the heart of downtown Chicago for $22 round trip - I can't wait for the museum to open!
There are other electric interstate trains in the US.
Its a shame that none of the major SOHO NAS vendors (Synology, Drobo, etc) use check summing file systems. They seem to be sticking with things like ext4 instead of ZFS.
NTFS has received a few non-backward compatible revisions over the years. The last big update was with Windows 2000. What was evil about it was Win2k would silently upgrade the file system on mounted drives, rendering them unreadable on machines running older versions of Windows NT (NT4 SP4 was the first to add NTFS5 read/write support).