Dude, I'm sorry, I should have given you a link to the MotionJPEG Codec instead of just telling you the name of it. PicVideo.com is a porn site. *just discovered that*
You can capture at 640 by 480 in software if you use PicVideo's 'Motion JPEG' codec. You have to pay for it, but it's cheap. They have a freebie watermarked version you can play with to figure out if it's interesting to you or not.
If you're willing to add a second step to the process, you can use Virtual Dub in combination with a plugin called SmartBob which will expand 30fps interlaced video to 60 fps.AVI. I've been trying to figure out a way to automate that process, but the problem I have now is that it doesn't detect even or odd fields, so it requires user intervention to capture one show. *blah*
However, as the other guy pointed out, 320 by 240 is fine. The only real advantage to 640 by 480 is that the compression artifacts get smaller. But that's your call.
If you want to get the best TV experience, you should consider the 60fps bit I mentioned. Although I wish there was a viewer that'd play back interlaced video at 60 fps. The PicVideo codec encodes interlaced fields into individual frames, so the hard part's already done.
"Double bonus: maybe the gov't will listen to him and switch to Linux?!?"
I'm all supportive of efforts to make Linux more mainstream, however the reason that it's not has nothing to do with MS being evil. Despite popular belief, Windows (particularly 2000) does what it needs to, and it has awesome software support to boot. Is it a security risk? Yes. Is it a problem to support? Yes. Would Linux kick it's but given a chance? Perhaps.
There is a fear of Linux out there. It can be a pain in the but to get working when you have no idea how it works. The Gov't or any big company is going to require that Linux is as easy to get running as Windows. Let's define 'easy' before the flames start rolling in: If a normal user running Linux cannot trade Word Documents back and forth between Windows user, it's not easy to use. See my point?
I'm not bashing Linux here, nor am I pro Microsoft, I'm saying that what is inhibiting it from being more mainstream is that the mainstream is already defined, and it'll have to play nicely with it.
I use a Pentium 2 400 with 128 meg of RAM. OS: Windows 2000. Capture Card: Hauppage WinTV PCI. Capturing Software Snapstream (www.snapstream.com.)
The way it works is Snapstream has a nice scheduler (plus a freebie version to try it out) that records from the capture card to Windows Media format. The compression is done in real time so once it's finished, it indexes the file and then it's ready for the next one.
Quality? Well, for me, I tweaked it to capture at 330kbits a second at a resolution of 320 by 240. It's very watchable, but some may think the quality's too low. Personally, I think it's perfectly acceptable considering I can get 4 hours a CD.
I have a TV with VGA input on it that the computer is hooked up to, and I use it to watch the shows full screen. It's not half bad once you get used to it.:)
Could you do it with your celeron? Probably. You can find out before you spend any money on it, just go to snapstream.com and download their test version. Worst case scenario is you buy a TV card for $50 at Best Buy.
"And Term 2C says that if someone even alleges you are infringing on copyright, you can be shut down with no notice, no recourse, and there's nothing you can do about it--the agreement indemnifies them completely."
In the old days, you were innocent until proven guilty. Anybody remember that?
The advantage to PC based TiVo functionality is that you can archive your shows.
The main reason I built a PVR out of an old PC is because I want to watch shows like Farscape from the beginning. With gigs of storage and MPEG 4 compression, you can keep recording eps until the show loops back around. Then you can start watching.
It's a different market from the 'I want to catch impulse shows', which Tivo excels at.
To put it another way, I could use both my PC and my TV and not pick one over the other.
That's nice and all, but the need for a quad processor game machine died when 3D accellerated games came out. Now the cards are the bottleneck, not the processor.
"Right... because obviously Cox, AT&T, Comcast, et. al. were completely unaware until they read about it on news.com and Slashdot."
Why solve a problem when it's not a problem? Now it's a problem. Now they'll have to solve it.
Re:Crappy moderation...
on
What Free Cable?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Hmm I thoguht I recognized your foul stench the moment I came to the board.:P
Crappy moderation...
on
What Free Cable?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I thought that the parent post made an interesting point. Now that it's extremely public how to do this, the cable companies will be forced to crack down on it.
Thanks a lot to news.com for posting this story. Give AT&T more reason to tighten their grips!
Does this mean I can have digital and analog?
on
What Free Cable?
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· Score: 2
AT&T really wants me to get Digital Cable, but the problem is I don't have a lot of time to watch it. I rely on a home-brew PVR to catch the shows I want to watch. Until I can do this on Digital Cable, I can't put the money into it because I can't watch it.
However, this may provide an opportunity to have both digital and analog cable. As long as I can still capture the stuff off the analog cable, Digital Cable may become something worth experimenting with. Heck, I may even find a way to wire a remote up to my computer to use it.
Anybody think I'll have luck with having both analog and digital cable?
*thinks it'd be heaps easier if AT&T would just have a PVR built to use the Digital Signal.*
It seems like there's a trend to post "That's nothing new..." posts in response to every article. I just assumed this was another one of those trolls...
Yah, I've seen that too, and you're right. I think what happens is people want strange new stuff to read on Slashdot, and they're not getting their craving satisfied. I feel the same way, but I alleviate that by posting comments and reading others.
If it's not news to you, you can turn it into news by discussing it.
In any case, I won't drone on about it. I just feel like some people miss the point simply because they're bored.
"Or even more effective: After each ad, there's a quiz, and you have to get a passing score to go on to the next part of the show. Of course, you can replay the commercial if you have to."
Actually I was thinking about something like this for PC's. Download a show, install it, and you have to answer a few questions like this first. Once you've done that, you've permanently unlocked that episode so you never get bugged for ads again with that particular show.
It may seem annoying at first, but if that means content is free, I say go for it.
It's funny, I got to thinking about how to have valuable ad revenue despite commercial skipping technologies, and it didn't take long to come up with a plausible idea: Trivia contests.
Imagine buying a Cell phone from AT&T, but getting $25 off for being able to answer this question: 'Q. What AT&T plan offers one low rate for any time, any where? A. One rate'
If somebody doesn't know the answer to this, they could go look it up on the net or watch TV with the ads and figure it out.
If somebody does know the answer, then what's the point in pummeling them repeatedly with ads? Annoyance is a big reason that people want to skip the ads. Well, if I'm willing to remember the 'One Rate' plan, then the advertiser's done their job, lets stop bugging me about it until it's interesting to me.
The big advantage of this idea is that it gives people incentive to watch the ads, instead of trying to strap them to their chairs.
Not trying to sound too negative, but I think the more intrusive the ads get, the more people will fight them or just stop watching TV all together.
Scrolling ads would be rather distracting, although a slideshow approach would be more palatable.
I think a better idea would be to offer special deals to people who can answer trivia questions. Imagine getting a free ice cream cone because somebody asked you "Which company makes the Jetta?"
That's a cynical point of view, don't you think? I mean the technology (+audience using it) to record people's viewing habits is rather new. It's a problem we, the connected nation, are going to have to be cautious of over the next few years.
It'd take an extremely over-simplified point of view to say 'oh this happens all the time'.
"If the networks and studios focused on the inevitable evolution of their business instead of attempts to stifle technology, we believe everyone involved would benefit, consumers most of all," the CEO added. "
I'm starting to hear this more and more. I hope that this was an influence in the judge's decision. The simple fact of the matter is that markets change. You can't legally force them to stay put. Doing so will ruin this economy. There is a lot more at stake here than just ad revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I'm sorry, I should have given you a link to the MotionJPEG Codec instead of just telling you the name of it. PicVideo.com is a porn site. *just discovered that*
Here's the link you want:
http://www.jpg.com/video/mjpeg.htm
I apologize for not giving you this link earlier.
You can capture at 640 by 480 in software if you use PicVideo's 'Motion JPEG' codec. You have to pay for it, but it's cheap. They have a freebie watermarked version you can play with to figure out if it's interesting to you or not.
.AVI. I've been trying to figure out a way to automate that process, but the problem I have now is that it doesn't detect even or odd fields, so it requires user intervention to capture one show. *blah*
If you're willing to add a second step to the process, you can use Virtual Dub in combination with a plugin called SmartBob which will expand 30fps interlaced video to 60 fps
However, as the other guy pointed out, 320 by 240 is fine. The only real advantage to 640 by 480 is that the compression artifacts get smaller. But that's your call.
If you want to get the best TV experience, you should consider the 60fps bit I mentioned. Although I wish there was a viewer that'd play back interlaced video at 60 fps. The PicVideo codec encodes interlaced fields into individual frames, so the hard part's already done.
:)
One vote. *G*
"Double bonus: maybe the gov't will listen to him and switch to Linux?!?"
I'm all supportive of efforts to make Linux more mainstream, however the reason that it's not has nothing to do with MS being evil. Despite popular belief, Windows (particularly 2000) does what it needs to, and it has awesome software support to boot. Is it a security risk? Yes. Is it a problem to support? Yes. Would Linux kick it's but given a chance? Perhaps.
There is a fear of Linux out there. It can be a pain in the but to get working when you have no idea how it works. The Gov't or any big company is going to require that Linux is as easy to get running as Windows. Let's define 'easy' before the flames start rolling in: If a normal user running Linux cannot trade Word Documents back and forth between Windows user, it's not easy to use. See my point?
I'm not bashing Linux here, nor am I pro Microsoft, I'm saying that what is inhibiting it from being more mainstream is that the mainstream is already defined, and it'll have to play nicely with it.
Thanks for asking. :)
:)
I use a Pentium 2 400 with 128 meg of RAM. OS: Windows 2000. Capture Card: Hauppage WinTV PCI. Capturing Software Snapstream (www.snapstream.com.)
The way it works is Snapstream has a nice scheduler (plus a freebie version to try it out) that records from the capture card to Windows Media format. The compression is done in real time so once it's finished, it indexes the file and then it's ready for the next one.
Quality? Well, for me, I tweaked it to capture at 330kbits a second at a resolution of 320 by 240. It's very watchable, but some may think the quality's too low. Personally, I think it's perfectly acceptable considering I can get 4 hours a CD.
I have a TV with VGA input on it that the computer is hooked up to, and I use it to watch the shows full screen. It's not half bad once you get used to it.
Could you do it with your celeron? Probably. You can find out before you spend any money on it, just go to snapstream.com and download their test version. Worst case scenario is you buy a TV card for $50 at Best Buy.
"And Term 2C says that if someone even alleges you are infringing on copyright, you can be shut down with no notice, no recourse, and there's nothing you can do about it--the agreement indemnifies them completely."
In the old days, you were innocent until proven guilty. Anybody remember that?
"Even though anyone here can easily purchase TiVo instead, I predict a flood of whiners complaining about ReplayTV"
Exactly! I don't know why you guys don't just go around and spend $500 every time a selfish company makes unreasonable demands!
The advantage to PC based TiVo functionality is that you can archive your shows.
The main reason I built a PVR out of an old PC is because I want to watch shows like Farscape from the beginning. With gigs of storage and MPEG 4 compression, you can keep recording eps until the show loops back around. Then you can start watching.
It's a different market from the 'I want to catch impulse shows', which Tivo excels at.
To put it another way, I could use both my PC and my TV and not pick one over the other.
Curious: Are you referring to the Voodoo 2 cards a while back? If so, I'm pretty sure that type of processing went extinct.
Heh that'd be cool if they still did that though. (Perhaps they do and I'm just unaware of it. heh.)
That's nice and all, but the need for a quad processor game machine died when 3D accellerated games came out. Now the cards are the bottleneck, not the processor.
I gave them a fake address, but they nailed my parents anyway...
"Right... because obviously Cox, AT&T, Comcast, et. al. were completely unaware until they read about it on news.com and Slashdot."
Why solve a problem when it's not a problem? Now it's a problem. Now they'll have to solve it.
Hmm I thoguht I recognized your foul stench the moment I came to the board. :P
I thought that the parent post made an interesting point. Now that it's extremely public how to do this, the cable companies will be forced to crack down on it.
Thanks a lot to news.com for posting this story. Give AT&T more reason to tighten their grips!
AT&T really wants me to get Digital Cable, but the problem is I don't have a lot of time to watch it. I rely on a home-brew PVR to catch the shows I want to watch. Until I can do this on Digital Cable, I can't put the money into it because I can't watch it.
However, this may provide an opportunity to have both digital and analog cable. As long as I can still capture the stuff off the analog cable, Digital Cable may become something worth experimenting with. Heck, I may even find a way to wire a remote up to my computer to use it.
Anybody think I'll have luck with having both analog and digital cable?
*thinks it'd be heaps easier if AT&T would just have a PVR built to use the Digital Signal.*
I see. :)
In all seriousness though, did you get my point?
It seems like there's a trend to post "That's nothing new..." posts in response to every article. I just assumed this was another one of those trolls...
Yah, I've seen that too, and you're right. I think what happens is people want strange new stuff to read on Slashdot, and they're not getting their craving satisfied. I feel the same way, but I alleviate that by posting comments and reading others.
If it's not news to you, you can turn it into news by discussing it.
In any case, I won't drone on about it. I just feel like some people miss the point simply because they're bored.
"Really? I just glance at my watch. "
:oP
Sorry, I forgot there's a segment of the Slashdot population that's adverse to going outside once in a while.
"Or even more effective: After each ad, there's a quiz, and you have to get a passing score to go on to the next part of the show. Of course, you can replay the commercial if you have to."
Actually I was thinking about something like this for PC's. Download a show, install it, and you have to answer a few questions like this first. Once you've done that, you've permanently unlocked that episode so you never get bugged for ads again with that particular show.
It may seem annoying at first, but if that means content is free, I say go for it.
Bullshit. Explain to me how the Universe is the "Largest Computer".
Well, I use the Earth's rotation compared to the sun and make choronological estimates as to when it's lunch time.
It's funny, I got to thinking about how to have valuable ad revenue despite commercial skipping technologies, and it didn't take long to come up with a plausible idea: Trivia contests.
Imagine buying a Cell phone from AT&T, but getting $25 off for being able to answer this question: 'Q. What AT&T plan offers one low rate for any time, any where? A. One rate'
If somebody doesn't know the answer to this, they could go look it up on the net or watch TV with the ads and figure it out.
If somebody does know the answer, then what's the point in pummeling them repeatedly with ads? Annoyance is a big reason that people want to skip the ads. Well, if I'm willing to remember the 'One Rate' plan, then the advertiser's done their job, lets stop bugging me about it until it's interesting to me.
The big advantage of this idea is that it gives people incentive to watch the ads, instead of trying to strap them to their chairs.
Not trying to sound too negative, but I think the more intrusive the ads get, the more people will fight them or just stop watching TV all together.
Scrolling ads would be rather distracting, although a slideshow approach would be more palatable.
I think a better idea would be to offer special deals to people who can answer trivia questions. Imagine getting a free ice cream cone because somebody asked you "Which company makes the Jetta?"
That's a cynical point of view, don't you think? I mean the technology (+audience using it) to record people's viewing habits is rather new. It's a problem we, the connected nation, are going to have to be cautious of over the next few years.
It'd take an extremely over-simplified point of view to say 'oh this happens all the time'.
"If the networks and studios focused on the inevitable evolution of their business instead of attempts to stifle technology, we believe everyone involved would benefit, consumers most of all," the CEO added. "
I'm starting to hear this more and more. I hope that this was an influence in the judge's decision. The simple fact of the matter is that markets change. You can't legally force them to stay put. Doing so will ruin this economy. There is a lot more at stake here than just ad revenue.