Peter's Blog

I was researching video playback on Linux and came across miro which is kinda like a video podcast application. It can be set up to download video from various Internet sources. It can also scan your local hard disk for videos to play.

When I installed it I tried it on a pctv rcording it locked up because I had been messing with mencoder command line options and broken the avi files (trying to poke the fourcc code to something that firefox would play directly: didn't work). After it locked up I forgot about it for a while.

This morning I fired it up again and found that it was able to play my latest recordings quite nicely. Then I found a Linux screen cast that was quite infomative and a whole load of videos about rails (railscasts) on interesting subjects.

There was a section on HD film trailers to download so I tried the one for the new star trek film.

O.M.G.

I have avoided HD as I don't have time to watch anything decent so it's not worth the expense upgrading everywhere. I was watching on a 42" plasma and it was most impressive, the quality was noticably better than the cbeebies stuff that this tv normally shows.

To sum up, miro looks like it will be my video playback application of choice. It is a free application that I installed from an ubuntu repository and has the level of polish you normally get with paid commercial programs.

The railscasts seem to be in a format that will play on an iPhone so I will have to find a way to watch them..

Tried blowing a DVD with my new DVD Writer. Up till now my plan was to use the neglected VideoCD format but now I have the DVD Writer there is no need to compromise. The difference in the playbacks is quite noticeable, while VideoCD is VHS Tape quality, DVD is, well, DVD quality. Quite amazing to me that about £350 of cheap kit (excluding the computer, which I had anyway) can give results that would have been broadcast quality 20 years ago.

Used Pinnacle Studio 8 to create the DVD. The image it created for about an hour of video was about 3.9G, using up most of a disk that is supposed to support two hours. This was probably due to the compression settings I chose which were the defaults. It took a few hours to do the job, I left it running all night so it's not good for the electricity bill.

No blogging for a while, been busy fiddling with my new Hauppauge WinTV Nova-t USB2 Digital TV Tuner. This plugs into a USB 2.0 port (won't work with USB 1.1) and allows you to watch/record Digital TV (Freeview in the UK).

Very long story so here are the highlights:

• Needs terrestrial aerial so took notebook (d410) into loft and connected it to existing unused aerial directly. Strong signal with no proper alignment, watched TV in the loft.
• When it is working picture is very good, digital quality. Recordings are just as good.
• Hooked aerial feed to computer room, signal too weak, black screen.
• Put booster amplifier in loft, signal strong enough again.
• WinTV2000 viewer app is crude and occasionally crashes. 64 channels (including radio) are chosen from a standard windows menu, too many options for screen so you have to scroll up and down. Argh. Channels are shown in random order.
• Comes with remote control. Set it to pause live TV and it worked. Couldn't figure out how to change channel or get out of live TV without rebooting the app.
• No real program planner in WinTV2000, just now and next when you change channel. Video recordings handled by entering time/channel in a seperate scheduler app. Primitive!
• Nero Home doesn't recognise WinTV box.
• Tried box in desktop PC and doesn't work. Only finds a few channels and it refuses to display them, even side-by-side with working laptop. It is hooked to USB 2.0 add-in card. Very annoying as desktop would be better for recording/media centre duties.
• After much research, downloaded Meedio a media centre app. Had trouble getting it working, only worked if I ran it after running WinTV2000.
• Meedio insists on showing 16:9 images on full 4:3 screen, fiddled with settings, no difference.
• Meedio TV playback stuttered a bit.
• Meedio is supposed to scoop program planner from the freeview signals but failed to do so.
• Has to be the most annoying application I have ever used. Designed to be used on TV so uses huge fonts meaning menus can only show five items at a time: there are invariably six items total and I want the sixth so have to scroll. Every time you click on something it plays a silly sound which is sooo grating. You can only disable sounds by fiddling in obscure plugin settings.
• Whenever I plug WinTV box into a different USB port, even on same pc, plug and play asks to install drivers. D410 has four USB ports (including docking station), desktop PC has four, so this is pretty tedious, especially as out of the docking station the D410 has no CD (e.g. when I was in the loft).

State of play:

• Doesn't work in desktop
• WinTV2000 is weak and crashes
• Meedio is annoying and has numerous problems to resolve.

Plans:

• Need to align aerial properly.
• Try ShowShifter
• Try gbpvr if I can bring myself to install .NET. Most of these things seem to use .NET so it may be unavoidable
• Try MythTV if I can stand the hastle of getting it to run on linux

Conclusion: sky+ is so good. If my experiences are anything to go by, the pc world still has some catching up to do.

Is it possible to spell Hauppauge correctly without having to cut and paste? How to pronounce it? What were they thinking? Tip for the day: make it your password. Even if someone guesses it, they won't be able to spell it.

Update: attempt to install gbpvr and get

Not only is the error message completely useless to anyone without access to the source code, you cannot even copy it into google to search for it.

Update 2: it turns out that this error means "You haven't installed the .NET runtime you moron".

gbpvr running fine and looks much better than anything else.

I tried editing videos from the k750i mobile on my pc. I copied the files from \MSSEMC\Media Files\video\camera on the camera's virtual drive to the pc using USB. The files all have a .3gp file extension. I tried opening them in pinnacle studio but it did not recognise the file format, even when opening them as *.*. I tried nero vision and that did not list .3gp as a supported file format but did open it as *.*.

However, even when recorded in 'high quality' the videos were pretty poor quality, not worth putting on a DVD unless the content is really worth it.

Now, when does my phone contract expire...?

I tried Nero Vision, the movie editing package in Nero Premium 7. Compared to Pinnacle Studio 8 SE it is not as good:

• I tried loading the .avi movie files from my canon powershot S1 camera and it decided that they were audio only. Studio opened them just fine.
• In Studio the play/preview shows you exactly what you will get: titles, transitions, all rendered smoothly. In Nero Vision the play facility does not show the transitions and the playback is slow and jerky. Maybe I am doing it wrong as I cannot imagine that I am supposed to blow a DVD before I can see what it will be like??? If I am doing something wrong then I will complain that it is less intuitive because there is only one play option in Studio and it Just Works.
• Nero Vision felt more like a token bundled video editing tool.

Nero Vision has more transitions and title effects with it than studio: most of the transitions in Studio have PRO written across the rendered image to encourage you to upgrade. However, most of these advanced transitions are in such poor taste that I would only use them as a joke.

Have to say it is cool that I can use the video clips from the still camera at all: they show various moments in my daughters development (sitting in baby chair, crawling, bouncing on baby bouncer, walking) that I can splice in with the video footage to give a nice overview of her first year (which went by very quickly).

ToDo: see if the clips from the K750i phone can be used or whether they are just too poor to show on a 37" tv.

I spent more time with Pinnacle studio: I went through the tour which in a few minutes told me about all I needed to know:

• how to edit a video
• how to add transitions (very easy)
• how to add titles (! didn't realise it could do that)
• how to put in sound effects.

I went through my video, cutting out the lens caps and putting in fading transitions between cuts which looks much better than a sudden stop and start. I added some titles and put 'Fin' at the end. There was no need for backing music as most of the video has music in the background. The transitions handle audio as well as video and this worked nicely. I didn't have time to watch it before I blew it and there is too much footage of the floor, walls, windows etc for my liking.

I edited it on the d410 laptop with external hard drive and rendered and blew it on my desktop pc. Rendering started about 12pm and was nearly finished when I went to bed at 11pm. By morning the CD had been ejected and it worked fine in the DVD player in the lounge. The video was about an hour long, 7 minutes short of filling the Video CD.

I downloaded a trial version of Nero 7 Premium and used it to record a snapshot of the video CD for duplication (don't want to wait 12 hours every time) and created a copy from the snapshot which works nicely. Nero 7 Premium has an awful lot of features, you can even edit videos with that. Maybe it would render them a bit faster? Maybe I can do a directors cut that leaves the floor on the cutting room floor.?

For Christmas I also treated myself to a Toshiba 160G external USB hard disk. I decided against Freecom as the one I use at work isn't the greatest quality and I figured a toshiba would be nicer, and I was right, it is a nice little thing, good build quality. So far it has Just Worked and when video editing with my Dell D410 laptop it was certainly fast enough (7200rpm spin speed, faster than the Dell's 5400rpm internal disk).

The video I was working with was 13G long in it's raw .avi format and I only have 20G free in the partition on the laptop, hence I used the external disk. This also had the advantage that I could plug the disk into my desktop system and use that to blow a video CD (Pinnacle Studio doesn't recognise the CD in the laptop). It is running as I type but the rendering is very slow: looks like a frame every five seconds or so. The Dell ran much faster when generating an mpeg to the Toshiba hard disk, maybe five times faster.

I didn't realise how fast the Dell D410 was, or how slow the Desktop is.

I might set up the D410 docking station to use it as a desktop PC and automate backups to the Toshiba which came with some backup software that I haven't played with yet.

Regular readers who are tired of python may be interested to know my latest fad: video. Before Christmas I was looking around PCWorld for a new toy and came across a Packard Bell 'Laptop video editing kit' which appeared to be a bundle of a PCMCIA Firewire adapter and a copy of Pinnacle Studio Version 8 SE video editing software.

I have had some video of my daughters first birthday sitting in the camcorder for a month, waiting for me to do something with it. This package seemed like a good deal at £30. I could have got a PCI version for my main pc but that is limited in slots and the packages were no cheaper. My laptop is more powerful than my desktop so I decided to go with that. My sony camcorder came with a USB 1.1 interface which gave low quality transfers and setting up Firewire had been on my todo list for a while.

By the weirdest coincidence, two days later my Brother gave me a DVD copy of our old family home movies from circa 1962 which blew me away, seeing my late Dad, Grandfathers, old house etc. He also gave me a DV tape which I can read from the camcorder with my new kit.

Family history seems to have more impact on video than still photography so I was inspired to get on with playing with video.

I installed the pcmcia card in my Dell D410 laptop and it Just Worked, no messages to say anything was installed, I had to go into device manager to check. I installed Pinnacle Studio, connected the camcorder and again it Just Worked, I captured two minutes of video and the image quality was very good (the camerawork left something to be desired).

I tried blowing it to a video CD (no DVD writer) but Pinnacle Studio would not recognise the CD Writer in the docking station of the D410: it said '***No disc writer device found! ***'. Maybe it should have looked for a disk writer. Anyway, I fiddled and googled and upgraded the software to the latest version of Pinnacle Studio 8 (the current version is 10, 8 is a couple of years old) but no joy. I'm not sure it matters, it might work on one of my two other CD writers.

Studio looks ok, apart from the CD thing it has only crashed once and I've upgraded it since then. I captured all my baby film and it will use 600M of a video CD, less if I edit out all the footage of the inside of lens caps. It runs fast enough on the D410, rendering is slow, it might take an hour to render the 600M but this may be down to disk speed and I don't have to sit and wait for it.

If I have one criticism of Pinnacle so far it is that the preview window is too small, about 3" diagonal on my 12" screen and it does not seem to be resizable or offer a full screen mode. The video is captured into a 13G avi file that can be played directly in Windows Media Player. Editing appears to be a process of telling Pinnacle what to do with this avi file: the avi file is not chopped about as you edit (literally like editing film) but instead pinnacle builds up a list of what needs doing and does these things as it renders.

I'll stick with blowing Video CDs for now, I can get a DVD writer for £30 but that still seems like a luxury, Video CD is good enough.