Not much to say for a few days

Been watching quite a lot of Due South (we forgot to update our Amazon list) and doing some work on my Folkestone maps when I've had a few minutes. Now weather.

I've sort of been enjoying the weather. Monday daytime I thought was fabulous, around lunchtime I went out and it was pleasant with a very slight breeze that was cool to the skin. Perfect festival weather I thought, so it was probably that it was the weather I remember from a festival I enjoyed in the past. Not hot enough to get sunburned, warm enough to not have to wear a jacket, but not so hot as to be uncomfortable if you had to put one on to save carrying it... Yesterday was an odd one, it showed up the mighty distance we travel to work each day. In the morning it was spectacularly foggy at home, though clear by the time we got to work and then really too hot in the afternoon here in London. We both do a bit of a speedy walk from the station to our offices, so when it's "nice" and hot, it's really too hot for that sort of activity.

Today, who knows, it's started out a bit warm, if it really does get hotter then things might just start bursting into flames here at work. There's been some kind of air-con problem, and we might have to turn the power off to stop all the computers going bang. I'll keep you informed by the medium of smoke signals.

Outlook for the rest of the week: I can see me having two lunches tomorrow, I have a couple of ready meals at home that were supposed to do for lunch this week and I keep forgetting to bring them in. We're looking for more of the perfect festival weather for the rest of the week and the weekend, as we're off to The Kent Show. We know how to live these days.

Now I remember, I had some content from elswhere I was planning to recycle here. I put out a shout out to some of my homelies looking for answers regarding home cabling, and everyone's on holiday so no-one's answering.

Who can help me with some video skills? I want to digitise a video, but my TV card isn't picking up the signal from my video, that I'm sending down an aerial lead, any ideas? I've retuned the TV card every which way but all I'm getting are ropey TV signals where that it's picking up using the video (that's not plugged into a real aerial) as an aerial. The other input options I have are s-video and composite, but the only other outputs I have on the video are scart The TV card is this, someone gave it to me at work.

I've got a little scart -> component converter that we used with the PS2, it looks like if that worked at all it would only send the video signal and no sound. I've not tried it yet because we only used it for converting the component signal from the PS2 into the TV SCART, and not the other way round, is there a chance of it going bang?

Should I get a SCART -> s-video cable instead? They look cheap, will that work?

2006 :: Comment / reply

I've done a bit of video stuff

Not used TV tuner cards so can't comment on that. I wouldn't use the aerial lead anyway, all that RF conversion at either end makes for messy pictures. Never managed to get the scart -> s-video input working on my VC100. I get a picture, but it's in B&W.

I have successfully used the composite input to grab some stuff in colour from video. The results are OK, but don't expect DVD like results. The capturing of VHS tape often brings out the imperfections that may not be visible on a TV and you may need to tweak the video until you're happy.

In answer to your questions,
1 Scart -> Composite ? No chance of it going bang. Go for it.

2. you don't send the audio with the video (there's no audio sent via s-video). To get the audio recorded you'll need to send the audio from the video (SCART/phono) to the PC's 'line in' jack socket and set the input to that or 'what you hear' or the equivalent.

Hopefully that should get you started. I can recommend VirtualDub MPeg2 for editing your captured files & it has powerful filters that can be used to greatly improve the image quality... The mega codec pack has just about every codec you can think of.. but you've probably got software that came with the card & it depends on what you're planning on doing with the video afterward of course.

12 Jul :: 2006 :: Comment / reply