2003-03-11 :
- sweet merciful crap, it's been over a year since I've updated this page! um ... hmm ... well, the box is stable and capturing nicely ... lots of coulda woulda shoulda things I still want to do ... meh ... sleepy now ... more later
2002-01-27 :
- scheduled jobs are holding up nicely ...
2002-01-26 :
re-edited the 2002-01-21 RAW clips, converted 'em and burned a VCD - no filtering, no nothing - just to see how it would turn out ... after all, if it takes hours and hours of frickin' around just to cut a decent 80 minute VCD, then this really isn't worth it ... I'm glad to report that things are good ... the first VCD is decent ... looks a little washed out, but that's as much to do with the source as anything else (default settings for VirtualDub capture need to be kicked up a notch) ... yay.
2002-01-25 :
- picked up the Plextor 24-10-40A CDRW ... it already had the v1.03 firmware, so no need to upgrade ... running quite nicely, I must say ...
- as one of the fundamental points of the digital VCR thing is to make VCD-compliant MPEGs that I can burn to CD, the system is also going to have to be a video editing workstation. To that end, I have some clips in RealMediocre format, and apparently there's a tool called EO Video that will convert RealMediocre to, you know, a useful format. The only problem is that it requires RealPlayer to be installed ... and I definitely don't want anything from RealNothingworks polluting my system if I can avoid it ...
2002-01-24 :
- success! ... an answer to my scheduling woes - and that answer is, surprisingly enough, Windows Script Host ... it does everything I need to do to drive VirtualDub ... here's the source for my batch files ...
2002-01-22 :
- installed the Huffyuv v2.1.1 codec. Compared it to the PicVideo MJPEG codec...and as far as I can tell, there is no appreciable difference...so I'll stick with MJPEG for now...
2002-01-20 :
- ATI, I would like to retract all those things I said about your suckitude. You have entered the Twister The Movie zone. You are one of a rare breed. An entity that has the capacity to SUCK and BLOW simultaneously. ... more on this later
2002-01-19 :
- Picked up an IBM Deskstar 75GXP 60Gb drive ... time to redo the system - WIN98 and WINXP ... more on this later
2002-01-18 :
- Came across a solution to the frame dropping problem ... most of the boards on Rage Underground and Rage3D acknowledge the suckitude of ATI software in a Win2000/XP environment ... then I came across Rich's site who had written an AIW guide that I had come across in the past, and he had a suggestion to resolve the frame dropping problem - reapply the VIA 4-in-1 drivers ... lo and behold, the majority of my frame dropping and audio sync issues went away! ... still not particularly satisfied with the quality of the MMC MPEGs, but better than nothing ...
2002-01-17 :
- the deed is done ... I bought the MSI K7T Turbo 2 (6330 v5.0), an Athlon XP 1700+ 266FSB, and a DragonOrb 3 ... installation was uneventful, although the DragonOrb was a motherjumper to get latched onto the socket ... sweet merciful crap, the DragonOrb 3 is LOUD ... installed Windows XP Professional ... ran the TMPGEnc test ... 5:30 baby! ... P4 1.8 ran 5:52 ... woohoo! ... time to try vidcapping to VCD-compliant MPEG-1 with ATI Multimedia Centre v7.2 ... and sweet merciful crap! I'm dropping frames like crazy, and having audio sync problems to boot! May have to redo the installation and do dual-boot Win98 and WinXP partitions ... curses!