Category: Video

My experiences with video work (recording, editing, burning), primarily under Linux.

Dammit, Logitech

We got new desktop systems at work a while back, and I hooked my webcam back up to the new system, but never bothered setting up the software for it since it rarely gets used. Well I’ll need to do a demo soon where it’ll be useful, so I find the installer and run it and…”This product requires a USB port. Please make sure your USB port is working before launching setup again.” Um, I’m pretty sure the USB ports work on this thing. Some searching reveals that it’s probably because this new system is UEFI, and this is an old driver package (circa 2009) that probably doesn’t know how to check for USB ports properly. I double-check that ‘Legacy USB’ support is enabled in the BIOS, but that doesn’t help. There’s a newer 2.x version of the webcam software and it installs just fine, but doesn’t recognize this old model, and support suggests that I specifically need that old 1.x package.

Well maybe I can just install the drivers manually, I figure. I extract the files out of the installer, notice that there’s a “RequireUSB=1” setting in the setup.ini file, try setting that to 0, and rerun the setup, and yay, it no longer gets blocked at that USB check. It starts to go through the normal install dialogs, except…there’s no ‘Next’ button on any of the screens even though it tells me to press ‘Next’. Hitting enter works to proceed to the next dialog until I get to the EULA screen, where I have to specifically click the ‘Agree’ radio button and then I can’t tab back to the invisible Next button, so I’m stuck again. Trying various compatibility modes doesn’t help.

The setup program just seems to be a launcher for various MSI files in the package though, so I go to the ‘Drivers’ and ‘Software’ subdirectories, run the .msi files there, and those all seem to install just fine. I run the webcam UI program, and…no webcam detected. Check device manager, and the webcam model name does now show up, but only as a ‘controller’, not an ‘imaging device’, and there’s still an ‘Unknown device’ whose USB ID matches that of the webcam. Somehow it’s managed to identify the specific webcam model as a USB hub, and the built-in mic, but not as an actual camera. The ‘Installing New Hardware’ systray notification also has an error about not being able to install the driver, but I change the settings there to also search Windows Update. It goes off and grinds on that for a while…and still fails to find a driver to install.

Cue several rounds of uninstalling and reinstalling the packages and trying different ports and other things, with no luck. Finally, I go to Device Manager, notice the ‘Update Driver Software’ option there, give it a try on the unknown device…and now it successfully finds and installs a driver, even though it couldn’t via Windows Update (I’d assumed it would have been the same process). But it does all work now, at least.

Webcams always seem to be among the worst devices for long-term support, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at least partly forced obsolescence because otherwise there wouldn’t be as much of a reason to upgrade to a new marginally-better webcam…

It Better Be Made Of Diamond

I’m having a bit of trouble with my cable modem and TV, so I figured I should try replacing the splitter, since this one’s kinda old and they’ll need higher frequencies when DOCSIS 3.1 comes out anyway. And hey, there’s a The Source store (what used to be Radio Shack here) on the way back from lunch. I find a two-way splitter, and they want $15 for it. Ugh, kinda expensive, but I don’t want to wait for one to be shipped either… But then I notice that there’s no frequency range printed on it anywhere. And then I notice next to it a “high performance” splitter that does have an explicit 2.4GHz rating. Except that one is $35. It’s not even some unnecessarily-fancy brand like Monster, just their regular in-house junk. I swear, they exist solely to fleece businessmen wandering around downtown who don’t know any better.

It may be a bit out of my way, but I’ll just swing by Home Depot and get an equal-rating one for $8.

Latency Killed The Video Star

As I briefly mentioned before, streaming video has been the main victim of my recent network problems. It’s been an interesting opportunity to examine just how the different services are handling it:

YouTube: Videos load more slowly than usual, and I can’t start watching them right away. Given enough time, though, it does eventually load the whole thing, so I just have to pause it and wait until a decent amount is preloaded. A.

Google Video: Likewise, it’s slow to load but eventually gets there, though a bit slower overall than YouTube, I think. It just suffers its usual usability and quality problems, being the abandoned orphan of Google’s video services. A-.

Viddler: The loading bar sometimes stops and gives up in the middle of a video, causing playback to stop when it gets there. You can get it started again by clicking near that spot on the bar, though, and skipping around like that is fairly robust in general, so there’s at least a workaround. B-.

Dailymotion: Unfortunately, the loading bar stops frequently here, and seeking around its progress bar isn’t nearly as robust. Trying to click outside the already-loaded areas usually just gets me a “There were technical problems, reload this page” error. In order to watch the video, I’d need the entire thing to load in one shot, and I failed to achieve that in what must have been at least a dozen tries on a short, 4 minute video. For not even letting me get to a significant chunk of the video, they get an F.

So Far The Home Team Is Up By 2 Gigs

Right now, MythTV is recording an episode of Rome for me. But at the same time, a transcode job is in the middle of converting some other shows to MPEG-4 to free up some disk space.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me that my idea of amusement is to keep checking the amount of free disk space every few minutes just to see which task is ‘winning’…

Ding Dong, The Disc Is Dead

With the news that Warner Bros. is dropping its support for HD-DVD and producing Blu-Ray discs exclusively from now on, the HD format war is pretty much over and Blu-Ray is the winner. The only major HD-DVD supporter left is Universal, and it’s unlikely they’re going to want to stay on a clearly losing side.

It’s actually a good thing that one side is finally gaining a dominant upper hand, since otherwise it was poised to be another VHS-vs-Beta war all over again, and the confusion would have kept people away.

The larger war is still only half-won though, as Blu-Ray still has to convince people to choose it instead of, well, plain DVD. People already get tons of extras and what they think is a decent-looking picture with DVDs, so is the higher resolution alone going to sway them into buying new players and more expensive discs…

(Maybe I won’t regret getting a PS3 after all.)

Can’t Get There From Here

The feature list for the Fall Dashboard update for the 360 is out now, and the big new feature that’s got everyone abuzz is support for DivX/Xvid codecs.

That is indeed awesome, but upon reflection, it doesn’t really do *me* much good. My MythTV frontend is a bit flaky right now and I’d prefer something better, but the 360 can’t stream from MythTV right now regardless of what format the video is in. Other streaming solutions exist, but would require transcoding the video on the fly, which degrades video quality. But, I don’t really want to watch TV on the LCD monitor it’s connected to right now anyway.

The PS3 is in a better position, being connected to the bigger TV and it’s already close to being able to stream from MythTV; it sees the server, but says that the video files are corrupt (choking on the MP2 audio stream, perhaps). DivX support is coming to the PS3 as well, but it’s not clear yet if that will include Xvid as well. But wait, even if it did, I’d have to transcode my MythTV files to Xvid (which is actually easy enough), but then they’ll be stored in a Nuppelvideo container format that neither the PS3 nor 360 will support. Sigh.

One of these days I’m just going to have to tear down my entire home theatre setup and rebuild the whole thing from scratch…

That Didn’t Take Long

It’s only a little over three months after building my new systems, including the heavily-upgraded MythTV box, and it’s already at 97% full on the video recording partition. Yikes!

Fortunately it’s just because I’ve been careless, and I can free up a lot of space, I just have to get around to working on it. There’s some backup data I was temporarily keeping on there that can be removed now, which would free up around 180 gigs. I can still try to use LVM to join it with another unused partition (the ‘extra’ space on the unexpectedly-larger refurb drive I got that couldn’t be added to the RAID set), which would add another 250 gigs. I can start transcoding shows into MPEG-4 now that there’s a more powerful processor in there and it won’t take all day to do so, which would halve the space used by recordings.

Or I could get around to actually watching these shows. I think I’m about 13 episodes behind on Lost now…

Partially Surprised

I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.

The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.

Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…

The Right Tool

Although I have a working process for recording and burning DVDs, I was still a little unhappy with some of the steps. In particular, ‘replex’ is apparently picky about audio stream headers and would often complain or crash if it couldn’t detect things the way it wanted to. When editing out commercials, I’d often have to experiment with different starting points for the first cut until ‘replex’ was finally happy.

Fortunately I finally got around to trying avidemux as an editing tool, and it’s made things much easier. Instead of marking off the sections you want to keep, as in ‘gopchop’, you mark sections to cut out and it applies the cut immediately, which makes it easier to see how the final result flows. It can requantize MPEG video to shrink it a bit, which is useful when I accidentally record a long movie at a high bitrate and it winds up slightly too big to fit it on a DVD. And, it’ll reindex the MPEG stream and insert the navigation packets, which means I no longer need to use ‘gop_fixup’ and ‘replex’ at all — ‘dvdauthor’ will directly accept the stream avidemux produces.

Now the whole process is simply:

1) Record the show with MythTV.

2) Load the recording into avidemux, edit out the commercials, and resave it.

3) Run dvdauthor and mkisofs to create the ISO image, and burn it to a disc, same way as before.

(Edit: Except that the title I tried it on tonight wound up with a/v sync problems… Bah. Back to the old method for now.)

Ordering Off The Menu

It took a bit of fiddling, but I finally have DVD menus working for the TV shows I’m capturing. There are tools available for putting together the menus interactively, but I wanted something a bit more automated, and it’s not like I’m going to spend a lot of time carefully painting beautiful pictures for each one.

Now I can finally start burning TV episodes, since I didn’t want to have them all as one big stream where you’d have to fast-forward or rewind to the right starting point…
Continue reading “Ordering Off The Menu”

The Final Piece

I also finally got the replacement video card I had been waiting for, and now I can say that the PVR is truly complete. The TV-Out works fine, with no colour problems, and there was even an unexpected performance boost. The old card didn’t support the XvMC library for the Nvidia drivers but this one does, and CPU usage during playback dropped from 80-90% down to 45-60%, making playback smooth even with other stuff going on in the background.

Now at last I can just sit back in the easy chair with the remote and treat it like just another appliance, and not just a tacked-on feature of the computer. Even if it really is…

Not Yet Feeling The Burn

Yay, my DVD burner drive arrived today. Except that I don’t have any videos properly DVD formatted for burning yet. Or any discs to burn them to. Or any software to burn them with, since it’s an OEM drive… I think I was expecting to do my burning in Linux, like I did with all my CD burning, but then I wiped the system and didn’t reinstall Linux…

Oh well, it’ll get sorted out in time, and I needed a new CD drive anyway. My old HP 9900ci was getting flaky — it couldn’t even reinstall Battlefield 1942 without randomly failing partway through, so I had to mount the discs on the Linux server, copy the files over, and install them all straight from the hard drive.

I wound up getting a dual-layer-burning drive anyway, even though I wasn’t specifically holding out for one. The dual-layer media’s still expensive right now but should hopefully drop, this drive got great reviews, and it was still dirt cheap at just over $100 CDN, so what the hell.

And I don’t even have enough space for my existing DVD collection… :-P