tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
So far I am pleased with my purchase of Elgato’s turbo.264 HD that I have been using to speed up H.264 encoding times.
Having edited some EyeTV recordings I was quite pleased by how fast the encoding was (and how it doesn’t impact significantly on the speed of the computer).
Having just purchased the turbo.264 HD from Elgato, checking their website I was interested to see a new product, called Video Capture.
Transfer video to your Mac from a VCR, DVR, camcorder, or any other analog video device as an iTunes-ready H.264 or MPEG-4 file. Elgato Video Capture’s easy-to-use software assists you through every step, from connecting an analog video source to recording the video on your Mac and choosing how you will watch and share it.
There is no easier way to transfer home video to your Mac to play in QuickTime, to sync with an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, to edit in iMovie, or to upload to YouTube.
I have been looking for something like this from Elgato for some time. I have a couple of Pinnacle devices for capturing video, however either they capture without a preview which is fine for most things, but not all. Or it is Windows only and this means adding extra conversion time to use the captured footage with iMovie or similar.
I use to be able to do it with my original EyeTV device, however that did not capture at a sufficient quality, but this was a fair few years ago now.
So I am going to get myself one.
I am a great fan of Elgato’s EyeTV and have been thinking for some time about buying their turbo.264
As I was near an Apple Store today I decided to pop in and see if they had one. Thought I found it and checked the price, wow, £139.95.
I know that buying retail can sometimes be a little more expensive, but the price seemed ridiculous, I had expected it to be around to £80-£100 mark.
Well, at least with the Apple Store with all their computers and free wifi I thought I would just recheck the Elgato website, and there on their website was the device for £139.95.
At this point I noticed the name, the turbo.264 HD read a little more and realised that this was not the turb0.264 I thought it was, but a new product, one which would also do HD. Released back in March I had missed the release.
Are you frustrated by the amount of time it takes to get the video out of your new HD camcorder and into a watchable format?
Do you want to watch your videos and EyeTV recordings on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV?
Do you wish it didn’t take so long for your EyeTV recordings to be ready for Wi-Fi Access?
Want to put your videos on YouTube and take advantage of their new HD features?
Do you own a Sony PSP® and need a way to export videos to it?
Are you a video professional and need an efficient and inexpensive way to compress your video for streaming or the web?
Yes?
Turbo.264 HD is right for you.
As well as speeding up my EyeTV recording conversions I can also use it for other video conversion. Shall be interesting to see how much faster it does work.
Initial tests seem to show that it does work faster.
So there I was messing about with Windows 7 when I thought I would give the DVD burning a go. In the past on Windows PCs I have relied on third party applications such as Nero. Even on the Mac I don’t use the in-built burning tools and use Toast.
So I started DVD Maker and got the following error?
Hmmm.
Not quite sure why I need a fast graphics card to burn a DVD.
I can imagine if the drive was too slow (or I had the wrong kind of disc) or my hard drive was not fast enough, however a graphics card which was too slow…
Why?
Good article from Bill Thompson on wireless issues.
The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, must be hoping that his neighbours don’t decide to have a larger family.
He recently spent ages setting up a high-speed wireless network (wi-fi) at home, documenting the whole tortuous process on the BBC Technology blog, but all his hard work could apparently be ruined by a single baby listener.
I have been running Windows 7 (build 7000) on my HP 2133 for a few weeks now and it has been running very smoothly with very few issues.
I ought to really get a 6 cell battery for the 2133 as the 3 cell battery is really insufficient for most needs, okay for around the house, but rubbish for taking the 2133 out for the day.
At least the camera works, which it didn’t in Suse, and it remembers my wireless network too.
BBC’s iPlayer is to go HD.
The BBC’s iPlayer is to start offering high definition (HD) streams and downloads of some programmes. It will mean improved picture quality on streams to web browsers.
Read more.
Other new features include a new internet speed diagnostics page, the full release of the new BBC iPlayer Desktop, and a cross-platform manager that will allow Windows, Mac, and Linux users to download BBC programmes, including those in HD.
Sounds good, but I do worry about those like me who have bandwidth caps, downloading HD video takes up a fair bit of bandwidth.
On my home iMac I run a variety of flavours of Windows through Parallels. In the main to test Windows software and to access some sites which only really work on IE.
Over the last few months I have been running in the main Windows 7 or Windows Vista.
A couple of days ago I started the Windows XP VM on Parallels and started getting a WMI crashing error.
A Google search brought up this solution however despite trying this (including deleting the relevant files from Parallels Explorer.
It was suggested to me that it might be a virus, but even my AV software then started to crash.
The only solution was to delete the VM and create a new VM and install Windows XP all over again. Not a quick solution as there are quite a few updates to install like SP3.
Seems to be working now.
I now feel that my iMac is way too slow for how I am using it these days. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does, this iMac is (well should be) one fast computer, but I certainly push mine to its limits and notice slowdowns and memory issues.
I have 2GB of RAM in there, so it’s not a lack of RAM, much more running too many applications at the same time. Yes I should exit one application before running another, but I often don’t have the time and sometimes (as with EyeTV) it just isn’t possible due to scheduling issues.
I wouldn’t mind the odd delay here and there, but due to delays it is starting to impact on the performance of applications such as EyeTV and as a result I am getting dropped frames on my EyeTV recordings.
My solution will be to get a new iMac, not to replace my current iMac, much more to have double the processing power. As a result I am going to get a bigger desk.
So which model, well it’s going to be the 24″ model.
I am a fan of The Vintage Web and I believe that I have found a wonderfully retro (currently active) site that fits their criteria perfectly.
I present the Wind and Wheels website.
From the wonderful Flash splash screen and animated gif enter graphic, you know you are in for a wonderful retro treat.
Once you have enjoyed the Flash animation, onto the main site, where you can find a wonderful animated rollover menu, a weather widget, an additional expanding side menu and clever use of Comic Sans.
Despite the website, there are some great photographs of wind powered action on the site, so well worth having a good look round.
