The Ocho

Well, I have learned a few interesting things over the last few days.

First, lurking in the Fazed slorums TMI thread can be bad for your
health. It turns out there are sometimes worse things than Man
Chickens.

Second, open source is a wonderful thing. No, I didn't really just
learn this. I have been a strong believer in the open source movement
for quite some time. Especially now that my work and my beliefs have
cooincided a bit with my work shifting to Linux. However, I got yet
another reminder the other night, and this time it was on Windows.

Some time ago (October or so of last year) I picked up a low-cost TV
tuner/capture card for my PC. It is a Hauppage WinTV-GO PCI. I got
it for $20 or so from some online company.

I tried hooking it up immediately only to find that the drivers I
found didn't work. Hours of digging through Hauppage's site led me to
other drivers, but they all sucked and hadn't been updated in 2 years.
I finally got one to somewhat work, and then fired up their
horrendous WinTV application. I occaisionally got some channels to
come in, with interference, if I was lucky. Then, it just stopped
recognizing the driver altogether.

I was fed up with this because I had read this card was actually
decent. So, I hopped on over to videohelp.com. As usual the site was
full of good information. After searching for my card, I found that
many people were using an open source Windows WDM driver for the BT848
chipset on my card. I hopped on over to btwincap.sourceforge.net and
downloaded the drivers.

They Rock!!! Perfect quality and stable as all get out. I also
grabbed DScaler and VirtualVCR. I haven't gotten DScaler to work yet,
but VirtualVCR works fantastic for both watching TV and capture.
Combined with a scheduler frontend written by someone else, I am now
able to record TV at will. No guide data yet, but my mac mini has not
yet entered the picture either.

I need to start capturing VHS tapes to computer again. I am going to
try using this card, rather than my mini DV cam and firewire this
time. Sounds like from everything I read that it will be a snap, and
very high quality.