David Glover Archive
Note! You are looking at an archive of my old blog. Nothing new is posted here. For new posts, visit blog.davidglover.org.
Minus 50% off
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Here's a Google Ad I saw recently. (Don't click it, it's just a picture.)
Doesn't that mean that it will be 50% more expensive? And then the text says it will be free!
So not only is it a scam, but it's a stupid scam.
Doesn't that mean that it will be 50% more expensive? And then the text says it will be free!
So not only is it a scam, but it's a stupid scam.
The Big Brother logo. Again.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Last year's logo was themed on MPEG noise and had secret words in it.
We have yet to see the intro sequence this year but here's the logo:
It's obviously produced by the same designer, someone who has a fetish for TV technology because this one is clearly based on the Philips PM5544 test card, using some kind of polar projection:
Exactly the same colours.
We have yet to see the intro sequence this year but here's the logo:
It's obviously produced by the same designer, someone who has a fetish for TV technology because this one is clearly based on the Philips PM5544 test card, using some kind of polar projection:
Exactly the same colours.
Labels: commentary, tech
Old Mac Restoration
Friday, May 18, 2007
A Macintosh SE/30 with 8MB of RAM (soon to be 128MB) running the System 7.5.3 installer off the attached AppleCD 200 drive, sitting on top. (1x speed - and it uses caddies!)Inside the HD has been upgraded from the original 40MB (yes, that's MB, not GB - it will soon have more RAM than it originally had disk space) to a new 4GB drive, partitioned into two 2GB volumes to avoid the 2GB bug.
Inside is a colour graphics card but I don't have a monitor to connect it to due to the custom connector - I have a VGA adapter but it doesn't seem to work. Around the back is a 10Base2 ethernet card waiting to be connected to the internet.
Labels: tech
DIY Slingbox
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Yesterday from a dusty shelf I discovered my Sony DV camera. And after playing with it for a while I discovered (or possibly re-discovered, as I might have just forgotten) that it has analogue video inputs that it will digitise and then spit out of the DV port.
So this gave me an idea - this is essentially what the Slingbox does, except the Slingbox outputs a network stream rather than DV video. But I have a Mac Mini sitting underneath my TV downstairs, and that has a DV port on it...
So, after a lot of bodging and hacking and plugging of cables... I have this:
Patricia Hewitt in a window! Or, more accurately, the output of my Sky box being converted to DV, fed into my Mac Mini, transcoded, and then multicasted (yeah baby) across my house LAN.
And here's how I did it.
My camera came with a video cable ostensibly for spitting out video to your TV - but it works backwards too, so I connect it to the back of my Sky box.
(Dusty, yuck.)
The other end connects to my camera, and another cable feeds DV out from my camera and into the back of my Mac Mini.
On the Mac Mini I download and install QuickTime Broadcaster, which is free. Setting it up, I start with the "LAN" presets for both Video and Audio, then hit "Show details" and do a few modifications. The Audio settings work unchanged except for choosing "DV Audio - first two channels" for the Source. Video settings look like this:
Things I changed are:
Size: 512x288.
288 is half the vertical lines of PAL. If I wanted full resolution I would have chosen 576 lines but the CPU in my Mac Mini isn't capable of encoding that at 25fps. Halving the vertical resolution also has a handy side-effect of deinterlacing the video. 512 pixels wide results in a 16:9 display, for non-widescreen programs I would choose 384, but 99% of all UK TV is widescreen, so I'll never need to change this. NTSC users might choose 427x240 or 320x240.
Quality: High
Frames per second: 25 (30 if my source was NTSC.)
Key frame every: 50 (60 if my source was NTSC.)
Limit data rate: Off (No point on a LAN.)
Network settings:
Things I changed are:
Transmission: Multicast
Then just hit "Generate IP Address" and you're done.
Save the settings as an SDP file and then hit "Broadcast". From another Mac (or PC), load up the SDP file and voila! DIY Slingbox.
Advantages over a Slingbox:
* No extra hardware to buy. (If you already own a DV camera and Mac server of course. You could also use a dedicated DV bridge if you have one.)
* More than one person can watch.
* Better video and audio quality.
Disadvantages over a Slingbox:
* No remote control functionality. (Which I'm doing by using an TV Link and existing RF cabling. Not ideal.)
* Harder to setup.
* Doesn't work over the internet. (Though it could do, if have access to QuickTime Streaming Server or can VPN into your LAN. (Does multicast work over VPN? Not sure. Should do.))
So this gave me an idea - this is essentially what the Slingbox does, except the Slingbox outputs a network stream rather than DV video. But I have a Mac Mini sitting underneath my TV downstairs, and that has a DV port on it...
So, after a lot of bodging and hacking and plugging of cables... I have this:
Patricia Hewitt in a window! Or, more accurately, the output of my Sky box being converted to DV, fed into my Mac Mini, transcoded, and then multicasted (yeah baby) across my house LAN.
And here's how I did it.
My camera came with a video cable ostensibly for spitting out video to your TV - but it works backwards too, so I connect it to the back of my Sky box.
(Dusty, yuck.)
The other end connects to my camera, and another cable feeds DV out from my camera and into the back of my Mac Mini.
On the Mac Mini I download and install QuickTime Broadcaster, which is free. Setting it up, I start with the "LAN" presets for both Video and Audio, then hit "Show details" and do a few modifications. The Audio settings work unchanged except for choosing "DV Audio - first two channels" for the Source. Video settings look like this:
Things I changed are:
Size: 512x288.
288 is half the vertical lines of PAL. If I wanted full resolution I would have chosen 576 lines but the CPU in my Mac Mini isn't capable of encoding that at 25fps. Halving the vertical resolution also has a handy side-effect of deinterlacing the video. 512 pixels wide results in a 16:9 display, for non-widescreen programs I would choose 384, but 99% of all UK TV is widescreen, so I'll never need to change this. NTSC users might choose 427x240 or 320x240.
Quality: High
Frames per second: 25 (30 if my source was NTSC.)
Key frame every: 50 (60 if my source was NTSC.)
Limit data rate: Off (No point on a LAN.)
Network settings:
Things I changed are:
Transmission: Multicast
Then just hit "Generate IP Address" and you're done.
Save the settings as an SDP file and then hit "Broadcast". From another Mac (or PC), load up the SDP file and voila! DIY Slingbox.
Advantages over a Slingbox:
* No extra hardware to buy. (If you already own a DV camera and Mac server of course. You could also use a dedicated DV bridge if you have one.)
* More than one person can watch.
* Better video and audio quality.
Disadvantages over a Slingbox:
* No remote control functionality. (Which I'm doing by using an TV Link and existing RF cabling. Not ideal.)
* Harder to setup.
* Doesn't work over the internet. (Though it could do, if have access to QuickTime Streaming Server or can VPN into your LAN. (Does multicast work over VPN? Not sure. Should do.))
Labels: tech
