a late night of video capture goodness

After we got home from that horrible night at the NAC, and the wonderful Oysters of Big Daddy's Crab shack, I had a nap while Janet blogged, then strangely when Janet was tired - I was wide awake! So, making the most of the opportunity, I plugged in the Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U (a USB video capture box) to Janet's laptop, and tried to get the old PVR, with the recording of her TV spot, saved on it's hard drive. Little did I know that Rogers set-top boxes expire after a while when their firmware becomes stale. I think it even has to do with some new fan dangled PKI thing they provision the boxes with. So, after trying in vein to get it to work without being plugged into "cable", I finally moved it into the living room and attached it to the mother-ship (the Rogers cable outlet). It flashed. It rebooted. It did a lot of stuff that I can't begin to describe. But it didn't work. It came up with "----" across it's display when it finally seemed "done", and didn't output any video to the laptop via the Plextor box. I then remembered you can call the Rogers repair line and "reset" all the set-top cable boxes in your house, in case such an error has occurred - so I did, and voila - working PVR! Unfortunately, by this time I had discovered that the cables that I thought I had on hand, I didn't - and I only had a composite cable to attach the video from the PVR to the Plextor box. While this would suffice, I wanted to capture the TV spot in as high a resolution possible, so I resigned myself to repeating the operation later, and figuring out how the software worked immediately, using the composite cable. First I downloaded the latest drivers from Plextor, then I installed VirtualDub, a FREE open source video capture utility. It's a little rough around the edges, but if you're a video guru (unlike myself) you'll probably have a much easier time. I installed the latest DivX drivers too, so I'd have, what I'd consider, the usual standard codecs installed. After some tweaking, the video capture worked, and I was able to record Janet's news spot, using the composite cable. Today I'll re-record it at the best quality possible over the SVideo cable, and finally take the "old" PVR back to Rogers, along with the living room HD receiver - we simply don't watch it! That'll save a few bucks a month off the cable bill! :)
Once I have a good copy of the video, we'll post it somewhere... YouTube? Facebook? Webshots? We'll see!