Fast forward to today, and there’s a larger variety of affordable products that do analog video capture. Specifically, I’m looking at products that can be used on MacOS X, and a popular one is the Elgato Video Capture device. It looks like a great product, but it only has composite video input, and I need something that can accept component video input, either RGB or YPbPr.

Blackmagic Design Video Recorder

The Blackmagic Design Video Recorder is an affordable (under $150) USB 2.0-based device that can accept both component and composite video and produces H.264-encoded video, and supports on MacOS X.

What makes me somewhat nervous is that there’s really no good, qualitative reviews of the equipment in comparison to comparable products. The best review I’ve found at all is this one on iLounge from back in 2009, and it’s really just an unboxing of the product, not really a review.

I’ve gone and contacted Blackmagic support and asked them the following questions:

• Does the Video Recorder do time-base correction (TBC) or will I need to add one between the source video and the Video Recorder device?
• Also, reviews all state that the device cannot accept 480p as input? Is this still true? Is this something that can/has been fixed with newer firmware?
• Reviewers also state that the Video Recorder only generates output in 720×480 – is this the only resolution that it can output? If I’m converting PAL video and want to output for PAL DVD, I’d like to capture in 720×576. Can the Video Recorder handle this?

Matrox MXO2

Remember how I was talking about cheap and affordable? If money were no object, I’d be seriously looking at the Matrox MXO2 family of products. At the lowest end, the MXO2 Mini starts at bare minimum of $450, but I wouldn’t even bother considering buying it without the Matrox MAX H.264 hardware encoder, which bumps the price up to $850.

Pro’s:

• Extremely versatile: HDMI, component, composite video.
• Fast: MAX H.264 provides faster-than-realtime encoding acceleration.

Con’s:

• Not cheap: You get what you pay for.
• Strange host connector: PCIe, not USB 2.0 or FireWire 800.

If you have an older MacBook Pro, like me, that still has an ExpressCard/34 slot, Matrox offers a PCIe ExpressCard that you can use to connect to the MXO2 devices. The newest 17″ MacBook Pro still has an ExpressCard slot, but the 13″ and 15″ don’t. Matrox appears to be offering a Thunderbolt adapter for the MXO2, but it’s priced at $299. No, that’s not a typo: just shy of $300 for what is effectively a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe-2.0 adapter. Still, it’s a usable solution.

In the short term, I’ll probably pick up the Blackmagic Video Recorder assuming it actually works as advertised, but if I start getting more video conversion and production work, I’ll definitely be investing in the MXO2 Mini MAX ($849) or MXO2 LE MAX ($1,395), or perhaps even the full MXO2 MAX ($1,995).

Related posts:

1. AOL launches new Video Search, still can’t find any real porn
2. Disappointing video quality from the at&t Captivate

Despite the news that RIM was going to finally launch a new touch screen slider phone “any day now,” which did finally launch as the BlackBerry Torch 9800, I decided to give an Android phone a serious look.

After looking at the various options that at&t offers, I decided to give the Samsung Galaxy S-based Captivate (details: Samsung, at&t) a try. I ordered three new phones–one for me, one for my wife, and one for my Dad–at the start of August, and by the 6th, we had our phones in hand.

Right off the bat, I’ll have to admit that I went into this with extremely high expectations. I know, big mistake. To be honest, after dealing with BlackBerry phones for the last two-plus years, I was excited at the prospect of finally getting on a modern platform that didn’t involve using that crappy iPhone OS.

On the surface, it sounds really promising: a fancy 4-inch Super AMOLED display; lightweight at 4.5 ounces; 5MP camera; 512MB of RAM and 16GB internal SDHC; Samsung’s 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 Hummingbird CPU. With these specs, there’s a whole lot of potential to build something really incredible.

My first disappointment was the “Email” app that ships with Android 2.1 on this phone. Apparently, I’m not alone, so much so that folks have forked the code and released their changes called K-9. However, K-9 still has its warts: I can’t figure out how to copy-and-paste text from an email message, without “replying” to it and copying from the quoted text area, then discarding the reply. Perhaps I’ll “fix” this and submit a patch.

Next, the lack of out-of-the-box wi-fi tethering was disappointing. I went and rooted my Captivate and then installed Android Wi-Fi Tether on it. Having a free, open source “solution” is a great thing, but certainly not for the average, non-technical consumer.

The Calendar app. isn’t too bad, but I sadly discovered a shortcoming in it: there’s no way to duplicate an event. I’m not talking about creating a recurring event, but taking an event and duplicating it. Suppose you have an event, like a doctor’s appointment. You go to your appointment, and at the end, you schedule your follow-up appointment. It’d be really convenient to be able to just copy your current appointment, and paste it on the new date and maybe adjust the time. Can’t do that with the stock Calendar app on the Captivate. You have to just add a new event and enter in all the data. Annoying, to say the least.

Battery life also seems disappointing. The specs claim over 300 hours (over 12 days) of standby time, and over 5 hours of talk time. Given the amount of email and Twitter and Facebook I get, even at an hour interval for refreshes and K-9 mail set up to do IMAP “push,” my battery seems to last around 4 hours before needing a charge. I suspect the 3G data use of the cellular radio uses more juice than voice “talk” time … and the notion of “standby” time is a bit misleading, since when the phone is doing background data tasks, it’s really not “in standby” as its actively using the radio.

Another huge problem is the fact that GPS on the Captivate appears to be totally broken. The TeleNav GPS navigation application is pretty much unusable, with it not being able to track your location properly, which causes it to constantly reroute as it tries to figure out where you are. Supposedly there’s a workaround, where you can manually reconfigure the phone to use Google’s Location Server, which I’ll try soon, but again, this is just poor out-of-the-box experience and “fixing it yourself” isn’t really a satisfactory solution for a non-technical consumer.

On one hand, I wonder if I should have bothered making the switch from BlackBerry to Android, yet. Despite my complaints with RIM and BlackBerry products, the few things they could do, they did reasonably well. But, I’m tired of waiting for RIM to catch up. Maybe the next generation of touch-plus-slider devices following the Torch 9800 could be an option, but for now, I’m going to stick it out with the Captivate, hoping that Android 2.2 brings some fixes, along with community-developed Android functionality closes the gap between “sucks badly” and “usable on a day-to-day basis.”

Related posts:

1. How To Upgrade an AT&T Captivate to Gingerbread with Cognition 5 on a Mac
2. Disappointing video quality from the at&t Captivate
3. 2011 In Review, Part 1

Waaaaaaaait a second. That looks awfully familiar … oh, that’s not the Move, that’s the Hitachi Magic Wand! Here’s the PlayStation Move:

I’m sure you can see where the confusion came from. Oops!

Nice job, Sony. If you’re still in the game console business in four more years, maybe you’ll actually build something interesting other than a Blu-Ray player with a sleek looking vibrator.

Related posts:

1. Do those knobs and switches really do anything?
2. Can the Eye Toy Kinetic really make you sweat? I couldn’t believe it!
3. Capturing analog video on the Mac

There is a driver inside USBWireless-10.6 for Snow Leopard, and it will complain during installation that the RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext failed to install. This is expected, just ignore it, the installation will complete successfully.

At the time of this writing, the WUSB600N v2 isn’t included in the Info.plist for the kext, so I had to edit /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist in a text editor and add the appropriate bits. Search for “Linksys – RT2870 – 2″ and duplicate the <key> and <dict> elements, renaming the key to “Linksys – RT2870 – 3″ and the idProduct integer from “113″ to “121″. Here’s what it should look like after the changes:

        <key>Linksys - RT2870 - 3</key>
        <dict>
            <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
            <string>com.Ralink.driver.RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
            <key>IOClass</key>
            <string>RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
            <key>IOProviderClass</key>
            <string>IOUSBDevice</string>
            <key>idProduct</key>
            <integer>121</integer>
            <key>idVendor</key>
            <integer>5943</integer>
        </dict>

After making this change, unload/reload the kext or reboot your machine, and then plug in your WUSB600N and you should get a window popping up telling you that a new network device has been detected.

I hope this helps someone, as I was totally disappointed when I learned that Linksys wasn’t supporting this device on Mac “out of the box.”

Related posts:

1. TiVo Hacking: Getting a Linksys WUSB54G working
2. Covering large areas with some Linksys WRT54GS’es and DD-WRT
3. Linksys WMP54GS with Broadcom BCM4306 chipset under Linux 2.6 kernel

My initial opinion of this particular hotspot is really unpredictable latency and packet loss. Speedtest.net results:

It’s not bad – I’m posting this blog entry from the connection – but the latency and packet loss makes interactive sessions like SSH really painful. Still, it’s usable to get some work done – email, web browsing, etc.

Tags: Optimum WiFi, Kinnelon, NJ

Related posts:

1. Life after a week of Cablevision/Optimum Online
2. Covering large areas with some Linksys WRT54GS’es and DD-WRT

I know you’re jealous. Don’t feel bad, it’s okay, you should be. These frames even come with 581% more cowbell.

For my own notes, my prescription is now -5.50 OD/OS sph, DS (SPH) cyl, and PD 32/33 (65).

Tags: vision, glasses, Zenni Optical, tie-dye

No related posts.

Not long at all, right?

Well, I seriously fail at retail therapy. I was given a $100 Visa gift card as a Giftmas 2008 present, and I can’t think of a single thing I want to buy with it. Is that pathetic, or what?

I thought about picking up a video game or two, but I really don’t have the time nor motivation to play them. Modern video games totally lack the necessary charm and appeal of older games. They use advanced graphics and cinematic sequences to “wow” people, but the gameplay is empty. You can’t compensate for a boring game with eye candy alone, at least for me.

I thought about movies or music, but there hasn’t been music released in the last 5 years that I thought was good enough to own except for a few songs which I picked up on iTunes or through Amazon MP3. Same goes for movies — the ones I care to watch, I’ve already seen and I haven’t seen a movie in years that was good enough to be worth watching twice.

Ah, what about books? Goodness, there’s that free time issue again! I still have books sitting on my shelf that I want to read that I haven’t read yet. Buying more just seems wasteful, at this point.

Surprisingly, as a technology geek, I’m not a big gadget junkie. I went through the phase of collecting shiny doo-dads and frankly, I got tired of throwing them out when they lost their shine. Is there really such a thing as a must-have item? I haven’t found one, yet.

About the only thing that I still really like is food. I love to eat! I guess the best way to spend this money is to take the family out and enjoy a nice meal. Oh, but then the dilemma of deciding where to go sets in …

I guess there are worse problems to have than not knowing how to spend $100, but it really bothers me that I don’t have a go-to list of reasonably inexpensive things that I’d want to buy. This is why I’m such a hard person to buy gifts for: I truly don’t want anything. I don’t mean this in the polite “oh, it’s okay, don’t worry” sort of way, but in the “oh, please, not another thing that I have to find a place for and hold onto until I get tired of it and throw it out” kind of way.

Maybe I’m truly able to find happiness with what I already have. But, a part of me — probably conditioned and programmed through advertising as I was growing up — feels like I’m “incomplete” without more material possessions. Part of me asks “what’s wrong with me?” because I don’t already know what I’d go out and buy with this money. Do you know what I’m talking about?

What would you go and buy with $100 right now? Or, are you like me, without any clue what you’d do with it?

Tags: retail therapy

No related posts.

Of course, on the leg of the trip from New York to Senegal, the flight staff kept rebooting the system trying to get it to work, with very little luck. Most of the time we just stared at the Linux boot process hanging, trying to talk to the NFS server. Fortunately, they got it working for the Senegal to South Africa leg of the trip.

Tags: South African Airways, Linux, fail

Related posts:

1. Six weeks in South Africa (Part 1)
2. flight, grounded
3. 64-bit AOLserver on Debian 4.0 (etch) Linux works

Apparently this puzzle type is what Stewart Coffin calls “Locked Nest.”

It may not look like much, but the challenge is to assemble it from a completely disassembled state. It’s not only geometrically challenging, having to visualize the pieces in their final states, but physically challenging, having to hold the thing together as you put it together. Several times, while I was working on the puzzle, a pin would slide out or a rod would be out of alignment and the pin would miss it.

This is definitely a puzzle I’ll enjoy solving many times over. It’s quite challenging.

Tags: Mongolian, puzzle, Stewart Coffin

Related posts:

1. Twin Tangle by ThinkFun, if you like brainteaser puzzles

It turns out that the Linksys WUSB54G v4 uses the Ralink 2570 chipset. Fortunately, there’s been effort on native Linux drivers for the Ralink family of wireless chipsets. The hurdle, of course, is that the TiVo’s MIPS R5432 is big-endian, so it presents a bit of a challenge porting the driver to the TiVo.

Working off the latest code for the legacy rt2570 driver from CVS, I’ve gotten it to compile using TiVo’s Linux 2.4.20 kernel. Loading the module, however, results in this:

rt2570: init
usb.c: registered new driver rt2570
rt2570: idVendor = 0x13b1, idProduct = 0xd
rt2570: idVendor = 0x13b1, idProduct = 0xd
rt2570: using permanent MAC addr
rt2570: Active MAC addr: 00:12:17:89:f5:02.
rt2570: driver version 1.0.0
Unaligned Access to 0x80230b2b in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80230b2d in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021b3dc
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021b408
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021dc2c
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021dc08
Unaligned Access to 0x80357076 in kernel mode at 0xc021cd8c
Unaligned Access to 0x80230f47 in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80230f49 in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04
Unaligned Access to 0x80231155 in kernel mode at 0xc0217be4
Unaligned Access to 0x80231157 in kernel mode at 0xc0217c04

So, now I get to go fishing through /proc/ksyms and try to fix up all these unaligned access errors. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get through all of this and get the driver working.

Anyone out there have experience porting Linux device drivers like this? Got any tips or techniques that might help me? I’d really love any help I can get …

Update: I’m posting my debugging progress in a rt2x00 forum thread. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, right?

Update: I’ve gotten it working! I’ve addressed the majority of the unaligned access traps and I can now use my WUSB54G as a wireless NIC on my TiVo! Here’s a patch against rt2570-cvs-2008102616 of the driver and the corresponding kernel module binary:

• rt2570-tivo-mips.patch
• rt2570.o.gz (1.42 MB)
  MD5: 64605e019929db714d583d160a6b513c

If you have a SA2 TiVo and want to use a Linksys WUSB54G as your wireless NIC, this driver is what you want. It works for me, anyway!

Tags: Linux, TiVo, open source, hacking, Linksys WUSB54G, Ralink 2570

Related posts:

1. Linksys WMP54GS with Broadcom BCM4306 chipset under Linux 2.6 kernel
2. Using a Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N on MacOS X 10.6
3. Covering large areas with some Linksys WRT54GS’es and DD-WRT