How's that G450etv review coming on, Chris?

[Nick Piercey]

Shall I pop over and help you out?




Nick

[This_Idiot]

Dya know Nick, I'm almost tempted

OK, here's the latest. I installed the eTV on PC2 (my test machine), replacing the G400 Marvel that was in it. Coincidentally I upgraded the machine from 128 to 256Mb RAM due to a special offer from Scan (in fact I bought two identical sticks and installed one each on my two main machines). From then on, PC2 has been behaving like a teenager. It hates me, it won't play, it'll do anything I ask within its attention span (variable), it hates me again. I took out the new Ram stick and for a couple of days all was well, and then it started playing up again. Basically it's telling me that my boot drive is shot, from BIOS as well as from Widows. I've scandisked with zero result, but since then I haven't had a problem.
However, I also got a "real" job instead of freelancing. This has a number of pros and cons. The immediate "pro" is that I'm no longer unemployed, and therefore have to go to work. One of the "pro/cons" is that I don't get 4 evenings a week to myself working away from home. While this is magic on the personal front, it doesn't do much for me getting down to issues with the hardware.

Anyway, I do have the eTV installed and currently working happily, and to be fair most of the issues I've had are with the mobo/chip rather than with the eTV. Oh, and the dodgy set of drivers that I was initially sent, since updated. Really I'd like to wipe the machine and start from scratch, since that's the way that I normally run a review, but on this bitch I'm not sure that I dare.....

Did you ever sort out how to connect Telewest cable to the G400 input ? I'd love to find a way of feeding cable into the "office" here.

Cheers

Chris

[Nick Piercey]

Hi Chris,

Stick it on a number 11… It’ll be here in about 25 minutes!

I’ll give it a good home for a few days


Glad to hear you’ve got a “real job”. Great news.

The closest I got to getting a picture from my TW cable box was the default screen that trails all the movies!


At the moment, I’ve got the basic TW analogue package plus Sky Digital (so I can tape one side and watch the other, not too much of an extravagance, I don’t have an aerial!) and connect things up via a 10m cable I got from Keene Electronics, this routes into my Sony D8 and through the Pyro.

Would these new fangled remote senders help you at all?

The quality difference between TW analogue and Sky Digital is quite something, once you ignore all the “fade in, fade out” artefacts that Sky has!!! More bitrate, please, Mr Murdoch!

I may upgrade to TW Digital, because it’s cheaper that the analogue package. Plus the fact they’ve got their act together and as they’re reducing the cable modem prices I’ve started warming to them again!


I know from various postings from “The Doc” et al that the G450eTv can capture using a variety of codecs. Does the PIC codec playback from the MSPro6 timeline OK with only the usual rendering?

What I’m looking forward to most is the huffy captures... Now I’ve upgraded to a P3 850 and a couple of new Maxtors. That should be within my reach.

I’m also thinking of ditching my SBLive!… with hindsight I think that was probably the cause of the green flashes that meant I couldn’t live with a G400TV. I’m thinking of going with the Echo Mia, primarily because of the digital in/out that it has. The Santa Cruz comes highly recommended, but doesn’t have the digi in which I need.


Enjoy you nights in with the family.


Thanks once again,

Nick.

P.S. Didn’t see you at Villa Park for the Semi Final?

[Traderx25]

I just got the 450 eTV and I have only a few small issues but hopefully I'll straighten them out soon.

It does capture a bunch of different codecs and good at it.

On my Radeon AiW previously it took a long time to render or convert raw mpg to VCD mpeg, the eTV does it like really fast. Better software codecs I presume.

I have a weird problem. It seems PC VCR 2.0 cannot find my Audio Input no matter how I configure my sound recording settings to take AUDIO IN as the source, it still captures vids with no sound.

In ULEAD's VIDEOSTUDIO captured audio just fine.

As for PC VCR 2.0, I had some tapes with color glares and copyright messages. Then I popped in a real copyrighted tape, it didn't even say copyright. Weird.

[This_Idiot]

Hi Nick,

It's good to hear from you again, it's been a while. Sorry, you didn't see me at Villa Park, football (trans. "Soccer" for N.A) isn't one of my priorities. At least, not enough to attend, although I sometimes enjoy premiere/euro matches on TV. Funnily enough, that's the one regret about being based back at home, in St Annes all of us used to get together for club european matches regardless of alignment (mainly Toonies oddly enough) and have a couple of sherbets while watching the big screen.

Living our side of the City, you'll understand that both my daughter and the youngest son are both Blues fans. The middle'un abstains, since he isn't interested in football at all (unless he can work out a better configuration for goalposts with less margin for official error etc). As my dear lady hails from the foreign territory situated to the north, any affiliation that she may have (probably Meadowbank, but she's giving nothing away) is unimportant, and my own allegiances are based on geographical/fondness factors. As in Shrewsbury Town (Lived in Shropshire for the 7 happiest years of my childhood),Wycombe Wanderers (who were always the underdogs when I was at school in Wycombe from 1970-76),and Norwich City (I always tuned into Radio Broadland while I was working n my rally car Saturday afternoons).

I always feel good when the Blues bring in a result (probably because I don't expect them to), and I also love to watch the Villa in the internationals. Luckily No3 cild isn't watching me type this or he'd be exhorting me to change "Villa" to "Vanilla").

Nick, isn't about time we sorted out a "west Midlands" chapter of the MURC/DTVW and tried to arrange the occasional local meeting ?

For that matter, how come this idea isn't taing off all over the world? For instance, I know of several regulars in both Montreal and Quebec, Finland, etc. Should we be sorting out a members register and putting locals int touch with each other ?

[Nick Piercey]

Hi Chris,

The "meetings" sound good... Plenty of "places" to visit locally!


Will you explain "sherbet" to our cousins from over the pond, or shall I?

[This_Idiot]

No mate, I'll leave it all to you

I will however try and rig up something on the site frontpage so that people in relatively close locations can converse and maybe meet up (please will everyone bear in mind that this is now www.desktopvideoworld.co.uk and bookmark it. Our dotcom hosts still aren't able to switch my email back on, and the only remaining vestige of the dotcom site is the redirect script. I'll have to arrange for the dotcom site to be rehosted soon.

Cheers

Chris