Winding Road From Hi8 To H.264, Part 1

I got my first video camera (aka camcorder) back in 1992. I don't recall whether digital recording was available in consumer devices at that time, but I chose one that recorded Hi8, an analog format.

My wife, dog, and I were living in a rented house in Princeton, NJ. During the week we each had our respective long commutes, so the cam was used mainly on the weekend to record our dog and the deer that wandered into our backyard. Years passed, we moved, bought a house, and had a son. Although I was by no means an avid recorder, by 2002 I had a couple dozen two hour tapes lying around.

Watching the tapes was more trouble than it was worth. The main issues were (1) I had done only a so-so job of writing down what was on the tapes (2) the camcorder was painfully slow rewinding and fast forwarding and (3) each tape had highlights separated by footage that was not especially interesting to watch.

In order to capture the highlights and create movies that could be burned to DVD, I bought Pinnacle Studio 8 AV. This bundle included the Studio 8 software for capturing video from an analog source, editing it, then creating a finished product, either a video file for the computer or a burned DVD. Along with this came the DC10plus, a PCI card to capture video from an analog source.

The capture was pretty decent. It produced AVI files with MJPEG encoding. The quality was generally about as good as the source in terms of resolution (608 x 464) and clarity. I believe the captured video was interlaced the same way as the source, but the codec was good enough to play this back without nasty artifacts.

However, the capture was not without issues. First, it needed to be done without other applications running, otherwise frames would be dropped. Second, it produced files that were, especially in those days, huge. A 9 minute capture required a 1.6 GB file. My rig at that time had something like a pair of 40 GB hard drives.

To the extent that I had the patience, though, I could locate highlights on my tapes, capture a few minutes of each, then compose DVDs. Locating sections of tape that I wanted to capture was still the biggest pain, but I did create a few DVDs. The quality of the DVDs was decent. Studio 8 encoded to MPEG-2 at up to about 6 Mbps. That's not as good a commercial DVDs, but reasonable considering the quality of my source content.

About a year ago I bought a MacBook for my birthday. One of my desires was to use iMovie to create more videos, from both the older (pre-2002) tapes and the ones I had recorded since then. I figured with the larger hard drive I could work with digital versions of entire tapes, which would make selecting footage much easier.

Little did I foresee the problems I would have. I captured a full tape on my PC (which by this time was a new model with considerably more disk space), copied it to the Mac and tried to open it. It would not play. Some research indicated that I might need a different codec for MJPEG. I downloaded every MJPEG codec I could find for the Mac with no success.

Since the Studio 8 software can create other formats for output, I investigated the possibility of those. As far as I could tell, MPEG-2 was not an option for input to iMovie. The resolution and bit rates available for WMV output in Studio 8 were not acceptible. Intel's Indeo codec was not supported on the Mac, at least not for the version of iMovie I was using. The Cinepak codec produced good movies on the PC, but the audio was MIA on the Mac. That was almost a blessing, since the Cinepak rendering on my PC was glacial. The only output I could produce on the PC that iMovie could properly read on the Mac was DV rendered within an AVI.

Rather than solving all my problems, this yielded new ones. The DV files were larger than the MJPEG, which is not surprising since DV has no compression. Four minutes of video produced a file of about 900 MB. Worse, there was an iMovie incompatibility for some files produced by Studio 8. The original AVI spec supported files up to 1 GB. While the format for larger files eventually became standardized, it appears that the output from Studio 8 does not follow this. I am not sure the exact nature of the incompatibility, but I could see in the output from the GSpot application that the larger AVIs had a structure that confused it somewhat as well.

I did some work with creating DV-AVI files from my captured video, but it was still an unpleasant process. I recently set out to find a better method, which I will discuss in my next post.

McAfee Meandering

A friend called this morning with a problem installing McAfee software on her (relatively) new PC. The computer had come with a McAfee trial installed. When the trial expired and she was asked to pay for a one year subscription, she uninstalled the software. As a Comcast Internet customer, she had a free McAfee install coming to her.

After going to comcast.net/security, entering her username and password, she started the installation of the McAfee software. She soon got a dialog that said "McAfee Integrated Security Platform Installer has encountered a problem and needs to close." Several re-tries, including reboots, gave the same results.

The phone runaround then began. Comcast support said to call McAfee. McAfee said to call Microsoft. Microsoft said to call Dell. Dell wanted money to even attempt to address the problem.

After receiving our friend's call, I first googled the error message. The results were mainly postings a year or older. The consensus advice was to uninstall MSXML2 and MSXML3, then reinstall them. However, this was clearly not successful for everyone. Other advice included running McAfee's uninstall clean-up (MCPR.exe), although links to that were all broken. I also happened upon a page McAfee labeled as Free Tools, one of which was supposed to check the installation of McAfee software.

When our friend brought her computer over, the first thing I did was try to install the software. The results were the same for me as for her. Since the computer had the 64-bit version of Vista, I chose to skip any attempt to uninstall and re-install any version of MSXML. Instead, I went to McAfee's Free Tools and ran the McAfee Virtual Technician.

I was a little concerned when this turned out to be a full-fledged app with an installation program, since there was every chance that the root cause of the install issue might cause the tool's install to fail as well. Fortunately, the install proceeded without a hitch. The app ran and told me there was no McAfee software installed. I had actually hoped it would tell me there was a broken installation of the trial version. Anyway, the tool then asked if I wanted to install something, and when I said yes, cited 5 or 6 things that needed to be done in preparation, such as cleaning out temporary files. I let the tool take care of those, retried the McAfee security installation, and it worked.