The new toy

As part of my tax return, I got myself a TV tuner card for my computer (AVERTV 303 from memory). It can pick up FM radio, TV and, my prime reason for buying, copy my old VHS videos so I can put them on DVD and get rid of the 1/2 cubic meter of VHS tapes. Just what I need, another task involving hours of fiddling with computers.

The FM radio works great. I have a remote and can switch FM/TV channels while lying in bed.

On Saturday I bought a new aerial so that I could actually pick up channels. Then I found that the reception sucked for everything except channel ten and the cable was too short to shift the aerial round. So I swapped it with my parents 20 year old aerial with 2 meters of cable. This worked better for both of us, I got better reception, as strangely enough so did they. They also got an aerial that doesn't fall off the tv everytime the wind blows the curtain - the new one has sucker pads. Of course the reception is still not great for non ten channels. I suspect I should have spent more than $10 and got an aerial that actually advertised that it worked for UHF - I think 10 is VHF and the others aren't. This is pure guesswork on my part though.

Once the TV was ok - sort of -, I tested that it would record TV channels and it seemed to record onto my computer at the same resolution I was seeing on the live feed. So I attached my video and an old copy of Star trek the next generation. The one where Data gets a girlfriend. After much hassle, I discovered that TV channel 68 picked up the video. The TV sound wasn't great but picture was ok. From the help menu, it seemed that video should have been picked up by composite or Svideo - I think the former rather than the latter as the cabel attachment diagram for Svideo was different. Neither worked though.

Then came the real hassle. After recording to computer in DVD format (which seems to be a DVD compatable version of MPEG-II), I tried recording to DVD. Four frizbees and three different software programs later, I still can't get my DVD player to identify the DVD. It will work with VCD versions I burned with ROXIO videowave though.
Part of the problem is that I have light versions of my burning software and they cunningly leave out DVD parts. The other part is the bits of them I can use to record TV/video seem to want to record channel 4 - which is a blue screen, and I'm having trouble changing that and getting them to pick up video anyway. Nero says it will burn to DVD but that function only picks up *.ivo, *.vob and some other non-recognisable file format. None of which are files I seem to be able to make. Power DVD seemed happy to make a DVD from mpeg, but my DVD player just didn't recognise it. I may actually have to buy some proper software and get rid of all the others.

Even if I get that working, as I suspected from when I played the files on my computer, video playback sound is atrocious. I played the VCD on my DVD player and the old VHS tape. The image quality is identical but the sound went to pot. I may have to get different sound cabling. Apparently you can get a cable that has separate left and right cables (or was it sound and audio) from the video and then a single other end to plug into the card (rather than the old aerial type connection).

I am so going to understand this by the time I get it working - aren't computers fun.

Feel free to add comments/advice containing weird acronyms and high tech geeky mumbo jumbo.