Monday, February 14, 2005
Video Capture
It seems like my homelife ends up overlapping with my professional life. About 4 or 5 years ago my brother, Alec called me up and asked if I wanted a ReplayTV. I was pretty clueless about what he was talking about--I vaguely remembered the contraption at his home--and said, "Uh sure." Turned out that he had gotten a larger capacity one through some corporate swap out.
This is one of the most addictive contraptions you can imagine. They are hard disk based recorders for television. They actively adapt if a TV show slot moves. Think TiVo, but with more free features.
The latest iteration of this platform is networkable allowing the user to not only get TV guide data over a network connection but to also download shows to a local computer using a free software package called DVArchive. This, in itself, is a godsend. I can take television with me on airplanes and catch up.
Alright, now we enter into what might seem, at first, to be a non-sequiteur. Bear with me, it does relate.
WESTAF gives grants to presenters who bring performers from out of state into one of the 12 western states. We've been doing this for decades. For the past few years we've been collecting the application information online using a Web based system we designed. In the past, somebody would send in reams of paper along with video tapes and audio cassettes. Last year all the panel books were put onto tablet PCs eliminating several thousand page books. This year we're taking it one step further. Using ReplayTV we will digitize samples from many hundred applicants and then we'll use DVArchive to download the samples to the tablets. No more VCRs in our panel process.
This is one of the most addictive contraptions you can imagine. They are hard disk based recorders for television. They actively adapt if a TV show slot moves. Think TiVo, but with more free features.
The latest iteration of this platform is networkable allowing the user to not only get TV guide data over a network connection but to also download shows to a local computer using a free software package called DVArchive. This, in itself, is a godsend. I can take television with me on airplanes and catch up.
Alright, now we enter into what might seem, at first, to be a non-sequiteur. Bear with me, it does relate.
WESTAF gives grants to presenters who bring performers from out of state into one of the 12 western states. We've been doing this for decades. For the past few years we've been collecting the application information online using a Web based system we designed. In the past, somebody would send in reams of paper along with video tapes and audio cassettes. Last year all the panel books were put onto tablet PCs eliminating several thousand page books. This year we're taking it one step further. Using ReplayTV we will digitize samples from many hundred applicants and then we'll use DVArchive to download the samples to the tablets. No more VCRs in our panel process.
