Beyond TV 4
Posted by Andy Rush on 10 Nov 2005 at 10:33 am | Tagged as: Audio & Video, News & Commentary
As Snapstream’s blog exclaims, “Oh yes, it’s here!” What does version 4 add? Well for me the DivX support is the number one reason. Over-the-Air HDTV support will also be nice, but I won’t be able to take advantage of that just yet. I’ll use the DivX setting for my Archos Av420. This is an important part of my Home Theater PC experience. I’ve already moved on from version 1.0. Updates will follow as I progress. Time to download and install the upgrade.
[...] Now back to the setup - Cox cable HD. The box they provide (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250HD for those HD geeks out there) has 2 Firewire ports on the back of it. I have a basic Firewire card in my PC (the Dell that runs my Beyond TV setup). A while back I tried connecting the port to see if I could get a signal, but I couldn’t get it to use a proper driver. I forgot about it for a while. Then thanks to a blog I read called HD Beat, I found this post about Firewire ports on set-top boxes. It lead me to this article where I got the drivers (sorry, registration required) for essentially a Panasonic D-VHS deck. The instructions were great and soon I was digitizing 1920×1080 video! It does stress out a computer trying to capture 30 frames per second at that size. Anyway the final piece, the screen grab, is accomplished with Nero Showtime. Now I have a 1920×1080 bitmap image of Letterman, which I reduce down to 400×227 to fit on this page. I’ve only just gotten started and suddenly a 250 GB hard drive is tiny! [...]
Nice Blog. =) You had said that you found the driver for the 3250HD? Ive been looking for it for some time cant find it. =( You said something about registration required… Where do I need to register for such a item? Thanx. =)
The driver isn’t specifically for the 3250, but is compatible. It doesn’t seem like you need to register anymore. Again the directions are pretty much all here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=403695