Archive for March, 2010

Explorer.exe Crashes After Selecting a Large HuffYUV AVI File

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I’m playing with massive 20GB-90GB video captures from the TV tuner. You learn a few tricks when you start playing with 50GB files. It’s mind boggling, only a few years ago, the hard drive in my day-to-day computer was not this big!

Anyway, they’re HuffYUV compressed AVI’s. HuffYUV is a neat codec for video capture, it’s lossless, and it’s fast. I am transcoding these files to MPEG4 on the computer downstairs, but, Windows’ explorer.exe kept crashing every time I highlighted the .avi. It was either the massive file size, or something with the AVI. It turned out to be the code, HuffYUV, I think.

Installing ffdshow tryouts, which includes a multitude of codecs for Windows, including HuffYUV, seems to have done the trick! Plus, I’ve probably updated a whole bunch of codecs that were several years old on that computer.

Bingo Cards for Easter – 2010

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Easter is right around the corner. We invite teachers, and everyone else who is hosting an Easter themed event, to visit print-bingo.com for a quick way to generate Easter Themed Bingo Cards.

Our Easter word list is only a starting point for your custom bingo card design. Make the bingo cards completely customized by adding or removing words to get bingo boards that are perfect for you.

Basic use of our bingo card generator is free! Those who want every bingo design feature that we have available, an upgrade is only $10.

Groupon.com is coming to Vancouver

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Groupon.com is a new coupon concept that is coming to Vancouver. They’ve been doing heavy web advertising today, I guess they are geo-targeting the Lower Mainland. The concept, is that a store offers a discount, usually a discounted gift certificate such as $12 for a $25 Gift Card, and Groupon members buy-in. The offer only goes live if a minimum number of Groupon members joins the deal. It’s been in the USA for a while, I think I heard about it a few months ago.

I did a quick Google search to find out example deals, this article about the San Jose site came up.

I signed up, so that I can see which local retailers give Groupon.com a try. If you’re into new marketing concepts, or if you are a retailer yourself, sign up for your own Groupon.com Vancouver account – yes, I get a referral credit for that link.

I’m keeping an eye on Groupon in Vancouver. If it hits critical mass, I suspect that one or more of my retail clients will be experimenting on Groupon.com sooner rather than later.

Recording from a Hauppauge HVR-950Q USB TV Tuner to VirtualDub

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics are over. IMHO, they were awesome. Unfortunately, it’s time to get back to work. Almost.

I want to record some video from Shaw On Demand of a curling event that I attended live. I have access to a Hauppauge HVR-950Q USB TV tuner – a great piece of hardware paired with terrible software.

I had multiple issues, but in the end, as I type this, I have my old laptop capturing the video from the composite (i.e. “RCA” video) input from the Shaw Digital Box.

I started this adventure on my day-to-day laptop, a 1.5 year old laptop running Vista. On this computer, the WinTV 6 software could not properly display the signal from the composite input. It would get about 1 frame per second, plus some really weird “chipmunkesque” spurts of audio. It was unusable to view the composite feed, never mind trying to record from it. I then tried the newly released WinTV 7 software from the Hauppauge website. It was worse – it is even more bloated, even slower, and still unable to view the composite input properly. Note: I have previously watched the Over-the-Air HDTV channels with this unit, so it’s specific to the composite input, and it might be specific to my laptop. There is a big difference between OTA HDTV and composite – an OTA signal is compressed MPEG2 and the unit passes it directly over the USB to the TV tuning software, whereas, the composite is fed in some sort of raw format that requires massive USB bandwidth – i.e. there is no on-device MPEG encoding.

I tried VirtualDub next, the free video capture software that I’ve used from time-to-time for years. VDub could preview the signal fine, and with much less processor overhead. Unfortunately, when I tried to start the capture, I kept getting this error: “The Capture device does not support the video format”. I eventually find a solution to this error, but only after I tried my ancient laptop.

I tried using my ancient HP Celeron 1.1Ghz laptop. It runs XP, and my theory was that the Hauppauge software just doesn’t like Vista. This might be true. I was able to use the WinTV 6 software on the old laptop fine… eventually. You have to run the install, and the setup from an administrative login. Otherwise, the software will crash hard, without giving any clues as to why. Watching the composite input in WinTV 6 used a lot of the CPU, but it is a 5 year old laptop, so it’s all relative. It was unfortunately, far too slow to do a live encoding to MPEG.

So, I knew that the composite signal worked reasonably well. I tried VirtualDub on the ancient computer. I got the same error when trying to start the capture. The fix? The trick is to look at the VirtualDub device properties to see in which format the preview was coming in. In my case, it’s 720×480 UYVY. Once I set this on my custom capture format, VirtualDub worked fine. I’m not able to encode to MPEG live, I’m using HuffYUV and 10s of GB of hard drive space to capture 2 hours of video, but it will work. I’ll have to transcode to MPEG4 later.

In the end, I could probably have used VirtualDub on the first laptop that I tried now that I knew how to get a compatible capture format. According to Google, there aren’t many people who have had these problems… I feel special. Sometimes I wish things would “just work.”