Monday, December 12, 2011

My TouchPad Today: Quiet Times

Its been quiet on the TouchPad front for me over the past several days.

HP's announcement that webOS is going open source was no big surprise... It was one of the common options/scenarios that had been floating around since Meg Whitman reversed course on Leo Apotheker's decision to scrap the PC unit and kill the TouchPad.

Otherwise, nothing worth sharing has happened with my TouchPad.

On another front, though...

I've spent some time getting a now-ancient Sony 8mm TRV350 camcorder (vintage 2003) working with my Windows 7 laptop and digitizing/editing some tapes recorded twenty years ago on an earlier 8mm camcorder..

The problem was that my current laptop -- the camcorder can connect to a computer by either Fire Wire, USB, or composite connections -- doesn't have a Fire Wire port, nor composite video connections, and Windows 7 does not natively support USB video streaming.

The solution was buying an EzCap116 USB video capture device on Amazon.

The device installs a driver on the computer that allows Windows 7 to support USB video streaming. The camcorder then connects to the device via composite RCA-Type connectors and the device connects to the computer via USB.

The video is captured as an mpeg2 in an ArcSoft program (TotalMedia ShowBiz 3.5) bundled with the capture device.

I import the video into Windows Live Movie Maker to do my edits and output the final file in .wmv.

Its a decent solution, at a modest expense ($30), to extend the useful life of the camcorder and do something with a boxful of tapes that are deteriorating more with each passing day.



This post was written on my TouchPad


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