Holiday Capture

I am off to America (florida specifically ... groan, no offense to floridians, but a nice big city is much more up my alley) for 2 weeks from the 23rd of octoberto the 3rd of november (so... it is 10 days). SKY One is airing (re-airing) 'Is Harry on the Boat', due to them never releasing this on DVD, I will capture it. The issue is (hope it is becomming a little obvious now) is that I need it captured whils't I am gone. Some of the family are staying here, so to avoid it recording the wrong channel on SKY, I have set it to 'Series-Link' and 'Autoview' Star-Trek: The Next Generation every night which is on before 'Is Harry on the Boat', this will change my Digital Satellite box to channel 106 ready for the 2:40 (am!!!) play of each episode. My question is this; I use VirtualDub (sync fix thingy) to capture my programms at 576x576 (to convert to 576x432 xvid) or 480x576 (to convert to svcd)... How can I make Virtual Dub start capturing at 2:38ish every night for 60 mins, with a decent level of reliability. I think I have enough room for what would be about 8-10 hours of XVID at either 576x576 or obviously more at 480x576. If anyone has any ideas about what to do with the little red dot as I cant series link it to my sky one entry in 'other channels', please, dont hold your peace! Cheers in advance

Try this: It includes the sync patch and a timer tool. I couldn't get it working with the BTWinCap drivers so I ended up messing around with ScriptIt (uses scripts to automate processes).

that is supposed to be the german... also, is there a way in the event of a power cut, that I can make my pc (KD7-Raid ABit board) to switch back on, (it logs in to win2k automatically) and resume capturing timer? harrison

You might want to try AVI_IO as capturing application. It has built in timer and you can set it up to record at the same time every day.

The problem with AVI_IO is that it doesn't resample the audio to keep the sync. It just adds or drops frames, which is not nice at all when you can use a free program to get proper sync without that:) Using the timer or creating scripts to automate capturing is not that hard, it just takes a little time and effort to check that everything works before leaving on holiday.

It contains more info than I want, I only want 576x576 much of info so I can convert it down to 576x432... 720 is (144?) more than I want, just wasted PRECIOUS space. End of argument. i'd like to use VirtualDub if possible because it has given me smashing results in the past, plus the noise reduce on 4 really does make my S-Video box shine! harrison