This website has been archived from TrainWeb.org/girr to TrainWeb.US/girr.

Lately I've been playing with Internet video. As can be seen from the results, I've got a lot of learning to do. However, I'm posting a few postage stamp sized videos here. I suppose that the quality of the videos will improve as I figure out how to do this stuff right.

I purchased a very inexpensive XLR8 USB video digitizer for my Macintosh so that I could digitize the analog video that I had recorded from an X-10 Remote Video Camera using the method shown at my X-10 Video Tips page.

The camera radio link is not completely solid which results in dropouts in the video. This is somewhat annoying while watching the analog video, but the digitizer gets all confused by the dropouts and makes them much worse as it looses video lock and has to take some time to recover. I suppose that over time, I'll figure out how to make the digitizer more tolerant of loss of a valid video signal or even better, figure out how to get a cleaner video in the first place.

Video can get really large and must be heavily compressed to be suitable for internet use. Straight digitized video at 320 x 240 pixel resolution runs about 150 Mbyte/minute. After being compressed with a Sorenson filter in a postage stamp sized window at 15 fps and having the audio digitized at 8 kHz monaural (the audio track isn't very interesting anyway) it gets down to about 1.5 MByte/minute.

The table below indexes the video that I've done so far. As I get better at it, I'll replace the worst of it with better sequences.

The movie files are stored in Apple's QuickTime video format. If your computer can't handle QuickTime now, you can get it for most versions of Windows or the MacOS at:

This page has been accessed times since 2 Feb 2001.

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© 2001-2002 George Schreyer
Created Feb 2, 2001
Last Updated June 16, 2002