woodworking channel is online

[sleddogg]

Hi everyone, my first post and let me say congrats to all here for thier part in one of the best sources of info on ww i've come across online to date, I visit everyday. I'm a one year fledgling to woodworking and really depend on folks like you who are willing to share the wealth, thanks.

Anyway, I see that thewoodworkingchannel.com is now up and running and although I haven't seen much of the content in only 20 min. of viewing, I'm excited to see the prospects come to life. They seem to be throwing alot of Sam Maloof out there so far. Anyway, I immediately checked here to see if word was out and didn't see anything obvious (forgive me if I missed any previous announcement), so just letting you all know.

sleddogg.

[rickd]

hi,

welcome to bt3central! thanks for the info on the ww channel. i've been checking every so often but didn't know until now that it was finally up and running - should be pretty good once it gets going.

[John Hunter]

sleddogg,

Welcome aboard.

[Wood_workur]

Welcome, sleddogg

Yesterday, I noticed that is was the 24th, so I went on to check it out. I think it is okay right now. There are 3 major shows: Sam Maloof, ROuter Workshop, and someoother one. It will be a few months before it really gets good, but the video quality is great. I set my 200kbps compt to view the 300kbps video, and I worked well. One thing I did notice is that You can't record the channel, usless you get out a video camera. I tried taking screen shots and videos of the screen, but the video blacked out. But it still is a good website.

[mschrank]

Welcome, sleddogg
One thing I did notice is that You can't record the channel, usless you get out a video camera. I tried taking screen shots and videos of the screen, but the video blacked out. But it still is a good website.

I think that's in the works....

I hope so as I waste, er spend too much time at work on this site...really can't get away with watching woodworking shows in the middle of the day

[thrytis]

It looks like they want to have a bit of their content contributed by their viewers. I'm looking forward to that part. How about a shop tour of Rod's shop, a segment by Loring on making a remote relay for a dust collector, or someone "hot-rodding" their inexpensive tool to add features found in a lot more expensive versions. There are a lot of creative ideas out there related to woodworking, lets see them in video!

[glencross]

woodworking channel

have tried several times to interact with other woodworkers the same as we do here but INHO all they are interested in is pushing products..all i could see were ads.anyone else got any other opinions? am i missing something?

[sacherjj]

It is obvious that they have to push some products. Bandwidth to push video isn't free. All of the video is paid for by advertising.

For recording the video or even grabing screen shots, you need to understand how media players work. Most programs render to the screen with the Windows API. This means that Windows understands what they look like. If you hit PrintScreen, Windows knows what pixels to use to create the bitmap in the clipboard memory.

With a media player or DVD player, a certain area of the screen is allocated for playback. The software then calls to the video driver, bypassing the OS. If they didn't do this, the performance would be seriously degraded. All the OS knows about is the color that is allocated to the player's rectangle. Sometimes you can drag windows over the DVD player and see the video through the text, with a black overlay color... But I digress. Where was I? Oh, yes...

For recording, I have only done it one way. I did it to win a bet that I couldn't crack a pay movie site DRM. The fact is if the signal is viewable somewhere, you cannot protect it. But I won't get into a Diminishing Rights Management discussion here.

FRAPS is a software package designed to record the frames per second of a video game, and optionally capture the video. It can detect the raw writing to the screen from a media player, as games have to do the same thing. Thus, you can "record" the channel with this.

There may well be other stream recorders out there which would also work. That is the only method I have used. It records it to an uncompressed format, so you need to encode it after the fact to become viewable. I might let this run on my editing PC at home, then cut out the "commercials" and render or my collection of woodworking files.

[final_t]

Sigh

Itty bitty window, buffering buffering buffering...

[gjbivin]

Itty bitty window, buffering buffering buffering...

Try right-clicking on the itty bitty window; you should get a menu of options. If you choose Zoom, you can expand the window to full-screen. Press the ESC key to go back to the regular display.

You will get the best results with the 100K or 300K speed setting. Even so, it can be a bit blurry, but still more fun to watch.

I have problems with the program stopping (normally at just the part I want to see the most!) and hanging until I re-select the connection speed to restart it. It might be Cox or my cable modem; I've been having other funny glitches as well.