Newsletter August 2007

New Acquisitons and Gadgets

Future Meetings

Below is a list of dates for 2007, these dates have been confirmed.

September 5th
October 3rd
October 31st
November 28th
December 19th

This Month….

Welcome back after the summer and we hope you all had a good break. As a gentle start after the break we thought it would be good to have a look at Toys and Gadgets. If you have aquired anything you think might be of interest please bring it along and lets have a look.

May Meeting ….

Melton Computer Club – Screen Recording

Barry had previously talked to us about writing custom software such as that for the English National Bowls Club, tonight he showed us how he made training aids for some of his software.

He explained that whilst many of the functions in software packages that he had written were in frequent use and fairly instinctive, there were some features that were only used occasionally, and often by a different person each time. Such features might include setting up new League tables each year, or setting up a calendar of matches. He found that he was often called upon to go and train a new person in using the system, and felt that producing a training video would be a better way to solve such problems.

Initially he searched Google for Screen Recording packages and found that there were hundreds to choose from. The functionality varied, but most trial versions had the same drawbacks:-
There was usually a supplier logo shown an every screen in the trail versions, and sometimes this obscured relevant parts of the display
The resolution on trial versions was not very high
There were no tools provided to edit the output file

He eventually selected a package called BB Flashback Player at a cost of £99+VAT. This had a good editor built in, allowed you to insert and delete frames of video, and overwrite all or part of the sound track. If video frames were deleted, it also automatically adjusted the sound to cater for this. It also had a feature where you could add a text box with more detailed explanations if necessary. The video could then be paused to allow time for reading, either for a set time, or until a mouse click

BB Flashback Player stores the captured video in it’s own format, but provides functions to export the file as flash, avi, wmv, ppt or a standalone executable. The ppt export function creates a Power Point presentation that the video is embedded into, whilst the flash export also generates an html page ready to upload to a web site.

The only missing function that he might have used was the ability to join several clips together and make a visual index, rather like a DVD index. He tried exporting the files to Pinnacle and Windows Movie Maker, but meither could take the frame rate used by BB Flashback. The frame rate can be altered, however during the demonstration this revealed other issues. Whilst data could be captured at rates as high as 63fps (compared to the default 20fps), on playback it resulted in incorrect colours with the display looking as if it had switched to 256 colours. He overcame the indexing problem, however, by writing a small VB application to provide a menu and display the relevant video. He also included text based Help pages in this menu

He also noted that playback was particularly sensitive to the codecs installed on the machine and being used. Nevertheless, for his purposes, the package met the requirements and provided a simple way to make training videos for users of his custom software.

Seagate: PATA disk drives phased out

Due to the falling popularity of Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment (PATA) technology in favour of the newer and faster Serial ATA-based disk drives, Seagate has acknowledged plans to stop building the older products.

According to a spokesman from Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate, the company plans to continue to offer PATA drives, often referred to as integrated device electronics (IDE) drives, until late this year or early next year.

Seagate's move away from the aging PATA standard has been in the pipeline for some time, the spokesman said. The hard drive manufacturer's engineers stopped work on new projects late last year, he noted.

This move will be closely looked at by other manufacturers and they are likely to follow Seagates lead. The question is what effect is this going to have on anyone with a computer that is more than about 18 months old? The likelihood is that you have one of this type of drive, in the short term it will not cause any problems but as supplies of these drives dry up we could have some problems. I will publish more details when they are available.