I have a Canopus ADVC-100, which I wish to use to capture broadcast TV off my satellite. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a tool for automated capture. Neither AVI_IO nor DVIO will work for me. In the case of AVI_IO I am informed that this is due to a problem with Windows XP's WDM wrapper; I presume that the same issue is causing the problem with DVIO. Using programs like IntroDV or Windows Movie Maker, I can capture fine, but they have no capability for scheduled capture.

So I wrote a little VBA script that I made part of a Word document. This script runs Movie Maker automatically when this document is opened, so all I need to do is use the Schedule Agent to open the document at the right time and presto! the thing does what I want. I have separate documents for half-hour, one-hour and two-hour captures (actually they set up 35, 65 and 125 minute captures). One could easily create other files for different durations or capture qualities. In fact, one could build a dialog wherein you picked a start time, end time and capture quality and the script would do the rest, but I am not a good VBA programmer so I didn't bother.

Note that the script uses SendKeys; I imagine that someone might be able to figure out how to use OLE automation and/or DDE to do this better, but I couldn't figure that stuff out. Note that for the capture quality setting to work, you have to disable the warning that pops up by default regarding disabling of preview for some of the capture quality settings.

I make no guarantee that this won't turn your system into a heaping pile of rubble, but if someone else has this problem, this may help them. If anyone wants to work up a more elegant solution, please be my guest. If you want to try this out, just open a new Word document, open the Visual Basic Editor, insert a new module and cut and paste the VBA routine below into it. You can edit the macro as desired, and then save the word document with a catchy name like "Half Hour Capture on Open.doc". Then set up a scheduled event to run that file at 2:00 am to preserve your favourite episode of "Matlock".

Patrick Reid

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Code:
Sub AutoOpen()
'
' MovieMaker Capture Macro
'
Dim TaskID
Dim temp
Dim wait As Single
Dim CapDurHrs, CapDurMins, CapDurSecs As String
Dim CaptureQuality, Count As Integer

' Define the duration and quality of the recording; at some point, this
' could be re-written so that a user selects a quality, start time and end
' time, then the OnTime method could be used to do the rest.
CaptureQuality = 1
CapDurHrs = "0"
CapDurMins = "35"
CapDurSecs = "0"

' Close Movie Maker if it is open
If Tasks.Exists("Windows Movie Maker") = True Then
  Tasks("Windows Movie Maker").Close
  wait = Timer
  done = False
  While Not done
    If Timer > wait + 3# Then done = True
    temp = DoEvents()
  Wend
End If

' start Movie Maker, give it 10 seconds to start and bring up Record dialog
TaskID = Shell("c:\Program Files\Movie Maker\moviemk.exe /RECORD", 1)
wait = Timer
done = False
While Not done
  If Timer > wait + 10# Then done = True
  temp = DoEvents()
Wend

' disable capture preview and set the capture duration
AppActivate TaskID
SendKeys "%v%t%t{TAB}", True
SendKeys CapDurHrs, True
SendKeys "{RIGHT}", True
SendKeys CapDurMins, True
SendKeys "{RIGHT}", True
SendKeys CapDurSecs, True

' set the capture quality
Select Case CaptureQuality
Case 1          'Set to DV-AVI (25 Mbps)
  SendKeys "%eo{TAB}d", True
Case 2          'Set to Video for local playback (2 Mbps)
  SendKeys "%eo{TAB}{HOME}", True
  For Count = 1 To 8
    SendKeys "{DOWN}", True
  Next Count
Case 3          'Set to Video for local playback (1500 Kbps)
  SendKeys "%eo{TAB}{HOME}", True
  For Count = 1 To 7
    SendKeys "{DOWN}", True
  Next Count
Case 4          'Set to Video for broadband (768 Kbps)
  SendKeys "%eo{TAB}{HOME}", True
  For Count = 1 To 6
    SendKeys "{DOWN}", True
  Next Count
Case 5          'Set to WMV 7 Video for broadband (768 Kbps)
  SendKeys "%eo{TAB}{END}", True
  For Count = 1 To 3
    SendKeys "{UP}", True
  Next Count
Case Else          'Accept whatever capture quality is set now
End Select

' begin recording
SendKeys "{ENTER}", True

End Sub