Invitation to constructive criticism

[omicron]

I live in Belgium, one of my sons lives in Japan. He misses some Belgian TV programs (mainly sports, esp. Formula 1 racing [whoever knows about Messrs Tassin and Vigneron will know they are the best F1 racing commentators the world over...]). My plan is the following:

I want to capture TV broadcasts, save them to my hard disk and through an FTP server / client set-up allow him to download the captured programs.

I access to the Internet through ADSL, with an upload limit of 384 kbps. My maths may be wrong, I think this means I can upload, and my son can download, about 170 MB per hour. So in a good night’s sleep, he should be able to D/L some 2 CD’s worth of TV programs (384 kb/s = 48 kB/s = 2880 kB/min = 169 MB/hour = 700 MB per 4 hour period). I set up the FTP server / client part and ran some tests with my other son (who lives in Germany). Conclusion: we should be able to reach at least 80% of the “nameplate U/L capacity” announced by my ISP, and that’s OK for the moment.

Next issue is how to capture. I want to do it with VirtualDub 1.5.6 (simply because I have it and can make it work, which is quite an achievement for me…). For no other reason than intuition, I suggest to compress through DivX MPEG4 Fast Motion (well, footballs and F1 racing cars DO move fast, don’t they). Since TV sound quality is not all that important, I guess I may “downguauge” this to the maximum, so I propose PCM 11 kHz 8 bits mono just to save the odd MB. I am not sure at all about frame rate, but again intuition leads me to opt for 25.

This all seems to indicate that at 1000 kbit/sec, I should be able to get about 90 minutes of TV program per 700 MB, which is fair enough I’d say.

Does this plan make sense, or am I missing something ? What would you all recommend to improve on this ?

Incidentally, I am unemployed at the moment, thus flat broke. Spending money on a better PC or anything that is not freeware is not an option I’m afraid.

Thanks

[daamon]

I am not sure at all about frame rate, but again intuition leads me to opt for 25.

I can only honestly comment on this. You need to pick a framerate that fits with the video standard that Japan uses. If it's PAL (as I suspect), then 25fps is right.

As for the rest, I didn't read anything that seems unfeasible, but then I'm not experienced in what you want to achieve.

I wish you luck with your project and your job-hunting.

[omicron]

Daamon, Cockney Pommy:

thanks for our engouragements.
Japan is actually NTSC, but I don't think this matters since my son will watch the files on his PC rather than TV. Or am I missing something ?

What about my maths though ?

[daamon]

If he's watching on pc, it doesn't matter. But he may decide to encode for VCD / SVCD / DVD. So doing it as NTSC will save him a lot of grief.

As for your maths, sorry - too much whiskey and not enough concentration / knowledge...

Good luck.

[Soopafresh]

Post a 100MB video file on your FTP site and have your son in Japan download it. Have him time the session. Voila.


As long as your source is high quality, you can get very good looking XVID/DIVX at 800 kbs.

[OmegaSupreme]

Your math is correct, but you should factor in the overhead involved in the connection. Also maximum DSL speed is dependent on how far away you live from the phone company. In the real world, you will probably get 60% - 80% of the theoretical maximum. So a 700MB file will probably take 5 - 7 hours to transfer.