Capturing Video via Parallel Printer Port! 1997 Was Weird
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Date: 2025-07-20
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Comments and reviews: 20
greggv8
Standard Parallel Port mode used for data input originally was a software hack to monitor the ACK, BUSY, PAPER OUT, and SELECT IN lines for 4 bit input. Combined with hardware to take bytes of data and split it into nibbles (or nybbles, 4 bits) and toggle the status lines, data input was achieved through a port designed to be output only. IBM soon changed the humble LPT port to be able to input data via the 8 output lines for double the speed, though unable to run in full duplex as was possible (though I don't know of any implementation) using the status lines. This 8 bit half-duplex mode was often called PS/2 mode.
Enhanced Parallel Port modified 8 ground lines to also function as data inputs for full duplex, 8 bit operation and faster speed in and out than either SPP method.
Extended Capability Port took the EPP method and added DMA, a small data buffer and other things to where it could move data at over a megabyte per second.
PC BIOSes quickly were given the ability to select SPP/PS2, EPP, ECP, and EPPECP. Though in a sort of format war early implementations didn't have simultaneous EPPECP support. Add-in IO cards typically used jumpers to set their parallel port mode.
I always set the parallel port to ECP with DMA or EPPECP with DMA, only dropping down to a slower method if a printer or other device had problems with it.
Several companies that made flatbed scanners made parallel port versions. My first scanner was an LPT one from Mustek. UMAX's bread and butter was SCSI flatbed scanners. When windows 2000, then XP, came along, UMAX declared it impossible to write drivers for LPT scanners for those operating systems and discontinued their LPT models. Mustek just went ahead and did it anyway, so I was able to keep using that scanner through Win 2000 and in XP before I got a USB scanner.
Aside from video capture and scanners, the other major parallel port input (and output) devices were hard drives, removable disk drives (mostly from Iomega and SyQuest, CD-ROM drives (including burners - without buffer underrun protection, floppy drives, and tape backups. A tape backup on ECPDMA could be faster than one connected to a floppy controller with 2. 88M drive support. MicroSolutions Backpack was a pretty extensive line of parallel port connected storage devices.
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Standard Parallel Port mode used for data input originally was a software hack to monitor the ACK, BUSY, PAPER OUT, and SELECT IN lines for 4 bit input. Combined with hardware to take bytes of data and split it into nibbles (or nybbles, 4 bits) and toggle the status lines, data input was achieved through a port designed to be output only. IBM soon changed the humble LPT port to be able to input data via the 8 output lines for double the speed, though unable to run in full duplex as was possible (though I don't know of any implementation) using the status lines. This 8 bit half-duplex mode was often called PS/2 mode.
Enhanced Parallel Port modified 8 ground lines to also function as data inputs for full duplex, 8 bit operation and faster speed in and out than either SPP method.
Extended Capability Port took the EPP method and added DMA, a small data buffer and other things to where it could move data at over a megabyte per second.
PC BIOSes quickly were given the ability to select SPP/PS2, EPP, ECP, and EPPECP. Though in a sort of format war early implementations didn't have simultaneous EPPECP support. Add-in IO cards typically used jumpers to set their parallel port mode.
I always set the parallel port to ECP with DMA or EPPECP with DMA, only dropping down to a slower method if a printer or other device had problems with it.
Several companies that made flatbed scanners made parallel port versions. My first scanner was an LPT one from Mustek. UMAX's bread and butter was SCSI flatbed scanners. When windows 2000, then XP, came along, UMAX declared it impossible to write drivers for LPT scanners for those operating systems and discontinued their LPT models. Mustek just went ahead and did it anyway, so I was able to keep using that scanner through Win 2000 and in XP before I got a USB scanner.
Aside from video capture and scanners, the other major parallel port input (and output) devices were hard drives, removable disk drives (mostly from Iomega and SyQuest, CD-ROM drives (including burners - without buffer underrun protection, floppy drives, and tape backups. A tape backup on ECPDMA could be faster than one connected to a floppy controller with 2. 88M drive support. MicroSolutions Backpack was a pretty extensive line of parallel port connected storage devices.
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chairthrower
I'm going to try and send you on a wild goose chase.
In the mid-1990s we had a device at work (IT at a university) that would print to 35mm film. The idea was that you'd create a PowerPoint, and print to the device, which used lasers and filters to expose each slide of the PowerPoint to slides on the film. You'd then get the slide film developed and bring your slides to a conference.
This exists at the nexus of computers fast enough to generate decent color images, send those images to a device, laser technology being good enough to expose film at a high enough resolution to produce an image; the lack of availability of decent PC projectors or screens in most convention centers; and the high likelihood that those same convention centers would have a slide projector instead. I guess we had about 5-6 years where this made sense--even by 2000 you had VGA projectors that were fine for basic PowerPoint.
The printer would take hours to expose a roll of film--we usually let it run overnight--and as you'd expect for an extremely complicated electo-opto-mechanical beast it would frequently fail. If you were lucky you'd know it died before all your slides printed; if you were not you'd think the slides printed, send them to the photo lab, and find out some or all your slides were corrupted. You had to plan weeks in advance before you needed slides--hope nothing changed in your data in the intervening time!
I don't remember more than a handful of faculty actually being successful in using the device to bring slides to a conference. And we must have thrown it out once it became obsolete. But I wish I could find one because it'd be a hoot to play with.
I'm sure services that convert images to 35mm film are using different workflows these days (I've seen the suggestion of a 5K monitor and a decent macro lens for instance)
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I'm going to try and send you on a wild goose chase.
In the mid-1990s we had a device at work (IT at a university) that would print to 35mm film. The idea was that you'd create a PowerPoint, and print to the device, which used lasers and filters to expose each slide of the PowerPoint to slides on the film. You'd then get the slide film developed and bring your slides to a conference.
This exists at the nexus of computers fast enough to generate decent color images, send those images to a device, laser technology being good enough to expose film at a high enough resolution to produce an image; the lack of availability of decent PC projectors or screens in most convention centers; and the high likelihood that those same convention centers would have a slide projector instead. I guess we had about 5-6 years where this made sense--even by 2000 you had VGA projectors that were fine for basic PowerPoint.
The printer would take hours to expose a roll of film--we usually let it run overnight--and as you'd expect for an extremely complicated electo-opto-mechanical beast it would frequently fail. If you were lucky you'd know it died before all your slides printed; if you were not you'd think the slides printed, send them to the photo lab, and find out some or all your slides were corrupted. You had to plan weeks in advance before you needed slides--hope nothing changed in your data in the intervening time!
I don't remember more than a handful of faculty actually being successful in using the device to bring slides to a conference. And we must have thrown it out once it became obsolete. But I wish I could find one because it'd be a hoot to play with.
I'm sure services that convert images to 35mm film are using different workflows these days (I've seen the suggestion of a 5K monitor and a decent macro lens for instance)
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0raffie0
I had bought an Iomega Buz when it came out and used it extensively in the late nineties and early 2000's. It captured to MJPEG files as you said in the video, which created huge video files for back in the day, but it was hardly inferior, it was just that that was the source video (which was far superior to VCD, which you could then do with as you please, in my case that meant cutting out what I wanted (frame-precise, which you can't do with MPEG-1/2) and then re-encode to VCD compliant MPEG-1 (which took hours on my 300Mhz processor. But the Buz could capture full frame 720x576 (PAL in my case) and theoretically encode to DVD quality MPEG-2 although on the PC I had, full-frame capture was basically impossible. But yeah I used to capture a lot of music videos, encode and burn them to VCD's so they were just like normal music CD's except with videos, I also used to capture Star Trek episodes off the BBC (no commercials or station logos) and encode those to SVCD (higher quality and could do about 45 minutes on a CD. The Star Trek episodes became obsolete once I got the DVD sets but I still have all the VCD music video collections, put a lot of work into those back in the day!
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I had bought an Iomega Buz when it came out and used it extensively in the late nineties and early 2000's. It captured to MJPEG files as you said in the video, which created huge video files for back in the day, but it was hardly inferior, it was just that that was the source video (which was far superior to VCD, which you could then do with as you please, in my case that meant cutting out what I wanted (frame-precise, which you can't do with MPEG-1/2) and then re-encode to VCD compliant MPEG-1 (which took hours on my 300Mhz processor. But the Buz could capture full frame 720x576 (PAL in my case) and theoretically encode to DVD quality MPEG-2 although on the PC I had, full-frame capture was basically impossible. But yeah I used to capture a lot of music videos, encode and burn them to VCD's so they were just like normal music CD's except with videos, I also used to capture Star Trek episodes off the BBC (no commercials or station logos) and encode those to SVCD (higher quality and could do about 45 minutes on a CD. The Star Trek episodes became obsolete once I got the DVD sets but I still have all the VCD music video collections, put a lot of work into those back in the day!
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omsi-fanmark
21: 19 iFilmEdit was a basic video cutter, but it was great for what it did: It could cut videos without re-encoding the whole video.
Downside: As the name already suggests, it can only cut at I-Frames (Intra-Frames, as they are the only complete video frames in an MPEG stream. Other frames just carry information about changes that happened since the last I-Frame or before the next. This way, MPEG saves space. This means you cannot cut frame-precise, because I-Frames come at different intervals that can make up a second of video or even more.
Frame-precise video editing without full re-encoding the whole video is still quite rare. SmartCutter can do this, it is mainly for cutting transport streams. ts) as they are used for example in DVB (digital video broadcast TV. It analyses the source video, adapts to the original encoding settings and re-encodes just the GOP (group of pictures) that is afftected by cutting, the rest stays as it is. A GOP starts with an I-Frame and ends one frame before the next I-Frame, so it is very short. Cutting usually only takes seconds plus the copy process from source to destination file.
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21: 19 iFilmEdit was a basic video cutter, but it was great for what it did: It could cut videos without re-encoding the whole video.
Downside: As the name already suggests, it can only cut at I-Frames (Intra-Frames, as they are the only complete video frames in an MPEG stream. Other frames just carry information about changes that happened since the last I-Frame or before the next. This way, MPEG saves space. This means you cannot cut frame-precise, because I-Frames come at different intervals that can make up a second of video or even more.
Frame-precise video editing without full re-encoding the whole video is still quite rare. SmartCutter can do this, it is mainly for cutting transport streams. ts) as they are used for example in DVB (digital video broadcast TV. It analyses the source video, adapts to the original encoding settings and re-encodes just the GOP (group of pictures) that is afftected by cutting, the rest stays as it is. A GOP starts with an I-Frame and ends one frame before the next I-Frame, so it is very short. Cutting usually only takes seconds plus the copy process from source to destination file.
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DoubleMonoLR
The old Miro dc20 / dc30 / dc10 etc pci capture cards from at least as early as 1995 were great, they had mjpeg codec chips & captured in very good quality, and could also output video - originally so you could record your final edit onto tape. I bought a 2nd hand dc20 in 2001, though from memory I used a free software mjpeg codec instead for a higher bitrate. Computers had of course got a lot faster in those few years, so the software codec was a non-issue.
mjpeg is still excellent for editing, as unchanged frames aren't recompressed.
Miro was bought by Pinnacle, the cards kept being made after the buyout.
These cards seem all but entirely forgotten, despite how popular they were at the time, it's bizarre.
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The old Miro dc20 / dc30 / dc10 etc pci capture cards from at least as early as 1995 were great, they had mjpeg codec chips & captured in very good quality, and could also output video - originally so you could record your final edit onto tape. I bought a 2nd hand dc20 in 2001, though from memory I used a free software mjpeg codec instead for a higher bitrate. Computers had of course got a lot faster in those few years, so the software codec was a non-issue.
mjpeg is still excellent for editing, as unchanged frames aren't recompressed.
Miro was bought by Pinnacle, the cards kept being made after the buyout.
These cards seem all but entirely forgotten, despite how popular they were at the time, it's bizarre.
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michaelturner2806
Reminds me of a webcam kit I got at a local computer show sometime in the mid-90s. It was actually just a PCI composite capture card, with no hardware encoding I believe, and a composite camera. I think it was $100 for the bundle.
Once I got tired of the webcam part I used it to watch TV and play consoles on my monitors, since Windows 98 supported multiple video cards and I rocked 3 monitors for a while.
Lag-free for just display, since I assume there was some DMA stuff happening where it could write directly to my video card's memory, but capturing video had to be done low-res and I had to make sure nothing else was running, since it was all software encoding.
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Reminds me of a webcam kit I got at a local computer show sometime in the mid-90s. It was actually just a PCI composite capture card, with no hardware encoding I believe, and a composite camera. I think it was $100 for the bundle.
Once I got tired of the webcam part I used it to watch TV and play consoles on my monitors, since Windows 98 supported multiple video cards and I rocked 3 monitors for a while.
Lag-free for just display, since I assume there was some DMA stuff happening where it could write directly to my video card's memory, but capturing video had to be done low-res and I had to make sure nothing else was running, since it was all software encoding.
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coyote_den
Only way that thing could stuff video over the parallel port was hardware MPEG encoding. I had a Toshiba Infinia PC in 1997, and it included a (Bt848 based) TV/FM tuner card that could do some pretty cool stuff like PCI busmastering to DMA video right into the frame buffer. For watching TV it was perfect, but what it could not do particularly well on a P200MMX with a IDE hard drive was capture. It had no hardware codec, you could only capture uncompressed video. Later cards like the ATI All-in-Wonder had some acceleration for MPEG/MPEG-2 codecs (with a little hacking you could make them work as tuners in Windows Media Center) and the Theater 550 was a hardware MPEG-2 codec.
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Only way that thing could stuff video over the parallel port was hardware MPEG encoding. I had a Toshiba Infinia PC in 1997, and it included a (Bt848 based) TV/FM tuner card that could do some pretty cool stuff like PCI busmastering to DMA video right into the frame buffer. For watching TV it was perfect, but what it could not do particularly well on a P200MMX with a IDE hard drive was capture. It had no hardware codec, you could only capture uncompressed video. Later cards like the ATI All-in-Wonder had some acceleration for MPEG/MPEG-2 codecs (with a little hacking you could make them work as tuners in Windows Media Center) and the Theater 550 was a hardware MPEG-2 codec.
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NullStaticVoid
I had a Radeon All in Wonder video card for a few years in the 90s.
It had a built in tuner as well as composite and stereo I/O. Was looking at some news stories and stuff I recorded back then recently and wow.
The herringbone pattern in all of it wasn't noticable when I had big old CRT monitors. But on a modern 4k LCD display it's agonizing to look at!
I think the video quality relied on the blur of those old monitors.
The composite was better. But I only did a little footage that way just to test it.
Would love to see you do a bit about those old ATI All in Wonder products. They had them for a while, usually with a mid tier Radeon GPU.
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I had a Radeon All in Wonder video card for a few years in the 90s.
It had a built in tuner as well as composite and stereo I/O. Was looking at some news stories and stuff I recorded back then recently and wow.
The herringbone pattern in all of it wasn't noticable when I had big old CRT monitors. But on a modern 4k LCD display it's agonizing to look at!
I think the video quality relied on the blur of those old monitors.
The composite was better. But I only did a little footage that way just to test it.
Would love to see you do a bit about those old ATI All in Wonder products. They had them for a while, usually with a mid tier Radeon GPU.
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crunchyfrog555
I didn't have one of these but I had someting similar.
Back in the 1990s/early 2000s I wrote freelance for the UK PS magazine and a few others. I got sent things like A PS, various bits of ephemera, beta discs, promos and so on. But one time my editor said that as I was writing the occasional review and that it would help if I didn't draw things to the art department to recreate, I would be sent a capture card. I had no idea what one was, and so I got sent something very similar to this.
What a weird pain in the arse that was. Although it mostly was just a pain to setup as many things were back then. Thankfully I only used it once in a blue moon.
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I didn't have one of these but I had someting similar.
Back in the 1990s/early 2000s I wrote freelance for the UK PS magazine and a few others. I got sent things like A PS, various bits of ephemera, beta discs, promos and so on. But one time my editor said that as I was writing the occasional review and that it would help if I didn't draw things to the art department to recreate, I would be sent a capture card. I had no idea what one was, and so I got sent something very similar to this.
What a weird pain in the arse that was. Although it mostly was just a pain to setup as many things were back then. Thankfully I only used it once in a blue moon.
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lukassteinbrink322
I have an old Matrox Mystique 220 from my father and he got the Rainbow Runner add-on, a second card that you connect to the video card like a sandwiche. This Rainbow Runner card enables the use of the second connector on the card that allows S-video and composite in and out put so you can send the video from the PC to a TV or you could record VHS-tapes, what my father did, he had a VHS player in the shelf where the PC was set up. I recorded something from a DVD player to see how good it is and I was quied amazed about the good quality as it recorded in MJPEG (Motion Jpeg. In the config I would always select PAL cause well. Germany.
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I have an old Matrox Mystique 220 from my father and he got the Rainbow Runner add-on, a second card that you connect to the video card like a sandwiche. This Rainbow Runner card enables the use of the second connector on the card that allows S-video and composite in and out put so you can send the video from the PC to a TV or you could record VHS-tapes, what my father did, he had a VHS player in the shelf where the PC was set up. I recorded something from a DVD player to see how good it is and I was quied amazed about the good quality as it recorded in MJPEG (Motion Jpeg. In the config I would always select PAL cause well. Germany.
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lunayoshi
I had a PCI slot TV Card (coaxial cable-based with RCA input that I never used) that I got in my Windows XP computer in 2003. It showed live video, 26 fps, when not recording, then got choppy as hell when recording. I recorded at 240p when stingy and 360p when not trying to watch anything because 360p was SO CHOPPY. The video wound up just fine, but watching it live was like. what the hell am I doing I'm going to watch it in the living room instead. Then I'd go and stop recording when the show was over. I STILL have those files. They're WMV compressed, but not bad-looking. This 1997 must have been a dream back in the day.
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I had a PCI slot TV Card (coaxial cable-based with RCA input that I never used) that I got in my Windows XP computer in 2003. It showed live video, 26 fps, when not recording, then got choppy as hell when recording. I recorded at 240p when stingy and 360p when not trying to watch anything because 360p was SO CHOPPY. The video wound up just fine, but watching it live was like. what the hell am I doing I'm going to watch it in the living room instead. Then I'd go and stop recording when the show was over. I STILL have those files. They're WMV compressed, but not bad-looking. This 1997 must have been a dream back in the day.
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ttpayton
Wonderful video and topic as you faithfully do. Crazy product. I had no idea. One note about the Iomega Buz, I had one back in the day. You mentioned MPEG-1 is superior to MJPEG but I believe the opposite is true. MPEG-1 is basically limited to quarter resolution of NTSC (basically 320x240) while the Buz could capture full resolution NTSC SD (720-x480) in MJPEG and interlaced at that. I worked at an ad agency and several times in the 1990's we delivered broadcast ads in MJPEG QuickTime files.
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Wonderful video and topic as you faithfully do. Crazy product. I had no idea. One note about the Iomega Buz, I had one back in the day. You mentioned MPEG-1 is superior to MJPEG but I believe the opposite is true. MPEG-1 is basically limited to quarter resolution of NTSC (basically 320x240) while the Buz could capture full resolution NTSC SD (720-x480) in MJPEG and interlaced at that. I worked at an ad agency and several times in the 1990's we delivered broadcast ads in MJPEG QuickTime files.
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teacolouredink
Oh no way this is excellent timing, I've been looking at finally getting a capture card just recently! I've always seen the modern day dazzles pop up so it's cool to see just how far back these things go and where this tech kinda started! I liked seeing a bit of editing from that era too since it does play such a big part when using these things. Even with how fancy the current tech is, the older stuff and how it works still fascinates me the most! And gosh that commercial haha
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Oh no way this is excellent timing, I've been looking at finally getting a capture card just recently! I've always seen the modern day dazzles pop up so it's cool to see just how far back these things go and where this tech kinda started! I liked seeing a bit of editing from that era too since it does play such a big part when using these things. Even with how fancy the current tech is, the older stuff and how it works still fascinates me the most! And gosh that commercial haha
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kirknelson156
i've still got my capture device, it was a hardware mpeg encoder that connected via the parallel port, I found it worked very well connected either to my desktop or my laptop, which i remember correctly was a PIII 900 mhz sony. for the time i felt the quality was very good, and i was able to record movies from cable or my vcr and got no effects like if trying to go from vcr to vcr. forget what it was called but made the screen cycle from bright to dark.
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i've still got my capture device, it was a hardware mpeg encoder that connected via the parallel port, I found it worked very well connected either to my desktop or my laptop, which i remember correctly was a PIII 900 mhz sony. for the time i felt the quality was very good, and i was able to record movies from cable or my vcr and got no effects like if trying to go from vcr to vcr. forget what it was called but made the screen cycle from bright to dark.
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omsi-fanmark
I had the SNAZZI PCI-Card from Dazzle Multimedia. It was probably the best affordable video capture solution of it's time with it's hardware MPEG encoder/decoder. To my knowledge, the driver for the card was available ONLY for Windows 98 SE. I was never able to use that card after moving away from Windows 98 SE (to Win 2000.
I never used printer port products (except from a printer and a radio clock) because they were often unreliable AND slow.
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I had the SNAZZI PCI-Card from Dazzle Multimedia. It was probably the best affordable video capture solution of it's time with it's hardware MPEG encoder/decoder. To my knowledge, the driver for the card was available ONLY for Windows 98 SE. I was never able to use that card after moving away from Windows 98 SE (to Win 2000.
I never used printer port products (except from a printer and a radio clock) because they were often unreliable AND slow.
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JenniferinIllinois
I remember seeing this but I didn't have any video camera or other capture device at the time. It's just crazy thinking that the parallel port could be used to capture video (i mean it wasn't 4K (being analog video and all) but still, the parallel port was not fast - hehehe. The mid to late 90s were quite the time for computer advances. All I can say is I'm soooooooooooooo happy USB happened.
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I remember seeing this but I didn't have any video camera or other capture device at the time. It's just crazy thinking that the parallel port could be used to capture video (i mean it wasn't 4K (being analog video and all) but still, the parallel port was not fast - hehehe. The mid to late 90s were quite the time for computer advances. All I can say is I'm soooooooooooooo happy USB happened.
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arthurand1006
Nice video as always, thanks
It does not mention deinterlacing because it is not necessary. Analog TV is normally 480 lines interlaced and this capture device only captures 240 lines at 30fps so it already discards one of the fields, resulting in 240p video. So it does not capture the full resolution and field rate, still a very good performance for a parallel port device.
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Nice video as always, thanks
It does not mention deinterlacing because it is not necessary. Analog TV is normally 480 lines interlaced and this capture device only captures 240 lines at 30fps so it already discards one of the fields, resulting in 240p video. So it does not capture the full resolution and field rate, still a very good performance for a parallel port device.
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lazygamereviews
I used to do media digitizing back in the late 90s/early 2000s. The main reason you have AV sync issues with video tape and not other sources, is because video tape has a slight speed fluctuations in the video output. We used to use a device called a Time Base Corrector that was connect between the VCR and the Digitizer and that eliminated that problem.
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I used to do media digitizing back in the late 90s/early 2000s. The main reason you have AV sync issues with video tape and not other sources, is because video tape has a slight speed fluctuations in the video output. We used to use a device called a Time Base Corrector that was connect between the VCR and the Digitizer and that eliminated that problem.
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j4k3shneg
I had something very similar to a Dazzle, it was branded 'Pinnacle' i believe. It was yellow and sort of cheese shaped.
I could never get it to work on PAL60 though, unlike the Dazzles of the time.
The 90s 00s era really made you have to learn about PCs because of how whatever you bought for them never quite did what you wanted out of the box
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I had something very similar to a Dazzle, it was branded 'Pinnacle' i believe. It was yellow and sort of cheese shaped.
I could never get it to work on PAL60 though, unlike the Dazzles of the time.
The 90s 00s era really made you have to learn about PCs because of how whatever you bought for them never quite did what you wanted out of the box
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yueibm
I used FireWire to save videos from our Digital8 / MiniDV camcorder, and while I had a capture card with composite and S video input, I always thought the quality was low and the software had to run realtime without hiccups so I never captured much until adding a FireWire card. By then (early 2000s) ULead VideoStudio was what came with most cards.
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I used FireWire to save videos from our Digital8 / MiniDV camcorder, and while I had a capture card with composite and S video input, I always thought the quality was low and the software had to run realtime without hiccups so I never captured much until adding a FireWire card. By then (early 2000s) ULead VideoStudio was what came with most cards.
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