Techie Stuff and Not So Techie Stuff

So my weekend was a technical failure. I was not able to accomplish my project. I had zero video captured!

Monday morning I took my video camera to work to test the firewire ports on the brand new latops - same model as the laptop that I had problem with, the Dell Latitude D820. All three did not detect my camera, but when I plugged in the camera to a Latitude D420 it instantly detected my camera. Again, this proved that my camera and cable were working. Now I am convinced that the design on the D820's is flawed.

Monday night after dinner I started researching the firewire issue again. This problem was a great challenge that I had to keep going. You can say that I am not a quitter :)
Anyway, I painstakingly verified each IRQ settings on the devices. I had a suspicion that it was some type of hardware conflict. Alas, my hard work paid off. I found three entries in the Device Manager with the same IRQ address. It was IRQ 19 assigned to the IEEE 1395 Host Controller, the 02Micro SmartCard BusController, and some Intel port under the System Devices. First, I disabled the 02Micro SmarCard and deleted the IEEE 1394 device, and then rebooted the laptop -- leaving the camera plugged in via firewire. After the reboot a new hardware (one I had not seen before) popped up with the yellow exclamation mark. I felt a little excitement - I was into something, getting close to proving my earlier assumption that it was a conflict issue. I tried to update the new hardware, but the update failed and the device disappeard from the list. My next step was to disable the Intel port that had the IRQ 19, and again I uninstalled IEEE 1394 (leaving the 02Micro disabled) and then rebooted the laptop. After the reboot the IEEE 1394 was listed in DM with the yellow exclamation mark. I updated the driver and after the driver update I heard two dings and couple of balloons popped up stating that the A/V digital device was ready for use. YIPEE!!! It was a great satisfaction to figure out the problem.

Although the camera was listed under Scanners and Cameras, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 could not detect the camera for capturing. And the weird thing was that I could control the camera to play the movie through the software. I launched Microsoft Movie Maker to see if it would detect the camera, and it did. Looking through the properties and settings I discovered that Movie Maker had the capability that I wanted. It could capture my videos and keep the quality intact by capturaing in DV-AVI format. This format would take up 178MB disk space per 1 minute of video. No biggie, I have plenty of HD space. Well, my happiness did not last long. After about 5 minutes of capturing an error message popped up stating the device failed. I guess I had not totally figured out the problem - the system was not stable. After the reboot the camera was not detected. I tried a few more reboots until I finally gave up and turned in for the night. I had to wake up at 5:30 the following morning.

I have decided that I am not going to use the D820 to capture my videos, instead I will try to use a desktop computer (Optiplex GX745 with Core2Duo) to capture my videos. Besides the hardware on the desktop is more capable in that it has a good video card along with a 3Gbps SATA drive.

The Not So Techie Stuff....
Despite the technical hurdle, this past weekend was pretty good. We went to Costco on Saturday to get some things for our Thanksgiving trip to PA, and to check if Don's (my husband) glasses were ready. Don's younger brother invited us to spend Thanksgiving with them in Pennsylvania. It turns out that our trip is going to be cancelled because my brother-in-law's wife's grandmother passed away (she was 99 years old) and the funeral is on Saturday after Thanksgiving. Don thinks that the trip it would be a good idea to skip the trip because his brother and his wife is going to be busy with the funeral stuff and we would just be a burden.

Jackie spent most of Saturday afternoon playing Kameo on Xbox 360. She can only play video games after noon. On Sunday I tried to give her some Edys fudge swirl ice cream (on cone), which she immediately pushed to Berna and asked for the "other" ice cream on a big container (making the hand motion shaping a rectangle). In the past, we had been buying Bryers chocolate ice cream which is in a rectangular container. It was quite funny. I had to explain to her that mommy has chocolate ice cream but it is in a round container and I had to show her the content. After she saw the ice cream, a big smile on her face and said "Yes, that's the one!".