beos/hauppauge wintv
Hmm, well that was nice. It’s a wonderful OS, bringing elegance and slickness to the desktop of even ‘slow’ machines, if you can find a selection of hardware with the correct drivers. It can do multiple video and audio streams that even today’s O/S have trouble with, and the default versions even came with Japanese localisations – how about that for a US company ?
Well, not so great, actually. There was an unfinished BT8x8 video capture app. that came with some of the later versions, and if pressed it could cope with PAL and 25fps, but for some reason, despite contacting the author and having quite a few exchanges with him, there was never any move to cope with European audio, particularly NICAM. The stills of Emma from 1999 were grabbed via the Hauppauge WinTV card and this driver, but I could only ever get AM audio decode to give intelligble sound, but AM decoding an FM signal isn’t a recipe for CD quality audio…
Would I have stuck with it otherwise ? Maybe. I never managed to get as far as sorting out an editor for capture footage, and perhaps (given the lifespan of Be) that wasn’t such a bad thing. I’ve still not found a better filing system though, <sniff>…