Q. I am using Roxio Video Wave Movie Creator that came bundled on my Dell to produce movies. I recently combined some footage that I took with my DV camcorder of my son’s baseball game and a DivX-coded movie that I downloaded off the Internet. The problem is that after I burned it to a DVD, the playback quality of the DivX portion was significantly lower than the portion captured from the camcorder. Is there a way to rectify this problem?
Ricky [email protected]
A. Good for you, Mr. D., you’ve started tapping the huge powers of home video (and audio) that I wish all owners of multimedia computers were doing.
Your problem, which might be likened to trying to mix apples with oranges, is easy enough to correct. Instead of just pasting together a movie from your own DV format home video files and those DivX files in the AVI format, you need to first convert the DivX file you downloaded into the same DV format used by your camcorder.
This is simple using that Roxio Easy Creator 7 software but, as you learned the hard way, it isn’t done for you automatically.
So fire up the Videowave component of Easy Media Creator and load that downloaded DivX movie into the software. Now click on File and then pick the Output choice. In the next screen select the choice of outputting the DivX movie as a Video File.
In the menu this prompts you will be able to do the conversion so that your DivX file is of the same resolution and frame rate as your camcorder baseball game files. It will be free of any interlace and progressive scan issues that can diminish the quality of a video file when played on a television instead of a computer.
Your question gives me the opportunity to urge readers to explore this fascinating world of DivX movies, an open source movement that offers free software and huge numbers of rather startling downloadable movies to experience. The jumping-off point is www.divx.com and, who knows, the ending might come at next year’s Academy Award ceremony when you take the winner’s stage.
Q. I hope that you can help with this. I find I can no longer run utilities such as disk defrag, etc., because another application was using the drive. This is after I shut down every application that seemed even a possibility beyond those such as antivirus and firewall.
I tried to wipe the free space using Norton. Same disappointing result. Your thoughts, comments or advice would be greatly appreciated.
More Top Picks Trolling Motor
A. That ripping sound you should be hearing about now is me tearing out another clump of hair in frustration at the fact that your problem has been vexing Windows users and columnists for years and Microsoft will not deign to fix things.
Routines like ScanDisk in the past and Windows XP hard drive defragmentation tools in the present all work by moving data about the hard drive to avoid bad spots on the drive surface and to make files open faster by placing all of their parts in consecutive order on the disk. If any other software tries to write to the disk during a defragmentation session it could write over parts being altered by the other software. So Windows stops defragmentation routines if anything whatsoever opens the hard drive, which a great many background programs do.
The only fix is to reboot the computer in what is called Safe Mode and then run the repair and restoration tools from there. Safe Mode comes up with almost no drivers loaded, and all background software is excluded. Nothing is left running that could stop the defragmentation.
So reboot the computer and after the first screen flashes telling you the keyboard is active, hold down the F8 key, which will bypass normal start-up and put you in Safe Mode. Don’t sweat the firewall and virus software, since your computer will not be communicating with the Internet with all of its stuff shut down and its ports closed.
You can see that this is hardly the kind of simple “plug and play” efficiency that Microsoft claims in its ads, because it requires customers to go under the hood. So Microsoft apparently decided to just ignore the issue even though thousands of customers have met frustration. Classy, eh?
Q. I reside in a remote area and use Web to listen to radio broadcasts. What do I need to do to save an interesting radio broadcast? Can the broadcast be saved directly to a CD, or do I need to save it to my hard drive and then record the CD from the hard drive?
Bob Wolfe, Pawleys Island, S.C.
A. With the never-ending flap over recording industry complaints over music piracy, your answer may stir some gripes from the studio owners, but what you are asking to do is no more than the legal recording of radio music we have been doing for years. And all kinds of Windows software can be used for this sort of thing.
For example, the Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 includes a module designed to let users copy vinyl records or cassette tapes into digital files that also can be used to record streaming audio and other sounds that one gets on the Internet. A less expensive solution is Cakewalk Pyro for $29 at www.cakewalk.com.
All you need to do to record Web radio is start playing the capture software and then open the music player. Whatever is played through your sound card will be recorded into the MP3 music format to store on your hard drive and later burn onto CDs.
You need to know that it is necessary to set the various volume controls so that the music doesn’t come in too loudly and corrupt the MP3s. A couple of tweaking sessions will have you downloading and recording anything you care to hear with even less effort than popping an audiotape into a high-fidelity music system.
A final word: To find the sliders to adjust volume controls, click on Start and Control Panel and open the Sounds and Audio Devices icon. Then click Advanced to bring up the sliders. Now go to the Options command at the top of the slider display and change it from the default for playing to recording.
You need to put checks in the boxes for Stereo Mix, Line in and Microphone.
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Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at the baiduhai, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Comments at chicagotribune.com/askjim.