The lion kingdom's beloved 2nd motherboard made it to the gootubes.  Rarely did lions get so excited about something as the arrival of their Asus BP6.

  Discovered consumer level SMP from Alan Cox's blog & then began searching for a video editing upgrade which lead to the BP6. That was really a life changing upgrade, but the IDE interface was problematic when using a CD R/W. It needed PIO most of the time.  Sadly, that seemed to be the end of doing anything that was previously considered productive.

 In those days, fully utilizing SMP 550Mhz Celerons was only possible by writing your own software. Most animals only benefited when compiling the kernel.  There wasn't even anything for Windows.  It was like an old fashioned UNIX workstation, requiring all custom software.

Young lion invested a lot in creating SMP video codecs for it.  There were a small number of videos of it.  Sadly, the only video showing Windows NT & Linux running video programs was only 193x323 10fps.  In those days, the only compression was JPEG & young lion was trying to fit as much as possible on a CD.

If young lion was more purpose driven & just focused on the minimal capture, edit, & playback tools instead of investing so much in usability, the quality might have been full D1 but he probably wouldn't have gotten a job.

If the lion kingdom searched all the Hi8 tapes & the Hi8 camcorder still worked, there's a small chance something might come up that could be recaptured. 

Just a few frames of the abit survived, showing the hackneyed cooling & how the power supply wouldn't fit.  Young lion had 2 optical drives, which is where the IDE problems started.

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Anyways, all this motivated the decision to resurrect analog video capture in  Cinelerra & try to archive the Hi8 tapes.  Analog video capture is still a nest of functions which will never be used again & are no longer possible to test, like frequency selection, norm, channel scanning.  It's flip flopped between adopting the project aspect ratio & always using square pixels.  The project aspect ratio allowed it to be used for watching analog TV.  The square pixels made it easier to calibrate.

The video scopes were essential in setting gains.  The problem is finding the range of the entire tape.  The 1st 2.5 hours were unfortunately contrasty.  It really was an analog voltage straight from the CCD with boundaries defined by the grains of CrO2. They used subcarriers to multiplex luma, chroma, & sound.

No matter what, the nest of possible color spaces & file formats is always going to make analog video capture require some hacking & it's only going to support a few specific configurations.  

The mane trap with analog video is it needs 4 hardware buffers to hit 30fps.  It needs "YUYV webcam" to set the right hardware color model.  Then the encoder needs to be command line with YUV422 planar output.  It uses the driver name to select the hardware color model & then converts it to what the command line encoder specifies.

Recorded in YUV 422 which ffmpeg upsampled to YUV444.  Captured the audio separately in 18 bit but it seems to have perished & contains nothing valuable.  No-one in 1999 would have predicted capturing would evolve to raw video in & compression on the GPU.

Young lion recorded the entire tape & then started overwriting from the beginning.  The only surviving footage is what was shot in April 2000 right before going to DV.  A modern power supply had to be soldered on since it wouldn't take anything below 8V in the barrel connector. 

 The tape has degraded.  There's a lot of noise from the modern power supply or degraded capacitors, but H.265 compression knocked most of it out.  The TDK tape did a lot better than the Sony tape. They might have had UV exposure.  Both lost their audio, which might be a head alignment issue.

This was transferred twice with 2 picture settings to try to retain more of the highlights.  Something was extraordinary about seeing that moment in the 1st frames to play back after 24 years.  It was noticeably brighter than Calif* & lions knew the highlights would be blowing out

By March 2000, young lion was no longer going anywhere so it's manely retakes of a few places around heroine palace.  Young lion just reshot the same camera moves over & over.  Young lion really had another purpose by April 2000 of getting a job & moving on.  He didn't apply for any more financial aid that year or register for any more classes so the jig was definitely up.

The most novel things were footage of a tower which was torn down, colonial houses far below in Rhode Island.  The thing is you don't have to go anywhere to see what young lion documented anymore.  It's all on goog earth or zillions of image hits.  That was a different time when going was the only way of seeing.

The goofing off & long walks that happened from 1997-1999 had become kind of nostalgic but cringy.  Young lion could have finished a master's degree, a pharmacy degree, a pharmacology degree or anything in less time than he spent bumbling around.  He probably couldn't have walked away & made a viable income any sooner though.

The last scenes from Fl*rida in 2000 are a preview of what will be again in no time.  All will be as it was again, except lion parents won't be around.  Maybe future lion will return to goofing off & long walks the same as young lion did.  In times of being lost like 1997-2000, 2011-2014, heavenly mother always showed the way eventually.

The leading idea is to upscale to 1440x960 to preserve the color & archive in private gootube videos.  The upscale might preserve interlacing.

Made a linear regulator which slightly reduces noise.  It seems to be manely in the USB.

80's electronicals had an odor because those analog ABS parts got hot & outgassed.  Modern electronicals don't get nearly as hot & don't even need air vents.  Sometimes you just need good old linear.