VirtualDub Post Capturing: Deleting Advertisements

There are two things that I do before I start cutting out commercial breaks from my TV captures:

• I make sure that the audio and video are in sync; and
• I remove all MP3 artifacts.

The Problem With VirtualDub

VirtualDub was the first tool that I used for cutting out these ads found in commercial breaks. But AVI capture files that have been resynced (and MP3 artifacts removed) will gradually go out of sync again after cutting out the ads. No matter what I did, I could not cut out ads correctly with VirtualDub.

Avidemux To The Rescue

So, I now use Avidemux to edit out these advertisements from my TV captures.

Avidemux is a multi-platform video editor and it is free and open-source. The version that I have installed on my PC is version 2.5.4 (r7200). I only use 7 keys on the keyboard to locate, mark and cut out advertisements.

Posting Churp Churp Campaigns To Facebook

My first Churp Churp campaign posting to Facebook was a disaster. I have assumed that I could easily do the posting with just a single click of the mouse on the "Like" button (see picture below) but ended up sharing the advertisers site instead - with no URL to my unique campaign link in the posting. Good for the advertiser but not good for me as I will not be paid for the mouse clicks generated from this advertisement.

TV Alhijrah - Now In Ipoh

I accidentally detected TV Alhijrah in Ipoh airwaves while doing an "Auto Tune" to fix my TV reception problem with RTM's TV2 on 29th August 2012. I am not sure when TV Alhijrah began transmitting to Ipoh. I tried tuning in to this station in April 2012 but could not get any signal back then. TV Alhijrah is transmitting to Ipoh on Channel 55 on the UHF band.

My VirtualDub Capture Mode Settings

Below are the VirtualDub settings that I use in VirtualDub for all my TV captures (my XVid settings can be found in my earlier post).

My captures are encoded in XVid (for video) and MP3 (for audio).

VirtualDub Post Capturing: Removing MP3 Artifacts

Annoying Artifacts

When I do TV capturing with VirtualDub, with the KWorld PCI Analog TV Card Lite (PVR-TV 7134SE) hardware device, the only sampling rate that I could choose for audio compression is 32 KHz, irrespective of the audio compression format. As a consequence, I have to compress my MP3 audio with a sampling rate of 32 KHz - in stereo with a bit rate of 96 Kbps.

I do not get any problems with the audio if I were to view my playbacks on my PC. But for playbacks using a media player that is connected to my TV, I can hear those annoying MP3 artifacts - some funny distortion when someone is talking that is audible at certain parts of the playback. I suppose this is because my TV has better speakers compared with my PC.

VirtualDub Post Capturing: Keeping Audio And Video In Sync

Unless it is less than 20 minutes long, I have a problem with audio and video synchronization in all my VirtualDub TV captures. During playback, the audio and video will start out okay, but after about 20 minutes they will begin to go out of sync. It is only later that I realized that this problem is caused by the audio and video having different length in time. In my case, the length of the audio is always less than the video, causing the audio to be heard first before the corresponding event in the video.

This is what I have to do to bring audio and video back in sync. To recap, I am using the KWorld PCI Analog TV Card Lite (PVR-TV 7134SE) as my capture hardware device. My video captures are encoded into XVid, while audio is encoded into MP3.

TiVme And RAM Slots

The Problem

This is a follow up blog to my previous posting. There were 2 other problems that were not so obvious after the boot failure problem had been fixed. These 2 problems did not occur prior to the PC's boot failure.

Extending V2CRS - Enabling VirtualDub Filters

I have a need to use VirtualDub filters when scheduling TV captures with V2CRS. I always find that with the Sharpen filter enabled at level 17, my playbacks always look better. I also have a need to enable the Denoise filter as for one particular channel where I live, the reception is not that good. But unfortunately, there is no option for enabling VirtualDub filters in V2CRS.

By luck I suppose, instead of selecting with the mouse, I happened to hit the keyboard and realised that I could key in into the field "Path:" when defining the file to execute for launching VirtualDub (under Preferences -> Capture application) from V2CRS. A thought then came to me - instead of using a .EXE executable file, using a Windows batch file ("VD.BAT" in this case) to launch VirtualDub will give me the ability to use VirtualDub scripts (and hence VirtualDub filters) via the VirtualDub command-line options.

Opera Version 11.64 On Win98

I previously wrote about upgrading my Firefox(FF) browser from v2.0.0.3 to v3.6.8 because of an "Invalid Title Value" error message that I got when I was creating a blog in Blogger.com.

I was very pleased with FF v3.6.8 after the upgrade. Compared with FF v2.0.0.3, it was very much faster and hardly crashed - only once but I think it was caused by uTorrent v1.8.1. I can login to Blogger.com, upload JPEG pictures and post updates to my blog without any problem. Neither do I have problems in viewing the other pages in Blogger.com.

But problems began to crop up after when I started to use Facebook (FB) and Nuffnang (a blog advertising company). FB pages will display but hard-disk activity will shoot up exponentially. FF response time was not only slow but the sound of hard disk activity was scary. Later, I realized that I had problems setting my Message notification level and other FB security options. Clicking on my selection does nothing. At Nuffnang, some pages will not get displayed correctly. And even if they do, clicking on certain buttons or selecting certain menu drop-down boxes yielded nothing.

Boot Failure - No POST, No Video Signal

I tried booting up my Asus P5G41C-M LX motherboard PC last Sunday afternoon, 17th June 2012, and it failed. There was no power-on self-test (POST) nor any video signal going into the monitor. As I do not have an internal speaker connected to the motherboard, I could not tell if there were any warning beeps coming from the BIOS. The only thing that were running are the CPU chassis and power supply cooling fans. The motherboard standby LED was also On.

I was tempted to apply some Electrolube Contact Cleaner Lubricant to the gold contacts/pins of the RAM module but I was not sure if this would help. I do not want to be blamed as I had a similar problem last year with this PC, and it turned out to be a bad motherboard - the store subsequently replaced it for me as it was under warranty. So all I did in the end was to just reseat the RAM module back into the slot. It did not help. The PC still did not boot up.

On the following day, I took the PC back to the store thinking that the worst had happened. The technician did some troubleshooting; disconnected the hard-disk power and SATA cable. It still would not boot up. He the removed the RAM module, took it to his desk and clean it. He then reinstalled the RAM in another slot and the PC rebooted without problems after that. When I asked him, all that he could tell me was that there were contaminants on the the gold contacts/pins on the RAM module.

Perhaps I should have cleaned it myself with the Electrolube Contact Cleaner Lubricant like I did in this previous post on my PCI card. It would have saved me all the stress and worry. Oh well. At least now I know.

Update: 30th March 2015
PC actually froze on the 22nd and 31st August 2014. I coated the pins of the RAM module and memory slot with Electrolube Contact Cleaner Lubricant and have not had this problem since.