My screenshot secret

June 3, 2006

Last year, I wanted a way to broadcast the night games on the back of my garage for big screen viewing in an effort to recreate the ballpark experience at home. With two kiddos who have a hard time sitting through games, not to mention night games go past their bedtime, this was the next best option. At the time, I could only receive the games broadcast on DCA 20, so I wanted to find something that I could use rabbit ears with to pick up TV signals on my laptop (which I then plug the monitor-out connection into a projector).

My laptop is an Apple PowerBook (Mac OS X), which limited my options. What I found while on a mad dash to every electronics store on the planet was that the only available option was in the Apple Store (my playground!). I picked up an Eye TV 200 television converter (semi-PVR, although at the time I didn’t use it for that) with a firewire connection – made solely for Macs by Elgato Systems. The box didn’t show all the connections on the box and they wouldn’t let me open it in the store, so I hoped it had a coax hookup. Luckily, it did!

That particular model has since been replaced with the EyeTV 250 using a USB connection.

Recording and capturing screenshots didn’t occur to me until this season. The software (1.8.5 is what I have) that comes with the hardware allows recording, although I’ve found it automatically stops after three hours. Once a recording is complete, the interface allows you to set markers in order to cut clips out and export them to the built-in iMovie software (side note: I don’t have iMovie HD!). It’s a bit labor intensive as you can’t export multiple clips to the same iMovie project with the version I have, so I have to rename exported clips and then drag them into the current project, but it works. Once I have all the clips I want, I can then “share” as a QuickTime movie to post on the web.

Since I have the ability to rewind and pause the recorded video, screenshots are easy to grab. A simple command-C will grab the image and then (since I don’t have any image editing software), I can paste it into Word and then export it as a JPG. Or, when I remember the key shortcut, I can generate a PDF using the command-shift-4 sequence (I think?) and it grabs a screenshot and creates it as a PDF on the desktop, which I can again export as a JPG using Preview or Acrobat. Again, not perfect and somewhat labor intensive, but I seem to have a good system down for it now.

A single game takes about 5 GB of disk space and the current version of EyeTV software doesn’t allow me to archive. I’ll be upgrading to EyeTV 2.0 next week, which will give me that ability, so it won’t be necessary to delete a game by the time I want to record the next one since I do have an external firewire drive just waiting for something to fill it up! I’m hoping the upgrade to OS X 10.4 includes the new iLife suite that has iMovie HD :-) Not that that will help with baseball games that aren’t in HD (yet?), but I’m all for new features.

I realize this doesn’t help you PC users! I figured I’d share since I’ve been asked several times what I use. Macs are great for this kinda stuff!

Posted in Media