Problem 1: Me. Yup, that is right. The first problem I ran into was me. I have a lot of ideas for applications for Android and in general. The problem isn’t that I jumped right into development, it was when I jumped I landed in a spot that was over my head and that made me instantly frustrated. With in days of installing the tools and SDK my drive had died. I just got over whelmed with all the new that I didn’t take the time to learn.

Solution: While I hate doing the typical “Hello World” type apps, it is a necessary evil. It is the steps needed to ramp up understanding of the environmental. What I was trying to do was not hard but because I didn’t know the basics of Android development, it was difficult to find help. The process isn’t hard and takes a bit of time but ramping up is needed to keep from being overwhelmed.

Problem 2: Holy cow, embedded application development is slow. Let me be clear, development isn’t slow but getting you application to run via emulator or on a device is painful. When it takes a few minute for my application to run, this just kills the fun and drive to continue. Especially when learning. When I was waiting, it was so easy to get side tracked.

Solution: I hear the sdk and emulators are getting better and faster. I am also in needed of a new PC which is pushing 5 years old or at least an upgrade or 2. Other than that, I am not sure what else I can do.

So the biggest problem was me. Once I can get through them, it should be pretty easy to continue. I plan on starting this again as I think there is some positive applications I could contribute to the community. However this is on hold for the moment. Need to get caught up on technologies related to my job, mainly ASP.NET MVC

One of the reason I decided to pull the trigger was the idea of creating application for the phone. By day I am a .NET developer. Mainly C#. I was sort of excited to learn a new development environment and langue because I have been in .NET land for so long. I figure it is time to branch out. Yeah java is not much different than .NET but you have to start somewhere.

So I had some time to get the Eclipse IDE setup and ready to go to start my journey. I went to http://developer.android.com and followed the instructions on getting started. I am starting from scratch. The machine (win7) I am working on didn’t even have the Java runtime installed yet. Since I am a novice when it comes to Java and Eclipse, I followed the installation steps for the Android SDK. They seemed straight forward.

First step: Get eclipse. Sounds easy enough. Read through the section for ecplise which stated…

A Java or RCP version of Eclipse is recommended. For Eclipse 3.5, the “Eclipse Classic” version is recommended.

What does that even mean? So I want to the Eclipse site and downloaded the Java version of Eclipse 3.6 and continued to the section to install the Android Develipment Tools (ADT).  This is where things get more confusing because I was greated with…

Caution: There are known issues with the ADT plugin running with Eclipse 3.6. Please stay on 3.5 until further notice.

Grrrrrr…. But I just downloaded 3.6.1!! To limit the number of issues I run into I decide to follow what Google recommends and found a copy of Eclipse 3.5. No big deal. I go to run Eclipse and it promptly fails stating it can not find the JVM. At this point I was confused because I had thought that I installed Java at some point in the past. Yeah, I was wrong. Whoops. Over to the Oracle to get the JRE/JDK.

I am running win7 x64 and did what anyone running x64bit OS would do. I download the x64 windows binary. Install Java. Run eclipse. Eclipse fails again. Still stating that it could not find the JVM. Ugh. The message box suggest to add the path to the JVM to my system path. A few clicks later and it should be good to go right? Nope, now Eclipse crashs but with a log/debug message.

At this point I was about ready to give up. That is until it dawned on me. “Hey stupid! You probably can’t run 32bit Eclipse with 64bit JRE!” An uninstall and reinstall of the JRE and eclipse is running!

From here on out everything seem to work correctly. Totally elapsed time: ~2 hours. No really 2 hours.

My enthusiasm has lessened alot because of the frustrating install. I mean I have not even started to write a hello world Android app yet. I am planning on sharing my experience as I go and comparing it to how I view the .NET start up experience.

The Answer: Buy some new toys and convert the analog video to something modern like DVDs!

My parents, like many, bought a home video camera in the late 80s. Since then my family has accumulated hours upon hours of home movies. There is a lot of family history on those VHS tapes. That is a lot of family history many do not want to disappear. The real problem is most (none technical people) do not realize that tapes do not last forever and VCRs will not be around that much longer.

I was pretty much going into this blind. There are a many possible way to get analog video converted to digital video. Since I didn’t want to screw this up or waste money on anything that yielded problems or poor quality, I made sure to do my research. VideoHelp.com has proven to be a great resource for all things video. There is a ton of information on the site but be warned, VideoHelp.com has a large community of professionals so it is hard to get a clear answer for the hobbyist.

I started my research with exactly how to get the analog video from the VCR to my computer. There are tons of ways to convert analog video to digital video. There are a number of hardware to software and internal and external solution to do this. After reading the net, it becomes clear the easiest way to get video from analog to digital was to use a GrassValley ADVC110. The ADVC110 takes in S-Video or Composite connectors. It will do the conversion from analog video to digital video in the unit and outputs the video from the device over fire-wire. The video that is output from the device is DV-AVI and runs about 13GB/hour.

The next major part of this plan was to find a VCR. There are a lot of options for a VCR too. Finding a VCR proved to be even more complicated than finding a device to do the video converter. It seems that there are a lot of opinions how what type of VCR is better and why. There is a large debate over consumer vs professional VCRs and which one is better. At the present moment in time, there are no companies making standalone VCR players. The options are to buy a used professional or prosummer VCR from EBay or similar place or you can buy a consumer dvd/vcr combo from your local retailer. The main difference between the two options (form what I can tell) is a some of the professional VCRs will have image correct/stabilization in the form of a TBC or Time Base correction device. A TBC will make jumpy video more stable and remove some of the artifacts form the video.

Since I needed a new DVD player for my office, I opted to go with the consumer DVD/VCR combo. I bought a Philips DVD/VHS combo from Wal-Mart for $80 bucks. I figured if the video quality was poor, I would try to find a used professional VCR. After all my research and worrying over what to buy, I finally pulled the trigger and bought the ADVC110 and VCR/DVD player. Last weekend, I hook it all up and started to convert video. I have 13 family video tapes to convert and since then I have done 3 of the tapes. I wanted the DVDs to look as good as the VHS tapes when being played on a TV. I can say that with my current set up the digital video looks better than the VHS tapes. It is all really easy to use too!

Set Up of the VCR and ADVC110 is very easy and easy to work with. The hardware set up consisted of connecting the VCR to the ADVC110 and the ADVC110 to my computer. To capture the video being pushed from the ADVC110, I use a free tool called WinDV which is very easy to use. Once the raw DV-AVI video is captured, I have been using Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker to create movies and DVDs. Both are straight forward to use. They are not very robust but they get the job done to my needs.

I am open to question just remember I am by no means an expert on this subject. Here is a very small example of raw video that has been converted from on of the tapes. The clip is what my bedroom looked like when I was little.

Tony