Today I was goofing around with hooking a firewire cable to the Motorola DCT-6412 DVR that Comcast provides, and seeing if I could capture HD content onto my MacBook. I could, with some caveats. (Click on the image below to get the full resolution png file of a frame from the capture.)

The problem is that many channels (including most HD channels) are set up with copy protection. They will record, but no open source playback solution exists because of encryption. TNT and our local PBS station are
transmitted in the clear however.

I’ll play with this some more. If anyone is interested, I’ll summarize here at a later date.

Engadget had a nice guide to recording HD material onto your PC, and includes a lot of information.

I was rereading Tsai’s paper on camera calibration, and was reminded of this more recent work by Zhang at Microsoft. I thought I’d dump a link here for later consumption.

A Flexible New Technique for Camera Calibration: Zhengyou Zhang

I admit to a fascination with most methods of print making, so it’s nice to see a rather nifty treatise on wood block printing in the Japanese style make it into Project Gutenberg. It covers the basics (at least from a technical if not artistic side) and is pretty well illustrated.

Wood-Block Printing by F. Morley Fletcher – Project Gutenberg

[tags]Prints,Printmaking,Public Domain[/tags]