Capturing teletext
August 9th, 2005 by 
Phil
One of my daily habits is reading GameCentral (Channel 4, Teletext, pages 375-379) every day. Except that at the moment my telly reception, despite being cable, is so poor that I only actually get to read pages 375 and 376; for the rest I’m lucky if I get half a frame out of six. v.poor (Bridget Jones is back in fashion, right?).
The pages aren’t served up onto the web, so I thought I’d use a TV card, an analogue aerial and an automated task to capture the pages I wanted and serve them up as a private RSS feed so I could read them when I get to work have some spare time. Sounds good, right? So I whipped out my decade-old MM201PCTV card, stuck it in my PC, spent a couple of hours finding the right drivers, installed DScaler, ran it, and watched my PC die horribly. It was just like running WindowsME all over again.
I don’t suppose anyone has a better idea, or instinctively (and magically) knows what I’ve done wrong? Being able to save out teletext pages would be immensely useful, and it kind of baffles me that I’ve had so much trouble trying to do it (especially now that teletext doesn’t even have a website at all any more).
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Not quite sure if Bridget is back in fashion as such. The new column seems to have attracted a few unenthusiastic reviews.
As for DScaler, I’ve heard rumours of it causing XP to freeze with certain cards eg. the bt878 chipset and certain drivers, usually fixed by a change of drivers?
However, I don’t do Windows, and ymmv.
Posted by Em on August 10th, 2005 at 11:34 amNo, they haven’t been too favourable, have they? I’ll find out for myself tomorrow
aha! My card has the bt878 chipset, god knows if there are any other drivers for my card, it was hard enough finding anything in the first place
Boo.
I guess it’s about time I tried *nux again, time to restart my “good text editor” hunt. Gnoppix is such a blessing.
Posted by Pip on August 10th, 2005 at 11:44 amAha! Yes I vicariously live your life through your blog entries! Hehehe.
anyway; Dude! Did I sell you that card? The name seems oddly familiar. And should I be feeling guilty about it?
Posted by Josh on August 10th, 2005 at 3:42 pmHello stranger!
No you didn’t, it came bundled with my PC back in ‘98. A vintage year for crappy TV cards
Posted by Pip on August 10th, 2005 at 3:54 pmIncidentally, it occurs to me that the reason why some drivers crash DScaler might be that DScaler has its own bt878 driver? (why else does it need a sys in ring0 on xp? Suspicious) Not sure about this, but it occurs to me that any other drivers on the system would then have to be in Ignore Me I’m Invisible mode to avoid complications, crashes, etc. What’s it do if you just don’t install drivers before running dscaler, or set the driver settings to something moronically basic?
Again, I know bugger-all about windows, so YMMV.
Posted by Em on August 11th, 2005 at 12:17 amGood idea, I’ll take a look!
Posted by Pip on August 11th, 2005 at 8:43 am