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The phone rang late in the morning as it often does. I expected the usual -- some PR person looking for a little attention for a client. It was a PR person, but was actually one who worked for my own outfit fielding a request from an outside outfit needing some comment on the latest corporate happenings at a certain computer company. A TV news crew wanted to chat with me on camera.

"Great," I said. "When do they need me?"

"They're setting up now. Can you be down in five minutes or so?" was the answer on the other end of the line.

So that's how I happened to appear on "the telly" in London and throughout the UK last night.

I've appeared on BBC TV a few times over the years, most recently in a live shot from its studios on the West Side of Manhattan, but almost never been able to see the segments. This week's slot on the World Business Report was a little different, as the network streams the show online in Real Video format. But what it doesn't let you do is save the file as it streams to your computer. So how did I get the video above? Well it was a bit of a hack....

This turned out to be an excuse to try a new program I just learned about called Display Eater which captured the video, sort of. What it appears to have done is capture a long string of still images, which it then converts to a Quicktime video clip.

I thought this was all well and good, until when I played the resulting Quicktime clip and learned that Display Eater doesn't record audio. Here, the solution was to turn to my favorite, app, Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro which saved the audio stream of my segment into MP3 format.

Armed with a silent video clip and an MP3 sound file of the segment, I poured both into iMove HD, which would have seemed to be a straightforward operation. All I had to do, it seemed was synchronize the sound file and the video file as best I could. Simple right? Wrong.

As interesting and potentially useful as Display Eater is, it doesn't come close to capturing the full video stream, but more an approximation of it. The result I had was a video clip that was not only out of sync with the audio, but actually shorter than the audio clip that accompanied it.

So at least now you know why the audio and the video are not synced up right.

One interesting bit of trivia about this clip: Steve Jobs appears once late in the segment giving one of the keynotes for which he is famous. But he actually appears twice, though its kind of hard to spot him. Can you guess where it is?

Posted 8/05/2006 10:29:00 PM

On The Telly Across The Pond