We have one of those big satellite dishes in our back yard, and last year I recorded the Kickoff using it, but it took forever to set-up. Sometime in the past 7 months, the settings got messed-up, and now I can’t find NTV anymore.
Does anyone know how to get this working?
The receiver is a Toshiba TRX-2220.
What service do you have?
I’m assuming it is not Dish Network, because channel 213 (If I recall correctly) is NASA TV.
I’m assuming you had to manually dial in the transponder and adjust the azimuth?? All that happy stuff.
http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/2005/kickoff.htm
And here’s the info about the webcast, and the Satellite broadcast.
NASA Webcast
The Webcast will be from 10AM est - 12PM est.
http://robotics.nasa.gov/first/2005/kickoff.htm is the NASA webcast site. Please check out the link early to be sure you have the latest technology needed to view the webcast.
NASA Broadcast
**The NASA broadcast is scheduled from 10AM–12PM EST. **
**For Channel/Cable Channel/Dish/Satellite Broadcasts: NASA Television can be found on the satellite AMC 9, Transponder 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization downlink frequency - 3880 MHz, Audio is at 6.8 MHz. **
It just so happens that if you live in the Boston area and have cable you should be able to also watch the kickoff or at least part of it. I know NASA television runs from 9am to some unknown time on one of these stations.
Same down here. I guess I’ll just have to play around with the settings.
Yippie!!!
It’s working now. 
Would it be OK to BitTorrent the kickoff so that way teams won’t have to rely on the low-quality webcast recording?
I just want to help, since my team isn’t competing this year.
EDIT:
Does anyone have any experience encoding XviD or DivX from VBR-MPEG2?
I’m guessing no since the webcast is sole property of FIRST and NASA, but don’t quote me. Dave Lavery may know a good answer to that.
You don’t want to infringe on any kind of copyright stuff.
But, I see where you are coming from and feel your pain.
Streaming video really sux, no matter what kind of connection you have.
It would be a lot easier if NASA allowed the Kickoff to be downloaded after the live stream was over, but as of now, I don’t think that they do. 
For this particular broadcast, for this particular purpose, Yes.
-dave
Hey Elgin check Robotics Education Project - FIRST Nationals they [NASA] always archives the webcasts and has them available for download after the event.
Again… Streaming Downloads… Urghhh… You can’t save them bad boys.
Oh man… I was shot down… Gee thanks Dave… :rolleyes:
Just kidding. That’s cool. w00t! to the freedom to share information!
Shot Down again…
http://all-streaming-media.com/record-video-stream/record-streaming-video-windows-media.htm
For reference, I had the best luck with Net Transport for recording some regional streams last year.
Thanks Mr. Lavery!!!
Thanks to you, I now use NetTransport to DL almost everything now. It’s a good program and I will probably use it to dl both streams as a backup, as will I try to do the same with a VHS recording.
The reason I want to do this is because (1) I would hope that someone who has the means would do this if I was incapable (2) a HQ recording would be awesome.
I recorded the 2004 kickoff on VHS, and now I want to record it on a PC. I have an AiW 128, and my dad has an AiW 9000. I should be able to use one of them.
EDIT:
Would any of these guides be good? Every time I try to re-encode an MPEG2 using VirtualDubMP2, I can never get the video to match to the audio. I think it’s because it’s Variable Bit-Rate, but I might be wrong.
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/xvid-guides.htm
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/gknot-main3.htm
What is an “AiW 128” and “AiW 9000”? I personally use a DV100 ( by dazzle ) and have used it to record video off my satellite. 99% of the time its synchronized and its good quality and as good or poor as I set it up to be.
If anyone is interested in capturing these videos, please make a high quality XviD and a low quality video of a different file type (so people without the codec can still watch… ie. wmv, mpg1)
I will be able to host these of my team site, so long as everything is cleared to be legal. If not i guess we could do the bit torrent thing. Not saying that isnt illegal, but as Dave said for the purpose of sharing it with a few FIRSTers, I think it would be fine.
The way to go is definitely Bit Torrent because there is less strain when more people want the video at any given time. No single host has to bear the bandwidth needs and because its a P2P network there is usually more bandwidth.
Any ideas on which Tracker you will use to host the Torrent?
Please keep us updated.
Thanks 
I have a tracker on our team’s website.
AiW is my shorthand for ATI’s multimedia video card, the All-in-Wonder.
I have Dazzle DVC-80, and it works pretty well, except the highest rez is 352x288. That’s not large enough.
I’m sure I/we can make an MPEG1 video using TMPGEnc.
I just have to figure out how to encode from MPEG2 to XviD. I belive now that the problem is when the recording has dropped frames around the beginning. When I encode the video, it dosn’t keep spaces where they should be, and the video speeds up.
I should be getting a JVC MiniDV camera very soon, and since I can’t seem to figure out how to convert these MPEG-2 files, I’m thinking of just recording to the camera from a VCR, or something like that.
I have TV-Wonder card
I could set it up to record to mpeg @ 8 mbit/s, and transcode to divx (5.2.2?) @ ~1000 kbit/s
The card’s output is a little (really, just a little) washed out, if I have time tommarow, I could tune it a bit. The encoding will take approx 2x the total video, and my connection is 144kbit (IDSL) It would take a while to get to whomever will host the file (via BT, or other)
The encoding should be visually lossless, unless you actually pause the video and put your face up to the screen.
2 questions: is it legal? and Who will host the tracker?
I think this will convert to XviD. Thanks so much for recording this!
I can host the video on my teams website, we have the bandwith capacity for lots of downloads at once.
…and some people dont use bit torrent.