Media

Kevin wants to know how to DIY capture his home super 8 movies. Leo says he'll need a projector. Then he can use a camcorder to record the image on the wall. That's the easiest. But there's also devices that will allow him to capture directly and digitize it, like the Wolverine. It's $300 and is highly reviewed. Kodak has a cheaper version, but it's not the Kodak everyone remembers, the name had been sold. He can also use a service like ScanCafe.

Josh has an audio recording that has a lot of distortion. How can he fix it? Leo says he can't, really. Distortion usually means the top end of the audio recording has "clipped" causing the audio to lose the upper end. But the chatroom says that Izotope is a plugin that can repair it somewhat. Since the caller is blind, however, Leo recommends a service called Auphonic. They have professional audio restoration tools that can do the job. There's a free tier and a pay tier.

Brian has two Apple TVs that stream music from his computer and iTunes, but lately it just stops after a few minutes. Apple says that it's a corrupted library, but Leo disagrees since it doesn't happen when he streams music on his computer directly. Leo has a hunch it's the router. Using AirPlay, he could be dealing with buffering issues. He also should make sure nothing else is connected to his AirPlay device. It could also be an issue with home sharing and his router configuration. It could be a blocked port issue.

Paul would like to rip DVDs and then put it on a 128GB thumbdrive so that his kids don't trash his DVDs. Leo says that's a great idea and you can use both Handbrake and VLC Media Client to do it. But how does he convert a DVD that's PAL? Leo says that the DVD is probably region coded to prevent you from watching a DVD from another country here in the US. The first time you play the DVD, it sets the Region code. But there are DVD players that don't do it. There's also a few back doors that respond to a certain number of remote button presses to unlock them.