Posts made in June 18th, 2008

TV on your Whiteboard

Posted on Jun 18, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards | 2 comments

There are different ways to get multimedia content onto your IWB. Youtube is pretty good, but it can be something of a lottery. Buying professional CD’s and DVD’s is another option.

One other way that has interested me for a while, is turning your computer into a Television. This is becoming easier and easier.

A few years back I bought a plug in device that was the size of a paperback book. It was quite awkward to use and the picture quality and recording quality was pretty poor.

I have just bought a new device that has really impressed me. It’s called the Pinnacle PCTV Nano stick and it is a hybrid Digital/Analogue TV tuner stick.

First thing to impress me was the price, it was only £35 in PC World. Secondly is the size, its tiny. And the third thing to impress me is the picture quality. Plugged into my normal house aerial the quality was pretty good, and we’re not a particularly strong area for television reception.

Using the supplied, portable aerial was less impressive. I was not able to get a signal at home. I am going to look into some kind of digital booster and see if that makes things better. I don’t want TV on the move as such, but it would be nice to have a system that I could use if no rooftop aerial connection was possible.

The Stick comes with Pinnacle TVCentre Pro software so that the television picture is shown in a window on your computer screen. This software will also let you use your computer as a hard drive/DVD recorder and it is this aspect that interests me for use on an IWB.

You can save TV programmes as straight MPEG files or DivX format. It will also export for devices such as ipods etc. I could take the DivX file and copy it straight onto my Archos to view on the train for example. File sizes can be large, but recording directly onto DVD would avoid filling your hard drive too quickly.

For a teacher who wants to record snippets of a TV programme to show to a class this is ideal. You could record adverts that use really bad science and then get the class to pick the science apart.

It could also connect to the coax output from a video recorder and let you digitise any of the old video tapes that you have hanging around in your department cupboards that haven’t yet been put onto DVD.

Obviously copyright is an issue here, and I would check this with your school first.

There are several other PC/TV Sticks out there. Pinnacle are doing a few, and also check out Happauge for other PC/TV devices.