BTWinCap is an alternative Windows WDM driver for those with BrookTree/Conexiant based capture cards. This is a wonderful enhancement to those of us who have either unsupportted, or poorly supported hardware with newer systems (Such as drivers for Windows 98 only).

I’ve discovered that my MediaLand SuperTV is the same as a Prolink PlayTV Pro (model 8E). I would use their given drivers; but they seem to have introduced an intentional bug. This bug causes the card to reset once it gets an open/reopen request; the practical upshot of this is that you can no longer use your card for capturing with software such as VirtualDub.

The BTWinCap driver solves this, by not having these [intentional] problems. Below, find my “BTSpy” formatted file which allows the card to work perfectly well with the TV, SVideo, and Composite components; but the FM radio function does not currently work. I’ll try debugging the issue with the FM tuner in the future.

### BtSpy Report ###

General information: Name:MediaLand SuperTV (ProLink PlayTVPro 8E) Chip: Bt878 , Rev: 0×00 Subsystem: 0×00000000 Vendor: Gammagraphx, Inc. Values to MUTE audio: Mute_GPOE : 0×0000ff Mute_GPDATA: 0×000028 Has TV Tuner: Yes TV_Mux : 2 TV_GPOE : 0×0000ff TV_GPDATA: 0×000021 Number of Composite Ins: 1 Composite in #1 Composite1_Mux : 3 Composite1_GPOE : 0×0000ff Composite1_GPDATA: 0×000024 Has SVideo: Yes SVideo_Mux : 1 SVideo_GPOE : 0×0000ff SVideo_GPDATA: 0×000024 Has Radio: Yes Radio_GPOE : 0×0000ff Radio_GPDATA: 0×000020

This is a working profile for btwincap
with the Medialand SuperTV, AKA Prolink
PlayTV Pro (Series 8E). The video and
audio works perfectly for the TV. Svideo,
and Composite inputs; however the Radio
does not; neither are any BookTree
enhancements available with VirtualDub
or DScaler.

Mortis has updated MKVToolNix, and as such, my official MacOS X port has been updated as well. Note that mmg, the wxWindows based front-end is currently non-functional, and as such is not included.

MKVToolNix has been statically compiled, so you not need additional support software to use the included tools.

Since I like to keep up to date (and it didn’t work), I’ve submitted my first patch to an existing Gentoo build, specifically, mod_php. It utilized an old patch that was valid for elder revisions of PHP. Oddly, the bugs were fixed in PHP 4.3.5 for Apache 2, but not Apache 1; so I removed the patches for Apache 2, and created a new ebuild. It’s built, and works fine.

[Update: Interesting. Robin Johnson included a patch which is exactly the same, roughly 10 hours later than mine, but only after browbeating me for my submission, and without credit. Shame on you, sir.]

My Optorite CW4002 has been exhibiting an odd issue. It will no burn over 32x, despite being a 40x CDRW drive. I have known good disks (newer build Ritek 40x), and it outright refuses to burn faster.

Here’s a screenshot using Nero’s CDTest on my PC with the 100E firmware:

And now, with the updated 110E firmware:

Yes, it’s now degraded to 12x!

The disk hasn’t fallen back into PIO mode, so I am a bit curious as to issues with this drive. I’ve since downgraded back to the 100E firmware, and will settle for 32x until I manage to find out what’s wrong with the disk. Optorite is also rather confused about this… of obvious reasons!

[Edit:]

Update:

Optorite released firmware 120E, and that seems to have fixed these problems

Without looking too hard into their EEPROM, it looks like they updated their manufacturer codes, thus the drive will burn at this faster, advertised speed for known media.

It seems that Nero NRG format is a fairly trivial overlay about the ISO9660 CD format. The easiest way to convert an NRG to an ISO is to strip the first 307200 bytes; the rest will be your resulting ISO-9660 image.

For example; to mount an NRG in linux via loopback: mount -t iso9660 -o loop,offset=307200 image.nrg /mnt/image

Alternatively, a program exists, which will do this for you. I’ve pre-compiled a MacOS X 10.3.x version. You may download it here.

[Edit: Added link to precompiled build.]