2. Gathering The Components

As the first step of my project, I started collecting the required parts. The laptop was a low-end Dell with a 2.2 GHz Celeron processor, 384 MB of RAM and a 30 GB hard drive. So as not to tax the main processor, I wanted a device that would take analog A/V inputs and convert to a digital format using its own built-in processor. I also needed sophisticated software to control the device, in order to schedule and record video.

For display, I wanted something that would take the VGA output from my laptop and convert it to S-Video for a TV. And finally, I wanted to control the whole thing from a single remote. This meant I'd also need IR capabilities.

After a bit of consideration of what I wanted to accomplish, I ended up with a couple of components from ADS. For video capture, I used ADS's Instant TV Deluxe USB, which came with the remote and IR blaster that I'd need (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Instant TV Deluxe

For conversion between VGA and S-Video, I used ADS's TV Elite XGA (shown in Figure 2).

Figure 2: TV Elite XGA

For software, the Instant TV Deluxe came bundled with a package called Beyond TV, which is designed to give many of the same features you'd see in a DVR such as a TiVo.