molnarcs's Journal: TV-Capture on FreeBSD && WTA tour news

The top 8 players (among women) this year in a final challenge (not necessarily the top 8 ranking, because porsche only count's this year's results). It will be awesame. 4 of 8 are russians, all playing very different and therefore exciting tennis.I hope Dementieva improved her serve, for she is the only one who has such a known and typical weakness. (but she is soo good in every other aspects, that she actually can make up for this deficiency, which makes her tennis very spectacular. Problem is, seeing how the other russian demons (Myskina & Sharapova) play, not to mention Amelie Mauresmo and Davenport, I don't think she can win w/o learning to do kickass serves.

I learned that one of Dementieva's hobbies is chess (and that's why her favorite tennis player is Martina Hingis, "because she plays smart, like playing chess on a tennis court." ). Yeah, tennis is 50% mind game. In fact, I believe it is one of the smartest sport. Or rather, one of the most balanced sports. One has to be smart to play tennis, and must have excellent mental discipline .... and he or she must also be a good athlete. She is also multilingual (russian, french and english).

Nothing interesting happened in Linz last week btw. Well, nothing interesting compared to Zurich or Moscow.Which is good, for I am running out of space on my harddrive. I've captured the more interesting matches, using mencoder, and my very very cheap capture card (PlayTV MPEG II). Image quality is excellent. On my amd xp 2400+ I can capture into 528:396/1500Kb/s mpeg4(divx)avi, if I don't do anything else. It is better, however, to capture with constant quantizer (-vqscale=2) and do a 2 pass encoding later in avidemux (and while you are at it, cutting out the ads). This gives me excellent results. I'm planning to write a tv-capture on freeBSD howto btw.

Next week: ATP Championships (men). The two bestest weeks in tennis (apart from the 4 grandslams).

Details on the WTA Championship

Dementieva