Prevue Guide Forums

Ari was interested in these. Thought others here might also be. So I'll just point them out publicly. EPG/Prevue Guide videos from my old VHS collection (digitized in the last couple days):

Electronic Program Guide (Sr.) being maintained by a cable technician (Covina, CA - Dec 20 1989):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=190dS5kmlPA

"The Saddest Prevue Guide That Ever Lived" (West Covina, CA - Mar 15, 1992)
http://www.vimeo.com/11793680

More Prevue Guide clips (West Covina, CA - 1991-1992)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhCn8loYWdc

Blue grid Prevue Guide's first day on air (West Covina, CA - 1993)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6OereXBLAs

I haven't finished going through the old VHS tapes yet, but that's all I think I have. If I find more, I'll post about them here. And for anyone who wants all 4 videos in one convenient download: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=R3BKEDUB

One other thing. There are numerous Prevue Guide videos on Youtube that people might normally prefer to save copies of. For those unaware of this, you can rip videos losslessly (no quality loss) from Youtube (and from many other video sites as well) with the Firefox extension DownloadHelper (available at http://www.downloadhelper.net/). Don't let the somewhat cheesy web site fool you: I have been using it for about 3 years now, and it works very well. It lets you save the exact MP4 or FLV streams that Youtube (and various other video sites) send to the Flash players embedded in their web HTML. No quality loss, no CPU-scorching "captures off your screen in real time" gimmickry, just good ol' fashioned ripping. All I personally recommend is going into the extension's Preferences section (once it's been installed in Firefox) and disabling all the stuff that "phones out" for any reason (i.e. disable Smart Naming, disable "share black list," disable "MP3tunes services", and disable "Twitter services"). Not that I think those things do anything necessarily evil: just saying those things are there, and for those who don't like chatty software, that this is how to "tame" the extension. Anyway, once it's all set up, you can rip Prevue Guide videos off Youtube to your heart's content. (Tip: click the DownloadHelper icon in Firefox's navigation bar, not the icon it puts into Youtube's own web pages, when you want to save something from Youtube itself. The one in the navigation bar lets you select the version -- i.e. quality -- you want to download. FYI, they are: HQ37 = 1080p, HQ22= 720p, HQ18 = 480p, HQ35 = 360p. DownloadHelper will show the ones that are available for any given video.) Hmm. Anything else? Oh, right. If for any reason the extension ever stops working, just check its web site for a new version. Sometimes these video sites change the ways they feed videos to their Flash objects, and new versions of DownloadHelper must be obtained that are aware of how to handle that.

Ah, great, thanks! Will watch the rest a little later.

An alternative way of pinching youtube videos is http://keepvid.com/ - drag the button at the top of your screen to your bookmarks toolbar and just click the link when you want to nick the video. I have been using this method for some time

Personally I like "Free Youtube Download" from DVDVideoSoft. It allows you to download entire playlists instead of downloading one by one. Nice videos BTW!!

I find the Prevue promos in the two new clips pretty hilarious... What were they thinking? :O
The whole "Saddest Prevue Guide that Ever Lived" thing was pretty funny too. Thanks for posting these videos.

swest77 wrote:"The Saddest Prevue Guide That Ever Lived" (West Covina, CA - Mar 15, 1992)
http://www.vimeo.com/11793680

I'm intrigued, how did you get the first AmigaDOS screen, is it just entirely a mockup? It's a nicely edited video BTW, nice music synchronisation with cablevision's dodgy version! I venture their reciever was at fault, there are sparklies on the video!

Heh, thanks for all the compliments.

Yes, the first AmigaDOS screen was entirely a mock-up using an Amiga font clone. The rest (OS background, its mouse pointer, the channel changing snow and sound effect toward the end) was just winged in Photoshop and CoolEdit.

As far as the audio synchronization, video editors with multitrack timelines are handy things.

@Ari - There were even cornier promos than those, believe it or not.

swest77 wrote:Heh, thanks for all the compliments.

Yes, the first AmigaDOS screen was entirely a mock-up using an Amiga font clone. The rest (OS background, its mouse pointer, the channel changing snow and sound effect toward the end) was just winged in Photoshop and CoolEdit.

Ah, cool. Where'd you get the Prevue Guide logo background and the good quality theme music?

AriX wrote:

swest77 wrote:Heh, thanks for all the compliments. Yes, the first AmigaDOS screen was entirely a mock-up using an Amiga font clone. The rest (OS background, its mouse pointer, the channel changing snow and sound effect toward the end) was just winged in Photoshop and CoolEdit.

Ah, cool. Where'd you get the Prevue Guide logo background and the good quality theme music?

Logo was screen captured from one of my videos -- five captures of five consecutive frames, then all evenly merged together to average away the VHS/video noise.

As to the better sounding audio, I explained that here. BTW, thanks for e-mailing me the heads-up to check out the forum again.

swest77 wrote:

AriX wrote:

swest77 wrote:Heh, thanks for all the compliments. Yes, the first AmigaDOS screen was entirely a mock-up using an Amiga font clone. The rest (OS background, its mouse pointer, the channel changing snow and sound effect toward the end) was just winged in Photoshop and CoolEdit.

Ah, cool. Where'd you get the Prevue Guide logo background and the good quality theme music?

Logo was screen captured from one of my videos -- five captures of five consecutive frames, then all evenly merged together to average away the VHS/video noise.

As to the better sounding audio, I explained that here. BTW, thanks for e-mailing me the heads-up to check out the forum again.

Do you think you might be able to post the resulting prevue guide logo picture? I want to stuff it into the TVguide version we currently have also - dunno if any of your videos have this, perhaps the end of scroll prevue logo?