Producing your own digital versions of audio or video tapes is simple too.

Audio is really easy. If you have a standard cassette player, just plug it into the teacher's machine and our software will digitise and compress it for you. It may be more convenient for you to do this at double speed to save time. If so, you will need a suitable cassette player, capable of double speed playback. One suitable model is the Coomber 844 and this can also be used as a cassette copier.

Melissi also supplies a free extra program to digitise audio on any machine licenced to use our classroom, enabling teachers to prepare work in their own office. It also has a built in timer to aid radio and Internet radio recording.

Digitising video is slightly more complicated. With a suitable input card in the PC it's just the same as digitising audio - plug in your VCR and go - BUT you must choose your file format carefully. The standard "avi" files are very large and eat up disk space alarmingly. That's why our software will play MPEG video files - they are compressed to be much smaller. Your PC may have the option of converting to MPEG in software but it will take a long time to process. It's much better to fit a suitable PC card to the teacher's PC that will convert incoming video "on the fly" - i.e. in real time. The process then becomes as simple and fast as digitising audio. Just plug in a VCR and go! Of course video file sizes are still larger than audio but, by making suitable choices about MPEG compression, they are quite managable. We can advise you about this.

Suitable hardware MPEG encoder cards are readily available as "PVR" or "Personal Video Recorder" cards such as Hauppauge PVR 250 0r 350. They are TV receivers too and can be connected to your aerial or satellite TV system for direct recording.

We can advise about suitable headsets as well.

Melissi Multimedia does not supply or endorse these products but we are happy to discuss and advise.

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