This may be old news for many to this forum but after spending several hours reading forums and blogs across 14(!) tabs in Firefox trying to find out why RegiStax 4 refused to input my AVI webcam file (even a small one:~!5MB) I’ve managed to solve the problem, and it never occurred to me that a Windows emulator would be the root cause (will we ever be rid of Windows?!). In my travels over the Web to try and find further info on this RegisStax failure I came across the notes from Ken Hough at
http://www.astronomie.be/registax/linux.html that contained the key (in my case) comment:
“wine REQUIRES that AVI files are recorded as RGB. If a YUV encoded file is presented, an error message will be given that will include:
"Failed to start AVI decompression"
I’m running RegiStax under wine on Scientific Linux/KDE. For those of you running RegiStax natively under Windows you may not run nto this but for those who are trying to do it under Linux your frustration is borne from the unobvious -- Windows emulation (Bill Gates final revenge on Linux!?) For anyone new to webcam and RegiStax that may be running into this same message, I offer my notes below:
VirtualDub Notes
-------------------
Main Window
--------------
o File | Load Processing Settings...
- Video | Direct Stream Copy
- Audio | No Audio
o File | Capture AVI...
File Capture Window
----------------------
o File | Set Capture File...
o Video | Set custom format...
- Frame size -- 320 x 240, Data format -- 24-bit RGB[1]
o do the capture
After Capture
---------------
o File | Open video file...
o File | Save old format AVI... (select new, separate file)
[it is this separate file that is input to RegiStax]
exit VirtualDub
[1] it is Wine that limits avi files to RGB only!
Frame size depends on camera -- experiment
In the interest of making this process more robust and easier for new people getting interested in webcam astrophotography and RegiStax, the Ken Hough note and my outline would be a nice Appendix entry for the RegiStax User Manual. Does anyone know who “owns” responsibiity or access to the User Manual, a contact person, that I could work with to include this for the Linux community?