Okay, so I've had a huge code head on lately.  I've uploaded a program to update your World of Warcraft character profile on RPG Outfitter called RPGO Upload and had some good feedback that has led to changes already. I've also made modifications to my IWA program that installs LUA AddOns to World of Warcraft automatically.

Both are released free and Open Source, under a GPL license, so they could be incorporated into a larger production. They both address inconveniences which only exist on the Windows platform, and as such were written in a Windows only scripting language called AutoIt. So porting them to other platforms may not be easy. However, AutoIt is syntactically, almost identical to standard BASIC, and the guts of them translates almost instantly to FreeBASIC, which is platform independent. From there on, it would simply be a matter or re-implementing the UI for the target platform.

Speaking of the UI, I'm quite pleased with the UI in RPGO Upload, as it's the first time I've used the new GUI commands in AutoIt 3, previous versions only had UI via simple predefined message boxes and progress bars.

It's also the first time in years and years I've produced a GUI without the aid of a Visual Development Environment.

The experience, compared to the attempts to get my head around X-Windows or the Windows Message System in C / C++ was really quite pleasant. So much so, that I wish we could integrate these GUI commands into FreeBASIC and link them to the various platform specific libraries for different systems. Then a FreeBASIC GUI application will be cross platform and work the same in Linux as it does in Windows, or MacOS.

I know there are libraries which can achieve such things between Windows and Linux, the WM library or QT. But they have their own drawbacks. If these commands could be implemented as a standard in FreeBASIC, they could be retargeted to the most appropriate library for the destination platform.

Hmm. Well that's my musing. I'm sure there are more problems than that.

I'd like to see a AROS / Amiga target of FreeBASIC too. I wouldn't write specifically for those platforms now, but still like to use them from time to time, and being able to compile some of my Windows software to run on them would be so nice. :) Something that would work like the FreeBASIC gfx library, translating down to DirectX, GDI, ModeX,VISA or XLib as appropriate.

Okay, well... Anyone who knows me pretty much knows I am a huge Whovian (that's the Doctor Who equivalent of a Trekkie incase you didn't know) and I have literally tonnes of clips of Doctor Who, distributed through the Whovian community, and loads of BBC releases as well.

I think one of the things that attracts me to Doctor Who, is actually the BBCs abysmal archives of the episodes, some of which almost definitely now, no longer exist... anywhere! However there is some footage, pictures or audio recordings of every story about somewhere.

There are very few official BBC stories I don't know, and I know many of the periphery stories written in Books, Magazines and in Audio Dramas such as the fantastic series by Big Finish.

Any way, I've got my system to a point where I can kinda do my Video clean-up stuff again, and am looking a turning some of these archives in to DVD, and also considering how they might best make the transition to HDTV. As the resolution of them is pretty much what it is, and changing that (without introducing artifacts) will only make a bigger fuzzy image, I'm investigating increasing the Temporal resolution. That is the frame rate.

Traditional UK TV is 50 fields per second 2 fields per frame at 25 Frames per second. However what material was professionally archived from the BBC TV series was transfered to film sped from 24 to 25 frames per second for overseas sales, more than keeping a record. Therefore the individual field based information is long since lost, converted in to a slight motion blur on the film.

Since the vertical resolution of the film is somewhat deteriated by the field blur anyway, I see no harm in digitally increasing the frame rate to re-introduce the TV effect from the old film footage.

This illustrates what my efforts have got me with that so far.

To the top right is my original backup, and the bottom left is the motion based temporal clean with motion vector temporal upsample interlaced.

In a stationary image of course this looks worse than the original in many ways, and desplaying interlaced material on most Computer screens is a very bad idea, as they will usually interpret the fields as half a frame and just reduce 50 fields to 25 frames progressive.

I've uploaded samples from "The Dead Planet", the first episode of the first Dalek (know as "The Daleks" though episodes were named then, not stories which spanned several episodes) story in the first ever series of Doctor Who, (that's the second official story of the series, first shown in 1963) in 25 Frames and restored 50 Frames progressive, but I'm not sure what the data rate of such sites is, and this (and your computer and internet performance) will determine whether you will see the "smooth vision" effect which really stops this stuff looking like an old B movie and makes it look like an early 60's TV show again.

The best official copy of this story can probably be found in the BBC DVD Box Set "Doctor Who: The Beginning", which comes with "An Unearthly Child" and "The Edge of Destruction".  Unfortunately, my source is an older VHS dub.