DVD

Last week I took my family to Cabo for vacation, and we did one of those snorkeling cruises where they take all kinds of great pictures and then let you purchase the DVD of all the photos (which I did). When we returned home, I wanted to upload those pictures to my facebook page so my friends and family could see them.

It's a 2-step process. First I imported the photos from the DVD to my computer, and then I uploaded those pictures from my computer to my facebook page.

Here's how to upload photos from a DVD to Facebook

1. Import the photos from your DVD to your computer.

Insert your DVD into your computer's DVD drive and wait for the Autoplay dialog to pop up.

Choose the "Import pictures and videos" option. You can tag your photos with something that'll help you find them later, and then click "Import" to copy them from the DVD to your computer.

The pictures will be uploaded to your Pictures folder, which is "C:\Users\Rick\Pictures" on my computer.

2. Upload the photos from your computer to your Facebook page.

Now that the photos have been imported to your computer, you're ready to upload them to Facebook.

Log into your Facebook account and click "Add Photo / Video" at the top of your homepage.

Click "Create Photo Album" and then click "Select Photos to Upload".

You'll be prompted for the location of your photos that are on your computer from Step 1 above. Find them, select the ones you want to upload, and that's all there is to it!

Here's another tip: hold the Ctrl key down while selecting photos. This will let you select individual photos on your computer.

Happy uploading, and I'm sure your friends will love seeing the new photos you'll be posting :-)

My wife and I bought a Sony Handycam about a decade ago, to capture video of our kids as they grew up. It records on Hi-8 video cassettes, and I needed a way to convert these analog recordings into digital movies and save them to DVD.

The Sony Handycam (model number CCD-TRV22) has RCA outputs for video and mono audio, and I found an EasyCAP USB2.0 Video Capture VHS-to-USB Adapter that converts the analog Hi-8 recordings into digital movies.

The Easycap adapter plugs into the RCA jacks on the Sony Handycam (I used the white line for the single audio jack), and the USB jack plugs into my laptop. Also bundled with the adapter is a licensed copy of ULead Video Studio 8.0 for creating and editing movies.

I had to use an RCA patch cable between the female adapter jacks and the camcorder, just like you would between a VCR and your TV. In fact, this adapter could also be hooked up to a VHS VCR (yep, I still have one), to make digital copies of old VHS movies.

Once I hooked up the camcorder with my laptop using the EasyCap usb adapter, I ran the Ulead Movie Wizard software and selected the "Capture" menu.

I put the camcorder in Player mode, loaded the video tape and pressed play. Then I pressed "Capture Video" in the Ulead program, and received an error indicating that no input signal could be found.

The reason was the video capture options are set by default to record from Video Tuner and I was using a video camcorder with RCA (composite) outputs. I clicked "Options" and then selected "Video and Audio Capture Property Settings" to change this setting: