1. Tobbe asks Frida the way (11MB)
2. Frida goes swimming and Tobbe gets to watch (Rebecka factor - high) (20.2MB)

Episode 7

1. Adam and Frida meet by the mailboxes (6.1MB)
2. Adam, Frida and Tobbe meet by the ice cream stand (4.1MB)
3. Frida and Adam talk on the shore (Rebecka factor - highest possible) (8.6MB)
4. Adam, Tobbe and Frida play minigolf (Rebecka factor - high) (21.6MB)
5. Frida says "Hej då" to Tobbe (Rebecka factor - high) (2.5MB)
6. Adam and Frida meet by the mailboxes and Eva fears the worst (6.2MB)

Episode 8

1. Frida and Tobbe meet by the mailboxes (6.1MB)
2. Frida and Tobbe spend time together; Eva wathches when Adam and Frida speak with each other (Rebecka factor - high) (19.7MB)
3. Tobbe hints Frida they could dance some in the evening (5.7MB)
4. Tobbe and balls (Frida almost has more of them) (12.3MB)
5. Frida and Tobbe dance (19.1MB)
6. Fireplace; Frida and Tobbe dance some more (24.5MB)
7. Frida and Tobbe say farewell (13.6MB)

The series itself was actually rather nice - well worth watching. To me, it shows that Fucking Åmål was certainly not a fluke, that Swedes really have a habit of making really good youth films (and series, soaps even). Rebecka certainly added a lot to the series, but for me there was a problem - I didn't like at all the guy Frida was supposed to fall for. I had exactly the same feelings for it happening, as the lead character, Eva did. On the other hand, Rebecka did a really good job with what she was given. After repeated viewings it almost looks like maybe it could really have happened.

Some comments about the captured episodes:

6. This was recorded on a VHS at a time when my antenna amplifier was broke, creating some interference on the picture. Both screenshots and MPEG clips are captured from that VHS. This episode aired and MPEG clips are in letterbox widescreen format.
   
   
7. This time the interference problem was fixed. Episode was captured directly off air and compressed to MPEG but I forgot to take screenshots. Screenshots are captured from VHS tape. This episode aired, and the MPEG clips are in anamorphic widescreen format.
   
   
8. This time I was wiser, and neither MPEG clips nor screenshots are made from VHS source. This episode aired in letterbox widescreen again.

You should watch these MPEG clips in full-screen mode only. Most of the MPEG viewers will show them using a wrong aspect ratio when you watch them in a window. I.e. images look stretched vertically. To make your computer always show MPEG movies in full-screen, choose (at least assuming Win95/98) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Multimedia -> Video and check "Full screen" from there.

I used the following tools:

1. Hauppauge WinTV-Go TV card (dead cheap, <$100).
   
   
2. Captured video into 352x288 YUY2 format uncompressed AVI with video capture program that comes bundled with MainActor v3.51. Video capture program works even without registering the program itself. There surely are better video capture programs available, but I used MainActor video capture because it allowed to begin recording into a new AVI file (it gives every new file a new number) with the loss of only about 3-4 frames. Video capture program that is bundled into Hauppauge WinTV32 requires you to type in a new file name and click mouse a lot, so the loss of video would be much bigger. There are surely some Video For Windows capture programs, that can begin new AVI files all by itself, possibly even freeware ones. I just didn't find them in time. I used MainActor video capture to record up to 12 minutes of video into one file (FAT32 has 4GB maximum file length limitation which is annoying) and always ordered it to start recording into a new file before the 4G limit was reached with the previous file.
   
   
3. Wrote my own program that cleanly cuts >2GB AVI files into <2GB AVI files, preserving perfect sync of audio and video.
   
   
4. Wrote my own motion video filtering program, to remove noise with as little loss of everything else, as possible.
   
   
5. MPEG encoding was done with freeware bbMPEG software (DON'T use the _VFW version, Use Floating point, choose VCD video stream, choose proper aspect ratio and off you go). An extremely nice feature of this program is the ability to give it a job of many small AVI files, which it can either treat as one long movie or many small movies. It also gives a very good picture quality (_VFW version makes awful quality MPEG-s by the way, at least v1.20 beta 19 I used, from YUY2 uncompressed AVI-s). The quality is far better than the old AVI2MPG1 DOS program gave using the exact same bitrate. To my eyes it gave better results than demo version of commercial LSX-MPEG compression software, which the bbMPEG authors recommend when you want faster compression. In my tests, the LSX-MPEG was surely faster, but didn't have as good visual quality (the difference wasn't that large however).
   
   
6. Then I wrote my own program to extract 768x576 or 768x432 screenshots from the abovementioned AVI file (which had already gone through the abovementioned filtering). The 352x288 YUV 4:2:2 frames are converted to 352x288 RGB with colour correction I deemed likable, and then stretched cleanly (with proper horizontal and vertical anti-alias filtering) to 768x576, from which only 768x432 were saved to a Targa file as the video was in widescreen format. I then used some age-old DOS program to convert these Targa files to JPEG-s with default quality setting.
   
   I wrote my own screenshot extracting program, because all the tools some of my friends had or I got demo versions for, created really awful results. Especially notable was the bad quality of screenshots produced, when I opened the AVI file with Adobe Premiere 5.1. The screenshots looked like they werent true-color but resembled more like the old 4096 color Amiga pictures. Worse actually. It was as if colour components were truncated to 4bits or less at some point. The problem lies probably somewhere with the Video for Windows API, not Premiere itself. MainActor Video Editor demo I tried was better, but had a really weird understanding of what proper colours look like. The resulting shots had too much red in it and the colours were too saturated. Besides, it didn't do proper anti-aliasing during the stretching. Anyway, it was easier to write my own than to find something others had done or to fix that they had done.
   
   In a sense, it is stupid to take screen captures from a 352x288 source at a time when it would have been theoretically possible to use even full resolution 768x576 source. I had a problem though. I couldn't record video off air for making MPEG video AND take full resolution screen captures at the same time. I had only one TV card. On the other hand, the fact that the whole thing was recorded as video, enabled it to be filtered properly, removing much of the noise that would have otherwise been present. Taking captures from recorded video was great in one other sense also: it enabled me to think about which exact frames to take as screenshots. Without pressure, leaving plenty of time for deliberation.
   
   Anyway. The pictures are therefore actually just 352x288 resolution images, stretched to 768x576. Considering that, they aren't that bad, huh? :) Especially episode 8 screenshots of course.

Sulo Kallas