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midwinter · 10:42 PM

Hi all.

Just for simplicity's sake, I'm considering selling my current rig for digitizing video (Dazzle DV-bridge, VCR, etc) and picking up an Eye TV, but was wondering if anyone out there has one. Opinions? Critiques?

I'm particularly interested in the quality of the VCDs the thing makes, as well as whether or not its on-the-fly mpeg1 encoding interferes with the viewing of the video.

Any input would be appreciated.

Cheers
Scott

tr · Jan 26, 2003, 09:33 PM

hate to be one of those people, but did you search the forums?

check these out

this one has been the most active recently.

tr

GORDYmac · Jan 27, 2003, 09:33 AM

On the high quality setting, VCD's look less sharp than a DVD, but good nonetheless. Recording is seamless enough, you can be watching, pausing, skipping forward, etc., while recording the show.

Overall, I am satisfied with the purchase.

ckohler · Jan 27, 2003, 03:39 PM

I did a lot of research on the EyeTV before making my purchase a week ago. I'm really glad I got one.

I would especially recommend it to anyone interested in archiving their favorite TV shows. This is the reason I purchased it. It has a fantastic interface for editing out commercials, cropping shows, splitting them, etc. It only takes a minute or two to do the editing and then you can burn directly to VCD discs that playback in most DVD players. A really fantastic product.

midwinter · Jan 27, 2003, 05:12 PM

Originally posted by ckohler:
I did a lot of research on the EyeTV before making my purchase a week ago. I'm really glad I got one.

I would especially recommend it to anyone interested in archiving their favorite TV shows. This is the reason I purchased it. It has a fantastic interface for editing out commercials, cropping shows, splitting them, etc. It only takes a minute or two to do the editing and then you can burn directly to VCD discs that playback in most DVD players. A really fantastic product.

Would you be willing to post some samples somewhere? I'd really like to see what kind of video quality the thing is capable of producing before I plop down a couple hundred bucks.

Cheers
Scott

tr · Jan 27, 2003, 05:38 PM

Originally posted by midwinter:
Would you be willing to post some samples somewhere? I'd really like to see what kind of video quality the thing is capable of producing before I plop down a couple hundred bucks.

Cheers
Scott

if you searched the forums (or looked at the second link in my previous post

), someone there has links to samples he made on EyeTV.

tr

midwinter · 06:09 PM

Originally posted by tr:
if you searched the forums (or looked at the second link in my previous post), someone there has links to samples he made on EyeTV.

tr

Hrm. I tried the links (to the samples) the same day you posted the link and they didn't work. Will try again.

Cheers
Scott

Edit: Nope. They don't work for me.

ckohler · Jan 28, 2003, 09:05 AM

I'll capture some short clips tonight and post them in this thread.

tr · Jan 28, 2003, 09:14 AM

Originally posted by midwinter:
Hrm. I tried the links (to the samples) the same day you posted the link and they didn't work. Will try again.

Cheers
Scott

Edit: Nope. They don't work for me.

i guess he must have removed them. sorry!

tr

Tsilou B. · Jan 28, 2003, 09:37 AM

Originally posted by ckohler:
I'll capture some short clips tonight and post them in this thread.

Great! Thanks in advance! :-)

midwinter · Jan 28, 2003, 12:05 PM

Originally posted by ckohler:
I'll capture some short clips tonight and post them in this thread.

Fantastic! Any length would be fine. I just want to burn the mpgs to VCD to see what they look like on my TV. Could you record both hi-quality and normal-quality clips? I'd really like to see the difference between the two.

Thanks again!

Cheers
Scott

ckohler · Jan 29, 2003, 03:14 AM

As promised, here are some various clips. I tried to use various types of video.

eyetv_low1.mpg - 7MB
This one was actually sent to me by another EyeTV user before I bought mine. I think it's a pretty good example of what standard quality looks like.

eyetv_low2.mpg - 6MB
Here's another standard quality recording. I made this one last night when Mars Attacks was on.

eyetv_high1.mpg - 9MB
This is a high-quality recording from Futurama. Animation is one of the most difficult types of video to compress with MPEG but I think the EyeTV does a good job especially at High-quality. Animation at standard quality still looks decent, there's just much more detectable artifacting around the lines. In High-quality, there's practically no artifacting. Nomatter what the lines tend to have a slight jaggy appearance due to the 320x240 capture resolution.

eyetv_high2.mpg - 10MB
Here's another high-quality clip, this time a random music video. Music videos can also be trouble for MPEG with all the high action, wobbly cameras and fast cuts but as you can see the EyeTV does a darned good job.

All my sources comes from standard cable TV. Keep in mind that it's easier to see MPEG artifacting on a computer monitor. When you burn a VCD and play these videos on your TV they can often look twice as good. If you guys need any other examples, let me know.

Tsilou B. · Jan 29, 2003, 07:38 AM

Thank you very much for posting the samples.

By the way, I downloaded the movies this morning on a Windows XP - PC and played them fullscreen with Windows Media Player. They didn't look very good. Later I watched them again on my Mac with Quicktime 6.1 (using the AppleScript fullscreen trick), vlc and mplayer and they looked twice as good in all three apps. I didn't know that WMP on Windows is such a bad player, I guess it doesn't smooth scaled videos at all.

midwinter · Jan 29, 2003, 10:20 AM

Thank you! If those clips look this good when burned to VCD, I'll probably place an order today.

Cheers
Scott

midwinter · Jan 29, 2003, 07:12 PM

The VCDs of the low quality captures look great, and so I placed my order a few minutes ago. Should be here tomorrow. I figured if I don't like it, I can always sell it on eBay and recoup most of the cost.

Thank you again for posting the clips.

Cheers
Scott

GORDYmac · Jan 30, 2003, 11:15 AM

The high quality clips can be burned to VCD too. Only 30 minutes though.

midwinter · Jan 30, 2003, 10:57 PM

Thanks again for the clips. My Eye TV arrived today, and I swear, I don't know how it does it, but it manages to capture video and make VCDs that are far superior to what I was able to get before. Definitely a keeper.

Now a quick question: I'm trying to determine whether it's actually Eye TV or my set-top DVD player that's the culprit, but occasionally there is a *very* slight audio lag (a fraction of a second, but enough to be annoying). Determining the cause is difficult, considering OS X doesn't offer anything besides VLC for VCD viewing, and while it's serviceable enough, it's got it's problems. So...has anyone else experienced this?

ckohler · Jan 31, 2003, 01:02 AM

I have noticed that while audio will always be perfectly in sync when using EyeTV, if you crop a show and export it, sometimes (not always!) the exported audio can be off by half a second during some portions of the show. I think this is because EyeTV has to re-multiplex the combined audio and video streams upon export and depending on the crop points, it could end up slightly off. This is only a guess though. I do know it only occurs after an export since I watch the show in Quicktime before burning to VCD and can see the delay there.

Still, when it does occur it is barely noticable at all and is a very small price to pay for the convienance the EyeTV brings to creating VCDs.

midwinter · Jan 31, 2003, 01:17 AM

Originally posted by ckohler:
I have noticed that while audio will always be perfectly in sync when using EyeTV, if you crop a show and export it, sometimes (not always!) the exported audio can be off by half a second during some portions of the show. I think this is because EyeTV has to re-multiplex the combined audio and video streams upon export and depending on the crop points, it could end up slightly off. This is only a guess though. I do know it only occurs after an export since I watch the show in Quicktime before burning to VCD and can see the delay there.

Still, when it does occur it is barely noticable at all and is a very small price to pay for the convienance the EyeTV brings to creating VCDs.

Good to know.

I've actually (perhaps) figured it out in the meantime: If I burn the VCD at 8x rather than 16x, I don't have the problem. I feel certain it's a limitation of my DVD player, which is cheap.

Another quick question before I hit the sack: I've used that mpeg-splitter el Gato recommends, but it produced two chunked mpegs that kill QT. Is this normal? Will they still burn to VCD just fine? I ask because I'm Eye TV-ing about 6 movies over the next couple of days, and I'll need to split the mpeg into two 650 meg chunks.

Recommendations?

Thanks for all your help. This thing is really amazing...even with my crappy cable signal, the VCDs it makes look FAR better than the ones I was making before with a DV-Bridge and BTV Pro (for capture), Quicktime (for editing commercials), Cleaner (for color correction and compression to VCD), and VCD Builder (because the VCDs cleaner makes won't play in my DVD player.

And after all of that, they looked like absolute ass.

Great gadget. El Gato will receive a panegyric from me soon.

iChristopher · Jan 31, 2003, 02:06 AM

Just wondering what kind of hardware you guys are running Eye TV on? I know the requirements are on the web site, but as we all know they are not always good indicators of what you can actually do or not do...

I already have a couple TiVo's, but it sounds like this would be handy for archiving shows I want to keep around for a long time. Hopefully someday soon there will be a straightforward way to move TiVo content over to the Mac without hacking the hell out of it.

midwinter · Jan 31, 2003, 06:33 AM

Originally posted by iChristopher:
Just wondering what kind of hardware you guys are running Eye TV on? I know the requirements are on the web site, but as we all know they are not always good indicators of what you can actually do or not do...

I already have a couple TiVo's, but it sounds like this would be handy for archiving shows I want to keep around for a long time. Hopefully someday soon there will be a straightforward way to move TiVo content over to the Mac without hacking the hell out of it.

G4/533, 384 RAM.

GORDYmac · Jan 31, 2003, 09:18 AM

G4 933 1.25 GB RAM.

BTW, I have never had any sync issues...

ckohler · Jan 31, 2003, 01:31 PM

Midwinter,
You shouldn't need to use any other MPEG splitting software if you want to split a show into two or more chunks. Just open the show in EyeTV (it must still be in your library of shows), then open the editor and select the first part you want to put on the first CDR then select "Save as Quicktime". You can fit about 60minutes of standard quality on a single disc or 30minutes of High quality.

Then select the other portion of the show for the second CDR and then save that clip to as second Quicktime file. When you have all your clips saved, rename the files with a .mpg extension and use to Toast to burn them.

I don't know why EyeTV makes you save the file with a .mov extension when saving a clip since it's really just an ordinary .MPG file.

BTW, I have an iMac G4 800mhz w/ 512MB.

midwinter · Jan 31, 2003, 01:34 PM

Originally posted by ckohler:
Midwinter,
You shouldn't need to use any other MPEG splitting software if you want to split a show into two or more chunks. Just open the show in EyeTV (it must still be in your library of shows), then open the editor and select the first part you want to put on the first CDR then select "Save as Quicktime". You can fit about 60minutes of standard quality on a single disc or 30minutes of High quality.

Then select the other portion of the show for the second CDR and then save that clip to as second Quicktime file. When you have all your clips saved, rename the files with a .mpg extension and use to Toast to burn them.

I don't know why EyeTV makes you save the file with a .mov extension when saving a clip since it's really just an ordinary .MPG file.

BTW, I have an iMac G4 800mhz w/ 512MB.

Great! That saves me some time! It was wonderful to wake up this morning and find _Wilde_ waiting there for me to watch (it had aired at 2:30 am). Burning some full-length movie VCDs now.