[Jasoco]

Is there any way to convert an eyeTV video file (Namely an HD recording) into a file that QuickTime can play?

A peek inside a .eyetv file reveals that it is just a container that contains a few files.. three documents with .eyetvp, i and r extensions, a .tiff file with a screenshot of the last frame playing when you close the video and a video file itself with .mpg extension that plays in VLC but not in QuickTime.

Now, when I say "Plays in VLC", I mean it plays, but all interlaced (Being 1080i), but it plays.

I'd love to be able to convert this into a file I can actually use without requiring I open it in eyeTV itself. If possible. Is there an app I can run it through to convert it?

I mean I can't very well burn it to a disc because it would only be burned at SD and shrunk down. And making it into an iPod video would make it 640x480 at the most. I want to preserve the 1080 format. (Or at least convert down to 720p.)

Also, here's a weird question. Why is it when I removed the commercials from the HD recording of something instead of making it smaller, it actually made the file size bigger? The video went from a 2 hour recording at 9.4GB to 18GB.

I don't know if this was the right forum for this. Sorry if it has to be moved.

[mduell]

Try running it through ffmpegx to convert it to MPEG4 or H.264. If that doesn't work, if you can post a small (<100MB) clip for download, I'll try running it though another piece of software I have that usually handles every format I throw at it.

What software did you use it edit out the commercials? Sounds like it's reencoding the remaining file (which degrades quality) and isn't doing it very well.

[Jasoco]

I can't post a clip because that would require me using my slow G4 Mac mini to.. wait.. no, I couldn't anyway because I can't open it in QuickTime. And at 1080i, I think a clip smaller than 100MB would be like only a few seconds of time.

I was just hoping to make the video something I could playback without having to launch eyeTV. If I can't, it's not a big deal. I just like to futureproof things whenever possible. QuickTime will be around forever. eyeTV you never know. They could change formats at some point. Who knows.

Now, when you speak of running it through ffmpegx, how do I do this? I have the plugins that I use in HandBrake. But is there an app? I thought that costed money. I don't want to spend money just to convert this.

Software? eyeTV of course. It is supposed to do it itself. On normal SD shows it actually makes the file smaller. Like if I edit an episode of Grey's Anatomy, it goes from 1.4MB down to 850MB after all the commercials are trimmed out.

But when it handles the HD version it ends up making the file bigger. Twice as big. I don't understand why. (That's not my biggest concern though as it's a recording off of UniversalHD which doesn't show commercials during the movie, just before and after. So really all I have is a few minutes of ads at the ends. No big deal there.)

[mduell]

Ignore my first reply for a moment. I completely missed the VLC part.

When you say "it plays, but all interlaced" do you mean you see a lot of jaggies during high motion scenes? If so you should turn on deinterlacing (Video->Deinterlace menu). Bob generally works the best, but blend is worth trying if bob doesn't look right.
Also you can transcode to MPEG4 or H.264 or whatever codec you'd like (I recommend H.264) right from VLC. Choose "Wizard..." in the File menu and follow the dialog boxes.

To address your second post:

If 2 hours is 9.4GB, then 100MB is a bit over a minute; I know, math is hard and stuff.

ffmpegX a free media encoder for Mac OSX. You download it, install it, open it, and drop your files (try both the .eyetv or the .mpg contained within) in.

I have no idea why eyeTV is making bigger edited files, but I'd guess it's the result of doing something dumb (by the software, not you).

[hldan]

I use the EyeTV and the software does allow exporting to Quicktime into a great deal of formats. H.264/1080i all show up on the list. Did you highlight the recorded segment and select "File" and "Export"?

[Jasoco]

Ah, there they are! Well, what format do you think I should use to preserve the file as best as possible and as close to the original HD format as it can be? (Remember, the original is 1080i. HUGE 9+GB file.)

Edit: Well, it looks like if I export it to the recommended HDTV setting, it's going to make this 9GB file into a 66GB file! WTF? What format is this if it can't export the original? Holy poop!

[hldan]

Originally Posted by Jasoco 

Ah, there they are! Well, what format do you think I should use to preserve the file as best as possible and as close to the original HD format as it can be? (Remember, the original is 1080i. HUGE 9+GB file.)

Edit: Well, it looks like if I export it to the recommended HDTV setting, it's going to make this 9GB file into a 66GB file! WTF? What format is this if it can't export the original? Holy poop!

How were able to tell that it would be 66GB before exporting?

[Uncle Skeleton]

EyeTV downloads the standard MPEG-2/AC-3 stream from the air and dumps it on the hard drive. When you remove commercials in the EyeTV App, it does NOT re-encode (this is why it doesn't allow frame-accurate editing, you have to edit at keyframes, which are specified by the broadcaster's encoder). What it does do is copy the entire (remaining) content to a new file, then delete the old file when it's finished (all inside the .eyetv bundle). So if you look at the bundle size before it's finished, it will be about twice as big. If it encountered a bug and didn't delete the original file (caused for example by another program like VLC having the file open, preventing EyeTV from deleting it at the file system level), the bundle will remain twice as big and EyeTV may or may not throw an error about that.

As for converting it, EyeTV will do it, or MPEG StreamClip is another excellent option (for opening the mpeg file you found in the .eyetv recording bundle). Keep in mind that MPEG-2 is already compressed to a good extent, and lossy, and recompressing to another lossy format is risky and may or may not gain you any size savings if you don't shrink the resolution.

I use the excellent (but pricey) 3ivx Crush to compress my HDTV EyeTV recordings (to the 3ivx codec). This gets me about 700 MB for a standard 42 minute show at 720p24, and it retains the 5.1 audio in the aac encoding. It has deinterlacing too, and you'll definitely want to use some since no modern codecs are currently supporting interlaced content in a manageable way (encoding interlaced content without a codec that supports it is death to pretty much all compression algorithms). 1080 is over 2x as many pixels as 720, and at 60 fps it's also over 2x as many frames as my files, so you can probably get it to 1400 MB per hour show, if you use the "discard" deinterlacing algorithm.

Edit: you can safely leave the files as-is too. The movie inside the .eyetv bundle is perfectly standard MPEG-2, same as DVD (but higher resolution, and in the more widely used mpeg container format, not vob). It's about the most future-proof format you could ever want.

[Jasoco]

Oh, it was more than twice as big. And I even checked it and double-checked later. No big deal though.

I'm doing a test now.

I'm having it Export the HD 1080i recording of Back to the Future (Originally 9.4GB) to H.264 at 720p instead. Making it smaller for me. It SAYS the estimated size will be 6.6GB, but we'll see when it's done. Seems right though. It's about 25% done (Been going ALLLLLLL night. Damn this G4 processor mini.) and the file is 1.9GB so far.

I didn't know about all the export options before. I thought it was restricted to iPod before. Nice to know it's not.

I'll have to play around a bit.

I need a faster computer.