[midwinter]

Hi.

I'm watching the prices drop on the Pioneer A05/superdrive, and I'm wondering:

1) I have an Eye TV, which records in MPEG-1. Is there any way I could get these into something like iDVD (or some other software) to make DVDs of the video I have captured?

2) Is there any way to make a VCD on a DVD? That is, can I exploit the space on a DVD to make longer, higher-quality movies using my Eye TV?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers
Scott

[midwinter]

No takers? Anyone?

[Weezer]

well, the Eye-TV is encoding in MPEG-1, and to get it to a dvd format you need to get it to MPEG-2. This next part is all speculation cause I've never done it. However, I would think you can use ffmpeg to convert the mpeg-1 into mpeg-2, and then use sizzle to author a dvd. I dont think theres anyway to get it into idvd, nor do I believe you can make a "vdvd"

[Theodour]

The DVD format supports mpeg1 just fine, but you'll have to do some tweeking.

First off, you'll neet to demux it:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/macbbdemux

Then convert the 44.1 mp2 audio into 48khz aiff.

The only program I've found that can do this for me is the old classic app, SoundApp, but it works fine in classic mode.
http://www.spies.com/~franke/SoundApp/

I assume you don't have DVD studio pro, which is what I use, so you'll sort of be on your own after this.

I do believe FFmpeg can convert to AC-3... this is sort of optional because you can use Mp2 and aiff audio on DVDs, but AC-3 is the norm.

To author the DVD, you can use the freeware Sizzle:
http://thegoods.ath.cx/~hmason/sizzle/

Mpeg1 works great on DVD. The specs listed in the DVD studio Pro manual say that it MUST be VCD bitrate, but I usually use 2600kbps and have never experienced any problems or incompatabilities. It is a great way to fit hours and hours of stuff on a single disk.

In fact, with the VCD bitrate, and 192kbps AC-3 audio, I've put 6 one-hour episodes on a single DVD. You can do more, I think 8-10 hours, I've just never had to do more than that.

[midwinter]

Great. I think between mpgtxwrap, madplaywrap and quicktime pro, I've got all the demuxing and converting covered.

Now, let me get this straight: You're saying that all I need to do is demux it, convert the audio to aiff (not a problem), and then use sizzle to burn a dvd using demuxed mpeg-1 video and the converted audio?

Thanks!

[midwinter]

Originally posted by midwinter:
Great. I think between mpgtxwrap, madplaywrap and quicktime pro, I've got all the demuxing and converting covered.

Now, let me get this straight: You're saying that all I need to do is demux it, convert the audio to aiff (not a problem), and then use sizzle to burn a dvd using demuxed mpeg-1 video and the converted audio?

Thanks!

I should say that the reason I'm doing this is that I'm using my Eye TV to capture and archive television shows (The West Wing & Buffy), and between the two, I'm running out of drive space. And it just seems silly to burn so many VCDs for each episode.

Cheers
Scott

[Weezer]

heres a step by step for both mpeg-1 and mpeg-2

http://www.elgato.com/support/troubl...html#trouble15

[midwinter]

Originally posted by Weezer:
heres a step by step for both mpeg-1 and mpeg-2

http://www.elgato.com/support/troubl...html#trouble15

Well whaddya know! Right there in front of me the whole time.

[Theodour]

You don't need to re-encode the video for it to be DVD compatable.

Just demux it and up-sample the audio to 48khz.

It takes much less time than re-encoding your video into Mpeg2.

The DVD spec includes Mpeg-1.

http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/DVD/Book_B/Standards.html

[midwinter]

Originally posted by Theodour:
You don't need to re-encode the video for it to be DVD compatable.

Just demux it and up-sample the audio to 48khz.

It takes much less time than re-encoding your video into Mpeg2.

The DVD spec includes Mpeg-1.

http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/DVD/Book_B/Standards.html

Woo woo!

Now, one quick question: how difficult will it be for me, using this method, to cram several episodes of, say, Buffy, onto a DVD with menus and whatnot?

[C.J. Moof]

If your goal is to archive mpeg-1 EyeTV recordings to DVD, getting capty will *really* make your life easier. A license to it comes with the LaCie DVD writer.

I've taken mpeg-1 archives of TV shows from online sources, dropped them into a Capty project, made menus, and it takes care of the audio resampling, and it never had a synch issue. The video stays mpeg-1, it just handles the 44.1/48khz issue automagically.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by C.J. Moof:
If your goal is to archive mpeg-1 EyeTV recordings to DVD, getting capty will *really* make your life easier. A license to it comes with the LaCie DVD writer.

I've taken mpeg-1 archives of TV shows from online sources, dropped them into a Capty project, made menus, and it takes care of the audio resampling, and it never had a synch issue. The video stays mpeg-1, it just handles the 44.1/48khz issue automagically.

Thanks for the heads up. Yes. That is EXACTLY what I want to do. I'm quickly running out of hard drive space, and it seems silly to burn all this video to VCDs. It's also a pain to have to split a movie in half if I capture something off of HBO.

Do you know if capty will work with non-Lacie drives?

[Weezer]

before you go spend a lot of money, I emailed the elgato people and they claim to be implemeting some of of dvd burning functionality, but don't expect anything for a couple months.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by Weezer:
before you go spend a lot of money, I emailed the elgato people and they claim to be implemeting some of of dvd burning functionality, but don't expect anything for a couple months.

That's actually really helpful. The deal is that I'm probably going to upgrade my G4/533 either to one of the low-end G5s or one of the 17" iMacs in August, so waiting on el Gato is certainly not a problem. I'm moving anyway, so the idea of bringing ANYTHING ELSE into the house sends me into hysterics.

Thanks for the info. I suppose I should email el Gato (Nick has been very responsive to me) and see if they're going to improve the playlist functionality in the program viewer.

Cheers
Scott

[Eug Wanker]

Your life would be much simpler if you just bought a $380 standalone DVD recorder.

Turn on show. Press record. Show ends. Press stop. Repeat until disc is full, then just press a couple of buttons to finalize disc.

Done.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
Your life would be much simpler if you just bought a $380 standalone DVD recorder.

Turn on show. Press record. Show ends. Press stop. Repeat until disc is full, then just press a couple of buttons to finalize disc.

Done.

If all I were doing were capturing shows off of television and archiving to DVD, that would be the case. But I want to have certain things on my computer for easy viewing while I work (I don't have a television in my office). Additionally, I want to have certain video content available to any computer on my LAN.

I hadn't realized they'd gotten so cheap, though. Might be worth looking into, regardless of my other needs.

Cheers
Scott

[GORDYmac]

Originally posted by Weezer:
before you go spend a lot of money, I emailed the elgato people and they claim to be implemeting some of of dvd burning functionality, but don't expect anything for a couple months.

That's great news. I have probably 100 shows now that I need to archive. VCD is just not a viable option for me either. Hopefully El Gato will throw us a bone before the fall TV season.

[Weezer]

Since people are interested:

"Development for EyeTV is continuing, but there hasn't been a
software release lately due to other commitments for our
engineers. Most likely there will be more happening with
EyeTV after this summer."

"...until EyeTV has better integration
with DVD creation software (one of our high priorities)."

[midwinter]

Originally posted by C.J. Moof:
If your goal is to archive mpeg-1 EyeTV recordings to DVD, getting capty will *really* make your life easier. A license to it comes with the LaCie DVD writer.

I've taken mpeg-1 archives of TV shows from online sources, dropped them into a Capty project, made menus, and it takes care of the audio resampling, and it never had a synch issue. The video stays mpeg-1, it just handles the 44.1/48khz issue automagically.

Ok. I've bought myself a superdrive. Do you know if there's any way I can buy capty without having to get a DVD burner from LaCie?

If not, does anyone know how I can produce a DVD image for toast without re-encoding the video? I've got all the standard video tools (ffmpeg, mpegtx, etc).

I may wind up forking out the $$ for iDVD 3 tomorrow, but its time-limitation bugs me. I want to put as much video as I can on a single DVD (several television episodes).

Cheers
Scott

[midwinter]

re: capty

OK. After fooling around with trying to get MPEG-1 video into iDVD, Capty (or an el Gato implementation of DVD burning software) is clearly a must. What a pain all of this is: demux, convert .mp2 audio into .aiff, add back to video file in QT Pro, export both as DV, import into iDVD.

Is there an easier way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers
Scott

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
Your life would be much simpler if you just bought a $380 standalone DVD recorder.

Turn on show. Press record. Show ends. Press stop. Repeat until disc is full, then just press a couple of buttons to finalize disc.

Done.

Hey Eug, this is a newbie question but can these standalone DVD recorders vary the speed and quality of what you are taping - a la a VCR with the EP, LP, SP settings?

Is that what you're getting at? If so, what's been your experience with these lower level recording options? Good quality? Would you compare it to a mpeg-1 capture?

Also, at the lowest setting how many hours can fit on a DVD?

[midwinter]

I've finally figured out how to make a DVD out of an mpeg-1 video captured by Eye TV. Initially I was having loads of sync problems. If anyone's interested, the tutorial on the el Gato site is dead on, but leaves out two important pieces of information:

1) When you select hi-bitrate DVD from the quick presets, make sure you change the framerate from NTSC film to NTSC.

2) Under options, uncheck Set 3:2

I made a DVD last night that looks great and plays just fine.

Now if I could only figure out how to get ffmpegx to let the mpeg-1 video passthrough and still generate the proper files, I'll be in hog heaven.

Cheers
Scott

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by midwinter:
I've finally figured out how to make a DVD out of an mpeg-1 video captured by Eye TV. Initially I was having loads of sync problems. If anyone's interested, the tutorial on the el Gato site is dead on, but leaves out two important pieces of information:

1) When you select hi-bitrate DVD from the quick presets, make sure you change the framerate from NTSC film to NTSC.

2) Under options, uncheck Set 3:2

I made a DVD last night that looks great and plays just fine.

Thanks for the tips. You should send them to El Gato to update their site. They're pretty responsive, they might appreciate it.

When you made the DVD, did you put several mpeg-1 shows on one DVD or was it just one show?

[midwinter]

Originally posted by vmpaul:
Thanks for the tips. You should send them to El Gato to update their site. They're pretty responsive, they might appreciate it.

When you made the DVD, did you put several mpeg-1 shows on one DVD or was it just one show?

Actually, Nick at el Gato was the one who suggested those fixes. He wrote their tutorial, and I'm sure he'll update it at some point. That guy's amazing.

The DVD I made was of Ice Age, which I had captured off of cable. Sync is perfect throughout, and it looks great.

HOWEVER.

I think I may have figured out how to make a DVD without re-encoding the video (Ice Age took about 12 hours for me). I'm still muxing the two tracks, but I think this will work (it did on the sample I did earlier today):

1) Demux the captured video.
2) Convert the .mp2 (audio file) to an .aiff or .wav using iTunes. Upsample it there (in the advanced tab under "import" in the preferences) to 16-bit, 48 khz, 224 kbs.
3) Use Missing Mpeg Tools (mp2enc) to convert the .wav/.aiff to .mp2 to 224 kbs, 48 khz, stereo
4) use Missing Mpeg Tools (mplex) to mux the .mp2 and the .m1v.
5) use Missing Mpeg Tools (vcdxgen) to make a VOB folder.
6) use Missing Mpeg Tools (vcdxbuild) to make the DVD disk image for toast.

Like I said, I'm still waiting on my video to finish encoding, but I can say this: I started encoding the old way (re-encoding the video, a known-good procedure) last night at 11:00 and that version is STILL not done (8:37 pm the next night), while the one using this method, which I didn't start until this afternoon, is nearly done muxing, and is actually ahead of the other process.

I'll keep you all posted.

Cheers
Scott

[midwinter]

It seems to have worked. The mounted DVD image plays just fine in the apple DVD player. I'm burning a copy right now to test in my set-top.

Just so you know, the same mpg I started converting via ffmpeg over 24 hours ago is STILL churning away.

Writing the lead-out now.

Ejecting.

PLAYS FINE!!!

I'll pass the word on to Nick at el Gato and will post instructions in a couple of places (my web site and vcdhelp).

Now. Does anyone know if we can get chapters in here somehow?

Cheers
Scott

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by midwinter:

The DVD I made was of Ice Age, which I had captured off of cable. Sync is perfect throughout, and it looks great.

So, essentially you had a mpeg-1 capture of a movie that you were trying to burn as a single DVD?

All these steps were to convert that mpeg-1 into a mpeg-2 format, correct?

And the quality is? Better than a good VHS or better than a bad VHS?

[midwinter]

Originally posted by vmpaul:
So, essentially you had a mpeg-1 capture of a movie that you were trying to burn as a single DVD?

All these steps were to convert that mpeg-1 into a mpeg-2 format, correct?

And the quality is? Better than a good VHS or better than a bad VHS?

No. Those steps are for creating a DVD with mpeg-1 video. In other words, this is how to make a DVD without re-encoding the video, which can take 10s of hours.

Looks like a VCD, if that gives you any indication. Quality is, of course, determined by the source. In this case, it was my relatively snowy cable signal. I'd say it looks like a decent VHS tape.

Cheers
Scott

[vmpaul]

OK. Thanks.

I just won an auction for an Eye TV unit. I'm looking forward to digitizing some old VHS stuff.

I don't have a DVD writer yet but eventually I'll get one and want to make either a single episode DVD or put multiple one-hour episodes on a DVD with titles.

All your effort (and tips) will help with that.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by vmpaul:
OK. Thanks.

I just won an auction for an Eye TV unit. I'm looking forward to digitizing some old VHS stuff.

I don't have a DVD writer yet but eventually I'll get one and want to make either a single episode DVD or put multiple one-hour episodes on a DVD with titles.

All your effort (and tips) will help with that.

That's pretty much why I got mine. You'll love it.

[vmpaul]

midwinter,

I just got my EyeTV unit, it's pretty good but I have a question.

How much do you know about the difference between recording at High setting versus the Standard setting?

I know you can't make a Toast VCD with anything but Standard setting but why have a High setting? Is it only for QT storage? Can you downsample if later you decide to make a VCD

I recorded a 5 minute sample on both settings and couldn't see much difference other than file size. Have you noticed the same?

If you don't know I'll just e-mail support.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by vmpaul:
midwinter,

I just got my EyeTV unit, it's pretty good but I have a question.

How much do you know about the difference between recording at High setting versus the Standard setting?

I know you can't make a Toast VCD with anything but Standard setting but why have a High setting? Is it only for QT storage? Can you downsample if later you decide to make a VCD

I recorded a 5 minute sample on both settings and couldn't see much difference other than file size. Have you noticed the same?

If you don't know I'll just e-mail support.

At broadcast quality, I can't tell all that much difference between the two settings (there are always broadcast artifacts that will be exacerbated by th8e compression process). I'm going to experiment with making a DVD using hi-quality later this evening. I'll report back with my findings.

I'm honestly not sure why they made a high-quality setting. Ask Nick at el Gato. He'll know.

Cheers
Scott

[vmpaul]

Sounds good. I'd like to hear if there is any difference.

I'll send my questions to Customer Support. If they answer, I'll post it.

Thanks.

[vmpaul]

Here's the response I got. Not exactly in great detail but I appreciate the fast response.

Good to know you can make HQ VCD's as well. That isn't stated in rev1 of the User's manual.

Still not sure if I can change the format if need be. I might try it in Cleaner later.

I didn't notice any difference between HQ and STD though.

High Quality recordings have twice the bit rate as Standard files, and thus take up twice the hard drive space. You cannot change High Quality recordings to Standard recordings by using EyeTV. High Quality footage can be visibly better, depending on the footage. If your video source quality is very high (like from a DVD player, satellite, and the like), then the visual difference might be less apparent.

Here are some sample files, made in both qualities. You can use them to compare.

www2.elgato.com/support/samples.sit.bin

Toast Titanium 5.2 can make VCDs from High Quality footage. The duration limit is about 33 minutes of footage.

Let me know if you have any other questions about this or other topics relating to EyeTV.

Nick Freeman
elgato Customer Support

[midwinter]

Hi all. Just an update on all of this.

Forget everything I wrote earlier, even though it works. Instead buy the new Toast Titanium 6. Drag the MPEG-1 video you want to make a DVD of into it, select the scenes you want to appear in the menus, edit the titles to whatever you want, and then click burn. It will do menus and everything.

Here's the best part: so far as I can tell, it merely upsamples the audio and DOES NOT RE-ENCODE THE VIDEO.

I burned 5 episodes of the West Wing to a single DVD, with menus, in around 3 hours on my G4/533. They play great in my set-top DVD player and on both the PCs around my house. The Apple DVD player doesn't like them too much (half the screen is garbled), but VLC plays them just fine and dandy.

Hope this helps!

Cheers
Scott

[C.J. Moof]

I wondered if this would work when I saw the release info on Toast 6. It sounds like just the thing for taking eyeTV video to DVD.

Does toast 6 allow an easy way to put in chapter marks within your 5 West Wing eps? That would make it really, really nice.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by C.J. Moof:
I wondered if this would work when I saw the release info on Toast 6. It sounds like just the thing for taking eyeTV video to DVD.

Does toast 6 allow an easy way to put in chapter marks within your 5 West Wing eps? That would make it really, really nice.

Chapters are set at the beginning of each episode. I've not yet figured out how to put them within each act of the episode.

[Titom]

vmpaul

Thanks for posting a sample.

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by Titom:
vmpaul

Thanks for posting a sample.

I wish I could take credit for it. Those are from the Customer Service dept of EyeTV. I just shared their letter to me.

[cnelson87]

I've been following this thread for a while and have a few problems.
I tried the first method of demuxing, upsampling, converting back to mp2, and remuxing, but the audio sync problems are horrible. The audio is somehow shortened in length by the whole process. For a 20 min episode the audio finished about 20 seconds before the video, even though the mp2 is only about 2 seconds shorter than the m1v before remuxing. I tried time stretching the aif by 2 seconds to compensate before reconverting to mp2, but even the slightest adjustment will make the audio 20 to 30 seconds longer than the video. Does this make sense? Not to me. Any way to sync the audio and video?

I tried the Toast 6 method as well. I dragged 3gb of mpg files into it and clicked record, but I got an error saying I had 10gb too much, or something like that. That leads me to believe that it's probably trying to re-encode the video. Can you give a step by step process on what you did to get Toast 6 to work? I just want to upsample the audio without re-encoding the video.

Thanks a bunch,
Chris

Originally posted by midwinter:
I think I may have figured out how to make a DVD without re-encoding the video (Ice Age took about 12 hours for me). I'm still muxing the two tracks, but I think this will work (it did on the sample I did earlier today):

1) Demux the captured video.
2) Convert the .mp2 (audio file) to an .aiff or .wav using iTunes. Upsample it there (in the advanced tab under "import" in the preferences) to 16-bit, 48 khz, 224 kbs.
3) Use Missing Mpeg Tools (mp2enc) to convert the .wav/.aiff to .mp2 to 224 kbs, 48 khz, stereo
4) use Missing Mpeg Tools (mplex) to mux the .mp2 and the .m1v.
5) use Missing Mpeg Tools (vcdxgen) to make a VOB folder.
6) use Missing Mpeg Tools (vcdxbuild) to make the DVD disk image for toast.

Originally posted by midwinter:
Hi all. Just an update on all of this.

Forget everything I wrote earlier, even though it works. Instead buy the new Toast Titanium 6. Drag the MPEG-1 video you want to make a DVD of into it, select the scenes you want to appear in the menus, edit the titles to whatever you want, and then click burn. It will do menus and everything.

Here's the best part: so far as I can tell, it merely upsamples the audio and DOES NOT RE-ENCODE THE VIDEO.

[midwinter]

Chris,

Have you tried with a smaller file?

Cheers
Scott

[cnelson87]

Smaller than 20 mins? (about 200MB each) No, I would have to chop the mpegs into pieces, I guess. I can try that.
Or did you mean smaller than 3GB? By 3GB I just meant that I have a lot of (15 or 16) 200MB mpegs that I tried to dump into Toast to burn to DVD. I realize that upsampling the audio will increase the file size slightly, but 10GB seems ridiculous.
I'll assume you meant smaller than 200MB and I'll try splitting them into 2 min chunks when I get home tonight. Hmmmmm, I wonder if it will work if I split them, go throught the whole conversion process, then rejoin them...?

Why is the mpg1 format so hard to deal with? There's GOT to be an easier way to do all this. Is there (gasp!) a PC solution that will allow for basic editing / cutting / joining / muxing without re-encoding?

Originally posted by midwinter:
Chris,

Have you tried with a smaller file?

Cheers
Scott

[midwinter]

Originally posted by cnelson87:
Smaller than 20 mins? (about 200MB each) No, I would have to chop the mpegs into pieces, I guess. I can try that.
Or did you mean smaller than 3GB? By 3GB I just meant that I have a lot of (15 or 16) 200MB mpegs that I tried to dump into Toast to burn to DVD. I realize that upsampling the audio will increase the file size slightly, but 10GB seems ridiculous.

Oh! I mis-read you! I thought it was 10 MB. No. This is *definitely* not right. Have you checked to make sure it's not trying to make a VCD or an SVCD? Check under the advanced tab in Toast 6 and make sure. That's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head. But something's definitely not right here. I routinely throw 5 43-minute episodes of the West Wing on a single DVD.

I'll assume you meant smaller than 200MB and I'll try splitting them into 2 min chunks when I get home tonight. Hmmmmm, I wonder if it will work if I split them, go throught the whole conversion process, then rejoin them...?

I wouldn't bother with that. Something else is going on here. Let's make sure you've got Toast configured properly before we go muxing around with all that

Why is the mpg1 format so hard to deal with? There's GOT to be an easier way to do all this. Is there (gasp!) a PC solution that will allow for basic editing / cutting / joining / muxing without re-encoding?

The standard response I've always gotten to that question is that MPEG-1 is a content delivery format and is not designed to be edited. Yes, it is a pain. Hopefully, someone like el Gato will come out with an import feature in Eye TV so we can edit them more easily. I *believe* there's a solution for this on the PC side, but I can't say for sure. For now, mpgtx is about as good as we get. And it's pretty darned cool.

Cheers
Scott

[vmpaul]

My .02. It may not be the answer but it's something I noticed when using Toast 6 and converting my EyeTV (mpeg-1) files.

Do you have enough hard disk space?

When Toast is encoding the file(s) it creates a folder called 'Roxio Converted Items'. While it's encoding it produces a name_of_file.aiff.tmp file and a name_of_file.m1v.tmp file. Both were the size of my original file. So it essentially triples the needed HD space.

That may not be it but I thought it worth mentioning.

BTW, Toast does leave the up-sampled audio portion in the above mentioned folder. So, you can use Toast as just a de-muxer as well. You just need to write the file to disk and discard the video when you're done and keep the audio.

[eddiecatflap]

wot a load of crap

i got an eyetv to cut all the bs out

no hope

FUXCK this pos

its shyte , buy a stand alone dvd recorder / hd - ok its a lot more £/$ but a LOT less hassle

utterly ridiculous effort required to make one dvd

P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C.

[tr]

Originally posted by eddiecatflap:
wot a load of crap

i got an eyetv to cut all the bs out

no hope

FUXCK this pos

its shyte , buy a stand alone dvd recorder / hd - ok its a lot more £/$ but a LOT less hassle

utterly ridiculous effort required to make one dvd

P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C.

buy Toast, drag and drop your videos into Toast, burn DVD.

also, El Gato just released an EyeTV updater, which "now provides seamless integration with Roxio’s Toast 6 Titanium, making it extremely easy to convert EyeTV recorded videos into DVDs"

tr

woo-hooo!!! 1100!!!