[grovberg]

So I have the Quicktime MPEG-2 plug-in, and it certainly will open and play MPEG-2 files, but any time I try to skip ahead or move around a track, I get horrible lags of like 20-30 seconds. This isn't such a big deal for just watching something, but I get the same results when I try to edit in Final Cut Express (haven't tried pro, but assume it's the same) and it pretty much makes editing impossible.

I'm considering purchasing an EyeTV 200 for work, but the EyeTV encodes natively into MPEG-2 and I will need to be able to edit the video in Final Cut. This lag makes it impossible to scrub through a clip and find in and out points. I could probably use their bundled editor to output a more QT friendly file, but that seems like a giant pain.

Any suggestions? I'm on a Dual 1.25 G4, so I have a hard time believing it's a muscle power problem. Does anyone else have this problem? Could a fresh system install fix it?

Thanks as always!
-Grover

[k_munic]

mpeg2 is not mentioned for editing, it is a muxxed stream of audio and video signals.

when you scrub thru your file, the recompressor has to redefine the picture, cause mpeg2 compresses the way, that only the information of the differences between two frames is saved. so, when you go ahead 52 frames, the players misses the infos of frame 51, 50, 49... depending of the compression, there are key-frames with the whole information of a single frame every XXX frame (e.g. every 500th frame=20sec with 25fps).

there's no difference between qt pro, FCE or pro - they all use teh qt-engine.

editing such streams needs a recompression into an editable file format, e.g. .dv-stream - in tresult, you got every single frame in its whole beauty - and BIG files...