[Raman]

Not sure exactly where this needs to go.

We are recording TV shows on our Windows Media Center 2005 machine in our living room. I want to take those recordings off the hard drive and cut out the commercials. They're regular Standard Def signals coming thru Time Warner Cable.

I have Visual Hub which gladly takes the DVR-MS files and will convert them to whatever I want on my iMac. Question is - what's the best format for me to output the TV shows to in Visual Hub so that I can open them in iMovie, cut out the commercials, then ReSave or reouput so they play on my 24" Mac full screen? ( I could care less if they will play on the Windows computer). I've messed with outputting to .DV, mpeg 2, etc, but some of those file sizes are bigger than the original DVR-MS which is just a very clear MPEG-2 stream in a proprietary MSFT wrapper from what I have read on the internets.

Yes, I could just use VLC to play the DVR-MS file directly on my iMac but they key is I want to edit out the commercials easily. Yes, I have used editing software on my PC to successfully do this but I'd like to use my huge iMac screen to do the same thing. Plus, the PC is very slow (p4 2.8 ghz).

Once Apple comes out with a dual HDTV tuner Mac DVR we'll throw away our Windows MCE box.

[Cave Man]

DV, if it'll do it. It's lossless.

[mduell]

I'd just use one of the pieces of software that will pull the original MPEG2 out of the DVR-MS file. Transcoding to another format will always lose quality; the way to minimize the quality loss is to run at a very high bitrate resulting in the large files you're seeing. Edit the MPEG2 with one of the apps that can do so without transcoding (not iMovie!), and then use VisualHub for a singe transcode to H.264 or something similarly convenient.

DV is not lossless.

[Cave Man]

Sorry - should have said almost lossless compared to others.

[Raman]

Originally Posted by mduell 

I'd just use one of the pieces of software that will pull the original MPEG2 out of the DVR-MS file. Transcoding to another format will always lose quality; the way to minimize the quality loss is to run at a very high bitrate resulting in the large files you're seeing. Edit the MPEG2 with one of the apps that can do so without transcoding (not iMovie!), and then use VisualHub for a singe transcode to H.264 or something similarly convenient.

DV is not lossless.

Well part of the problem is that nothing that I know of except VisualHub can do anything with DVR-MS file on OS X. It's fast in converting to DV so I don't mind doing the conversion. I'm starting from an SD stream so my initial quality isn't that great anyway. I'm converting to DV because that's the format that iMovie seems to prefer.

The problem I'm having now is that iMovie 7.1 is painfully slow and isn't timeline based. i downloaded iMovieHD and that seems to work MUCH faster than 7.1 when importing/cutting out commercials/exporting back to DV.

If you know of a program that can natively work with DVR-MS files on OS X to cut out the commercials and then export it out to say h 264 as fast as Visual Hub then I'd be interested.

[mduell]

I can't find anything decent for OSX to remove the wrapper from dvr-ms files. I'd use something like this on your PC then let VisualHub do the MPEG2->H264 conversion.

[Raman]

Originally Posted by mduell 

I can't find anything decent for OSX to remove the wrapper from dvr-ms files. I'd use something like this on your PC then let VisualHub do the MPEG2->H264 conversion.

The best tool I've used on the PeeCee for removing commercials and then compressing is DVREdit and DVR2WMV. They're both free and they're at The Green Button Files

I'm going to try iMovieHD. I just can't believe how fast my 4 year old P4 2.8 can do this conversion compared to my shiny new iMac! I might have to do one of those old Steve Jobs duels! Maybe throw in Windows XP in Parallels just for good measure

[Raman]

O.K. So I'm relatively happy with the following process that I'm doing right now:

1. Copy DVR-MS files off PeeCee to Mac. This relegates the PeeCee to just record shows and that's it.
2. Use VisualHub on OSX and output to MPEG2, deinterlaced, high quality - I figure that it might be extracting the MPEG-2 stream rather than converting it since DVR-MS files contain MPEG2 streams. Dunno. It's fast, that's all I know.
3. Use MPEG Streamclip 1.9 to crop out the commercials and then Save As.. Mpeg-2 (for now). I'm still messing with if I want to export using MPEG2 Streamclip export to something else or if I should use VisualHub to do the change to whatever type instead.

Any recommendations? I think I prefer to let VisualHub do everything except cut out commercials since I can just let it run a batch overnight on a bunch of shows that I've cut commercials out.

I'm sure this is a lossy process but the standard def video doesn't spectacular to begin with. Especially when watched full-screen on my 24" iMac.

[VideoAddict]

You should look at DVRMSToolkit on the media center pc. It will automatically strip the dvr-ms file to mpeg2 and also had integration with commskip/showtime analyzer which will automatically remove the commercials for you. You then can convert them with visualhub for the mac.