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Downscale video from EyeTV 500?
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: East Africa
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I have an MDD 1.25Ghz G4 and, as of yet, no HDTV. But considering the upcoming Broadcast Flag trash, it seems I might as well buy the EyeTV 500. Except that the G4 probably won't be able to play back the files, full-stream. Is there an easy&cheap way to downscale the saved MPEG2 file to, say, 480p instead? Fast is nice, but I don't mind VNCing in from work as needed to start the next job. Hoping for drag-and-drop easy.
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Senior User
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: NY
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I have an EyeTV 500 and like it quite a bit. The excellent software it comes with already has built in capability to export to different formats so that should be as simple as just exporting whatever file you want. It also allows some basic editing to remove commercials as well. Nothing fancy but well executed nonetheless. There are 2 main types of HD in use in most places, 1080i and 720p. Your Mac might have a hard time as my dual 2.0 G5 seems to use about 60% of 1 of the CPU's to playback 1080i and maybe a little less to playback 720p. There is a thread over at the Ars forums where the capability of different Macs at playing HDTV is discussed with a link to a place where you can dl some large HD movie trailers to test your rig. They are DIVX ones I believe but they should give you some idea of what to expect from something like the EyeTV 500.
Test Your Mac with HD Content
-Jerry C.
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Sep 2000
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Wow, great link. Thanks Jerry. Yeah I may buy the 500 even if I can't do playback very well yet (choke choke choke). I'll sure be able to get a faster machine in the future. DRM-free HDTV DVR pipe, no-time soon. Here's to magical decoding in Tiger! [clink]
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Naperville, IL
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I have the same setup as druber and want the eyetv500. As long as I can maybe export the files as mp4's or .movs that are playable, that's all I really want and then in the future, as I upgrade the computer, I can keep the HD files themselves. Will the eye tv 500 do what I'm hoping it does? (that is, save the resulting file as an mp4. .mov, or something that's 'smaller'?)
Thanks,
Mike
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2009 MacMini 2.0 C2D 4GB (3,1) - Needs update!
11" MBA (2010 1.6GHz C2D)
iPhone 4 / iPad!
Hooked on Apple since the IIGS
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2003
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Originally Posted by MikeD
I have the same setup as druber and want the eyetv500. As long as I can maybe export the files as mp4's or .movs that are playable, that's all I really want and then in the future, as I upgrade the computer, I can keep the HD files themselves. Will the eye tv 500 do what I'm hoping it does? (that is, save the resulting file as an mp4. .mov, or something that's 'smaller'?)
Thanks,
Mike
I have nothing much to add, except to say that my recently purchased EyeTV500 is da bomb. I have it hooked up to my QS G4/933 via FW, and my QS to a 23" HD Cinema display. Installation was a breeze, as was the setup.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Naperville, IL
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zweibel,
Can you watch regular (non HDTV) tv with it? Or is it only good for the HD channels?
Mike
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2009 MacMini 2.0 C2D 4GB (3,1) - Needs update!
11" MBA (2010 1.6GHz C2D)
iPhone 4 / iPad!
Hooked on Apple since the IIGS
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Junior Member
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: The Sovereign State of Southern California
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Originally Posted by MikeD
zweibel,
Can you watch regular (non HDTV) tv with it? Or is it only good for the HD channels?
Mike
The EyeTV 500 will only recieve DIGITAL broadcasts. High definitation (HD) is digital. And most tv stations are now broadcasting their normal (SD) programing in digital (SD=standard defination). But the 500 will not recieve ANALOG tv.
So the EyeTV 500 will recieve HD & SD digital television.
Pat
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jan 2005
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Would a G4 MDD Dual 1ghz with 1280mb of ram be able to handle eyetv?
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Admin Emeritus
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
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Originally Posted by druber
I have an MDD 1.25Ghz G4 and, as of yet, no HDTV. But considering the upcoming Broadcast Flag trash, it seems I might as well buy the EyeTV 500. Except that the G4 probably won't be able to play back the files, full-stream. Is there an easy&cheap way to downscale the saved MPEG2 file to, say, 480p instead? Fast is nice, but I don't mind VNCing in from work as needed to start the next job. Hoping for drag-and-drop easy.
There are free tools (e.g. ffmegX) to do this, but boy they're messy.
You could use the Apple MPEG-2 QuickTime component plus either QuickTime Pro, or any of the myriad of free QuickTime editors out there to export to h.264, MPEG-4, Sorenson, or whatever you want, and resize in the process.
tooki
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: East Africa
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Wow, resurrecting an old thread here. I did end up buying an EyeTV500, and no the G4 can't come anywhere close to playing it back at full resolution. Considering an Avel Linkplayer2 for that. But when it comes to reencoding at a lower res/bitrate.... Well the EyeTV software has this built in, and besides occasional stall-outs, it works well enough. I.e. the results look good. But a 1-hour show in 1080i (cut to 44 minutes after the commercials are edited out) can easily take 12 hours to squeeze down to 7xxby576 (SDTV) for H.264 at single-pass. That is to say, only really an option for shows you really really want to keep. I'd also say an external tv antenna is a must. Who cares if the encoding's good if you have signal dropouts? Not me.
This to say, recording tv programming to your Mac, hurray. Doing anything with it afterwards, half-hearted meh.
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Senior User
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: NY
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Originally Posted by druber
This to say, recording tv programming to your Mac, hurray. Doing anything with it afterwards, half-hearted meh.
Well one thing you can do with it is to stream it over an Airport network to your TV using one of these cool devices:
http://www.snazio.com/Links/CinemaHD..._Overview.html
It is an upscaling DVD player and has wireless connectivity to stream the program streams off your Mac's hard-drive, so even if your Mac stutters on HD content it should be fine on this as it is only streaming the file not decoding on the Mac. I haven't gotten one yet but if I do I will review it for you guys.
-Jerry C.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: May 2000
Location: northeast PA
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Originally Posted by druber
Wow, resurrecting an old thread here. I did end up buying an EyeTV500, and no the G4 can't come anywhere close to playing it back at full resolution.
Have you tried VLC .8x for playback? Works great here on my DP1.42 at full res and full screen with the Doom sample trailer. It uses about 40-50% cpu.
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