On 18/05/2006, at 12:19 PM, Josh McKinnon wrote:
Well, I bit the bullet and bought an EyeTV for DTT in time for the
world cup next month.
I love it - Digital quality and the ability to record, pause, rewind
live TV, all for $300 (and a spare computer). But the digital TV
stream is no good for archiving shows, as it uses 2-3 GB per hour. You
need to export to another more efficient format for archiving, but
this is slooow on my 1GHz TiBook. Can anyone give a brief critique of
the various video encoding formats (quality, size, time to encode)
that I might try, including H.264, MPEG-4, DivX etc.? I tried H.264,
but gave up encoding a movie when it was half-finished in a day (my G5
2x2.7 at work does a similar task in an hour!). I guess I'll have a
Macbook soon enough, so that should help with speed...
But initially, I couldn't get SBS reception - a rather big deal since
I bought the thing for watching the World Cup. I'm in Subiaco and my
analog SBS reception was fairly dodgy, hard to see the football.
After a couple of weeks, I rearranged the gear in my lounge room, and
lo, SBS reception! After some investigation, it turns out that in my
borderline case, the signal quality is EXTREMELY sensitive to the
location of the receiver, even though it remains plugged into the
rooftop aerial.
Next to the computer, signal strength = ~50% and signal quality = 0%.
Relocate it to next to the TV, signal strength ~55 - 60%, signal
quality = 100%. I can turn the signal on and off just by picking up
the receiver box and moving it around just a few inches (55% seems to
be the magic number for reception). I can't explain it, except to
assume that something is providing some kind of interference.
Since you can't automatically tune in your channels until you have
reception, you can use the reception locator to manually tune the
station(s), then find your reception hotspot:
<http://www.dba.org.au/index.asp?sectionID=22>
cheers,
Josh
Hi Josh,
I'm in Subi also and get a good picture on all channels including
Access 31 which is even better coming through the EyeTV and a long coax
from a splitter
than I get on my TV. I use good gold connecters. A good properly
directed antenna is essential.
I'm only using version 1.8.5 of the software with an EyeTV 200 on my
1.25 Ali. Powerbook, OS 10.3.9. I use a Firewire 800 250 G for the
data.
When I get a movie that is only 1 hr 25 min or less (the older B&W's
usually) I just select EyeTV's menu Burn With Toast and it's sorted
pretty quick.
WTH = "which takes hours" (varies obviously. I give it these tasks when
I'm doing other things like sleeping)
Any longer movies that I want to get onto one DVD I have to Export it
from EyeTV selecting the Option 'DV PAL' (WTH).
Then I put the resulting .mov file into Final Cut and get it to
Sequence/Render All/Both (WTH) then I Export/Quicktime Movie which
takes a while.
I then give that exported file (usually several Gigs) to iDVD and get
it to Save As Disk Image (WTH). Which contains the usual VIDEO_TS &
AUDIO_TS files which
go to Toast for burning the DVD.
These larger movies can be split into two with EyeTV and Burn With
Toast used on the 2 halves (using 2 DVD's) though I've not done that
yet.
With the newer EyeDVD I believe most of those early maneuvers are
thankfully redundant.
Anyway that's my experience with it so far. I look forward to getting a
newer model of EyeTV.
Brian
