Thanks to everyone for their comments, on and off-list. I can now
(just) get SBS, and I'll try suggestions like better coax cable to
improve the signal strength more. Luckily, because it's digital TV,
just good enough still gives perfect picture.
Unfortunately, I can't replace the aerial - the landlord already
spent a small fortune getting the signal to this standard :( And I
still don't understand why moving the receiver around has such a
significant effect on the signal strength...
I wasn't really clear enough about archiving. I'm not really
interested in backing up to DVD (if I can avoid it), but rather, I'd
like to store shows on disk. A 2 hour movie takes up ~7GB when stored
in native Digital TV format, and I want to reduce that in order to
avoid filling my disk.
I've used handbrake <http://handbrake.m0k.org/> to rip DVDs onto ~1GB
movies with excellent quality (H.264, ~1024Kb/s bitrate, multi-pass).
That takes 1-2 hours on my G5 in the office, but it was too slow
using EyeTV on my powerbook.
I've just discovered that using EyeTV to convert to H.264 as above,
is really slow, even on my fast G5 (three hours later, maybe 1/5 of
the way through!!). I know it's not exactly the same thing, but EyeTV
seems to be at least an order of magnitude slower at this process
than handbrake.
On 19/05/2006, at 12:06 , Martin Hill wrote:
I export all the movies I record as H.264 and change the datarate to
2500Kbps (it annoyingly defaults to 500Kbps) which results in
average length
movies consuming around 2GB...
...I used to set the datarate to 2000Kbps or lower but found that a
fair number
of movies would suddenly become *extremely* pixelated halfway
through as if
H.264 suddenly gave up trying to achieve high quality at such lower
datarates. Has anyone else had this problem?
I'll let you know how I go with EyeTV, but as I mentioned, there
should be no reason why a H.264 video at ~1024 Kbps is anything less
than superb (based on my experience from DVDs). I've certainly not
seen the pixellation issue you mention. Maybe try using multi-pass...
I also record music videos off Rage every weekend and extract the
few gems
in amongst the garbage and export these using the EyeTV recommended
iPod
MPEG-4 setting (which is considerably faster than H.264) to
download to my
Video iPod.
This is a superb idea! And the Rage playlist is on the web, so you
can even pick and choose beforehand, to some degree.
cheers,
Josh
