On 28/01/2007, at 3:04 PM, Severin Crisp wrote:
1. Is there a way of verifying that EyeTV will perform as well as
the settop box in this known poor reception area?
I've found the EyeTV hardware to generally be as good as the digital
set-top boxes we had previously. Originally our analog reception was
very poor and when we first got a digital set-top box, the signal
kept breaking up and glitching until we got a new antennae and I re-
cabled with RG-6 "digital-ready" coax cable from the antennae to the
box. (the old cable was rusted and connected on only one strand.)
Our Firewire EyeTV 410 gets an absolutely perfect signal (100% Signal
Quality and 98.8% Signal Strength) while our new USB EyeTV Hybrid
which we added to allow us to record 2 channels simultaneously does
sometime suffer the odd artifact. This could be due to the fact that
the EyeTV Hybrid is getting 100% Signal Quality but only 58.8% Signal
Strength. I think i'll have another look at my splitter-amplifier.
2. What format does EyeTV save to disk in with respect to
importing into iMovie, ie is there a need to convert to .dv first?
EyeTV digital TV receivers all capture recordings natively in MPEG-2
format (that is the format broadcast from the TV stations). EyeTV
has an Export to iMovie option which takes a bit less than a minute
to convert every minute of MPEG-2 format video to DV format for
iMovie on our 1.8GHz iMac G5.
3. Having edited in iMovie, my own experience is that Toast is the
simplest way to convert and copy to DVD. iDVD is great if you want
to add menus and other glitz. In both cases the compute time to
convert to DVD to burn to disc is considerable. I recently
produced an iMovie/iDVD of a concert I had filmed, edited and
adorned and iDVD took about three hours to prepare about 80mins for
burning (single processor G5 1.8 so newer machines will certainly
improve on this).
If you have Roxio Toast, EyeTV can with a single button-click create
DVDs directly from these MPEG-2 recordings as they are the same
format used by DVDs. This is by far the quickest and easiest way to
create DVDs as the conversion from MPEG-2 transport stream used in
digital TV broadcast to MPEG-2 Program stream used on DVDs only takes
a few seconds compared to the hours and hours it can take to convert
into other formats (as you mention with iMovie Toast and iDVD).
With the EyeTV Hybrid, you can also take advantage of this speed for
converting analog video such as old VHS or Video-8 tapes to DVD. It
is blindingly fast compared to converting to DV format to edit in
iMovie and then exporting back to MPEG-2 in iDVD to actually burn the
DVD (not to mention the quality degradation due to all the
generational losses incurred as a result of these format conversions).
However, I personally export all the recordings I want to keep from
EyeTV as iPod Video format as I can then fit 4 normal length movies
(typically around 1GB each in size once the ads are edited out) on
one single-layer DVD-R and of course they are also good-to-go on my
video iPod. If you have a newer dual-layer DVD burner, you could fit
8 or so movies per DVD which is a great way to store them.
The new "highest quality " iPod Video format is 640x480 using H.264
and it does take a long time to compress, but I just leave them
queued up compressing overnight. I am more than happy with the
quality and can't generally tell the difference compared to the
original MPEG-2 file in EyeTV at full-screen size (though the audio
is stereo instead of surround sound).
Any suggestions welcomed.
The good news is that this may mean another convert to the Mac
family of a case hardened PC user. His brother likewise, recently
added an iMac to his family of PCs.
Likewise - my non-technical PC-using brother-in-law now has a Mac
Mini, EyeTV Hybrid and a 19" LCD monitor as the TV in their small
lounge room and they are very content. Similarly, my Dad who is in
his 70s now has an EyeTV Hybrid connected up to his 15" MacBook Pro
connected to his existing TV with an AV cable and uses that for his
regular TV viewing. He is now quite competently pausing and re-
winding live TV, scheduling and recording TV shows and generally
appreciating the far better quality of digital TV reception over his
old analog TV reception.
-Mart
--------------------------------------
Martin Hill
email: mart "at" ozmac.com
homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com
Mb: 0417-967-969 hm: (08)9314-5242
