El Gato EyeTV 500 HDTV to DVD assistance

[ronozer]

I am enjoying the high quality video streams I am getting rom my El Gato EyeTV 500 hooked up to Comcast cable. The MPEG-2 streams give excellent video and sound quality, but I am still having some of the problems that have been mentioned in reviews (and have had no luck with the solutions El Gato support has suggested).

1. I am unable to export the HDTV streams as MPEG-2 that will either be read by Toast and converted to DVD format or to DVD studio 2 or 3. As a result I have to convert these files to DV and then use iDVD to make DVDs. The video quality is still excellent, but it takes a lot of time and it seems crazy to convert MPEG-2 to DV and then MPEG-2 again. Also the .ac3 dolby digital soundtrack gets converted to PCM when you go to DV so you lose the surround sound data.

(Note when I export HDTV to Toast, Toast opens the file but shows it as a length of zero minutes so no DVD can be made).

2. The digital channels on my Comcast system keep changing. For the first few months I got INHD2 and all the local HD channels but little else. Now I did a new exhaustive scan and I lost INHD2 (which has great concerts!) but gained TCM which has great movies, though they are not in HD, just SD. Are there any decryption tools out there to get access to more of the cable spectrum? (I don;t want to steal movies, but I would love to have an archive of some HDTV from other channels). Anyway, anyone who has an insight into how to best understand the digital cable spectrum on this baby would do well to let us all know, thanks!

FYI: Toast 6.0.9, EyeTV 1.7.1, Mac G4 866 Quicksilver, 780 MB memory, OS 10.3.9, upgraded everything software.

[Ladd]

First:

Grab EyeTV 1.7.2b29 HERE.

If your EyeTV 500 recording is 1920x1080/29.97 fps, you can simply select the recording in the EyeTV software's Program Window, then from the File Menu select "Burn DVD". This will export a "program stream" file which will maintain the 5.1 audio and dump the file directly into Toast for you. Toast will handle the reduction of file size and encoding, and burn the VIDEO_TS folder for you. Only the most current version of Toast (version 6.0.9) will work).

EyeTV 500 recordings that are 1280x720/59.94 fps are a completely different story. I've tried dozens of methods and they all end up with the audio being about one second out of step with the video.

Here's a method that works, but ya gotta really want the recording on DVD to do it...

Using the EyeTV 1.7.2b29 version of the EyeTV software, export your EyeTV 500-recorded program as "elementary streams". This will retain the 5.1 audio.

Fire up the latest version of ffmpegX (0.0.9s), available at MacUpdate.com if you don't already have it.

Click the "open" button and navigate to the .mpv file you just created via the EyeTV export.

Click the "Save As" button and navigate to where you want the processed files saved. I usually do a "create new folder" and put all the files in an "ffmpegX" folder inside the same Folder where I put the EyeTV exported files.

Below the "open" and "Save as" buttons you just clicked note that you are in the "Summary" tabbed window. On the right side of the window (Target Format), click and hold the "To:" selection that has been made for you, and instead select "DVD ffmpeg".

Click the "Video" tab.

Video size for widescreen programming needs to be 720x480
Autosize for widescreen programing needs to be "DVD 16:9"
Framerate needs to be "NTSC 29.97"

Click the "Audio" tab.

Change "audio bitrate" pre-selection to "Passthrough". Leave "encode audio" selected.
Click the "Add audio" button near the bottom on the right. Navigate to the .ac3 file that was you exported earlier from EyeTV.

Click the "options" tab.
Set "profile" to DVD.

Click the "Tools" tab.

DESELECT the "Author as DVD (Video_TS)" box.
Select "keep elementary streams"
Change "Mux as" to "DVD"

Click the "Encode" button and walk away for a few hours.


You could have had ffmpegX make a VIDEO_TS folder, the the audio would have been out of sync.

What you do now is repeat the entire above procedure, but use the .mpeg file output from ffmpegX as your originating video file instead of the .mpv file that you exported from EyeTV. The ffmpegX .mpeg file is 29.97 fps and when processed again with the original EyeTV-exported .ac3 file, you'll get proper audio sync.

It has been my experience that the ffmpeg settings get messed up when trying to process a second file -- until you are familiar with what they are supposed to be (as described above), better to quit the application, re-open it and re-set the settings after you select the .mpeg file as your originating video file.

Ensure that when you run the ffmpegX procedure the second time, in the "Tools" tabe, that you turn ON the "Author as DVD (Video_TS)" selection. Run the encode process.

This will create a "VIDEO_TS" folder that Toast 6.0.9 can burn to recordable DVD.

It's easy to do but annoying and time consuming. And I have yet to figure out a way to get multiple episodes of a program on one DVD.

The key is getting the frame rate of the recording down to 29.97 fps and ffmpegX is the only application I've found that can do this. I've just started investigating Handbrake and MPEGstreamclip to see if they might work also, because THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY!

Note that HD programming is of higher quality than that you can put on DVD. DVDs max out at 720x480 and 29.97 fps. The HD recordings you are getting from your EyeTV will be either 1280x720/59.94 fps or 1920x1080/29.97 fps.

If you have an HDTV (other than your computer monitor), you may be better served by using the Elgato EyeHome box and streaming the programming directly from your computer to your TV. No re-encoding required, just click and play.

[ronozer]

Thanks to Ladd I got the new version of EyeTV which works with Toast. I burned a DVD overnight (it took my 867Mhz G4 a long long time to re-encode the video etc though probably no longer than iMovie and IDVD)

I watched some of the DVD this morning and found the video AND audio quality quality worse than it was with iMovie and iDVD export (in 60 minute iDVD mode). There was some raggedness to the image and some skipping here and there. The audio was not recognized asn ac3 by the coaxial digital in on my receiver, it showed Dolby Pro Logic which means it was taking a 2 channel mutliplexed signal and turning it into 5.1. It sounded pretty crappy. It's possible it is the difference in source material (I no longer have the raw HDTV files for the recent iDVDs I made, they were from INHD2). But the Conan O'Brien show with Ben Folds was in 1080i, high bitrate with 384 kbps ac3 audio, so it should have been great.

Also, I see no one commenting on my troubles with channels changing on Comcast, has no one here seen this wierdness? I hope to find some more channels doing another exhaustive scan, we'll see!

THANKS LADD for your help.