Capturing with a Formac Studio DV/TV: DV or MPEG-4 to DVD

[waywardbus]

I am about to inherit a Formac Studio DV/TV and would appreciate some advice about capturing TV broadcasts on my Mac (G-4 1 ghz AGP Tower with 1 gig RAM, 80 and 120 gig hard drives), then burning them to DVD. I have a Norcent DVD player that is supposed to handle MPEG-4 and DivX.

This much I know: The Formac encodes incoming video as DV, but it also offers the option of on the fly software encoding as MPEG-4. Which of these options is best, with the ultimate goal being viewing the recorded television on the aforementioned Norcent DVD player?

Specifically, can the smaller MPEG-4 files be burned directly to DVD for playing on the Norcent, and if so, how and with what app? If not, is it still advisable to do the mpeg-4 encoding, because of the smaller file sizes? Or should I simply capture the DV files and use Toast Titanium to encode and burn them to DVD?

Any advice from seasoned Formac Studio users and others knowledgable of video capture and burning on the Mac would be greatly appreciated by this newbie. Thank you in advance.

[mhar4]

I'd be pretty amazed if a 1Ghz G4 could do real time MPEG4 encoding at anything like useful picture dimensions and frame rates.

But if you get useable results, you can use D-Vision version 2 to convert an mp4 or mov to an avi containter with mp3 audio, which a standalone player should read. Mine claims to be able to play "mp4" but it will only actually play avis. The results are very good, though.

If you're converting DV to mp4, then OpenShiiva is the best program for that. You could probably also use ffmpegX with the "Decode using Quicktime" box checked to go straight to DivX avi.

Also, the Formac software really blows. I use BTV, which is simple and effective.

[waywardbus]

Thanks for the advice. Once converted to .avi, whats the best app for doing the actual burning? Toast? Apple's built-in burner? Or do I need something more specialized to created a DVD-player readable Mpeg-4 or DivX disk?

I've been playing with the formac and was 1)horrified by the buggy and clumsy software, then 2) even more horrified by the incredibly slow encoding of the DV files into any other format. I think the Formac might be a good device for some uses, but not what I had in mind. Time to look into the other devices that do hardware encoding to mpeg-2 and the other, more compact formats.

[mhar4]

Thanks for the advice. Once converted to .avi, whats the best app for doing the actual burning? Toast? Apple's built-in burner? Or do I need something more specialized to created a DVD-player readable Mpeg-4 or DivX disk?

I've been playing with the formac and was 1)horrified by the buggy and clumsy software, then 2) even more horrified by the incredibly slow encoding of the DV files into any other format. I think the Formac might be a good device for some uses, but not what I had in mind. Time to look into the other devices that do hardware encoding to mpeg-2 and the other, more compact formats.

There shouldn't be any "authoring" required for a disk with avis for an "Divx"/DVD player, just burn it onto a disk and away you go using your application of choice.

I have an ADS hardware MPEG2 encoder, which is great - better quality and of course no reencoding for DVDs - but it is much more sensitive to source quality than the Formac device. So if I have some bad but valuable video tape I want to keep, I use the Formac. Converting to anything else takes forever, but I don't use it very often. DV has certain advantages for editing, too, over MPEG2 capture, if you're using FCP or iMovie or whatever.

[broaddd]

So, how do you find the on-the-fly encoding? Is it MPEG-2 or MPEG-4?