Advice on fixing and editing HDTV captures or recapturing them?

[Dr Gonzo]

I have a lot of HDTV recordings made using a Humax 2000T FreeviewHD PVR that I need to able to edit for academic purposes. I've rewrapped the recordings from their original .TS into .MOV via FFMPEG at the Terminal on my Mac but there’s a frequent problem where in every video editor that I’ve tried, (Avidemux, MPEG Streamclip and F.C.P.) the following happens: the recordings either don’t play properly: often because of unseen video corruption of some sort or problems with editing MPEG4 AVCHD material, or they simply cause the editor to crash during the seeking process. I’ve tried VideoRedo on my Bootcamp partition, with mixed results: some files I can fix but not all. I also gave EditReady a go but had no luck whatsoever.

I’m always able to review the original .TS recordings on my PVR and watch them on my TV without any problems. If there's no software solution for fixing the recordings, surely I could just connect my PVR’s HDMI out to an HD capture box and let it capture the content in a lossless format that would be free of the problems and also easier to edit than AVCHD?

If I'm out of options in fixing the recordings, how viable is this idea and if so, what you would recommend as an external capture box for this purpose?

Thanks as always.

[usually_quiet]

VideoReDo would probably work better with the original TS recordings than video and audio that has been re-multiplexed into a MOV container, so if you have not used VideoReDo TV Suite to process the original TS files, try it. You can save the video as H.264 MP4 files for improved compatibility with a Mac.

Yes, you can capture the output of your recorder using an HD capture device, but it is time-consuming and there will always be some loss of quality, regardless of the device you choose, although it would probably be an acceptable amount of loss. It will also take some time to learn how to work with whatever capture device you buy and its software.

[Dr Gonzo]

I'll try that, thanks. Will saving the video as H.264 MP4 involve any quality loss?

[usually_quiet]

I'll try that, thanks. Will saving the video as H.264 MP4 involve any quality loss?

I don't believe so. As I recall, HD TV broadcasts in the UK are H.264, so VideoReDo will just copy the original video and audio, re-encoding only where needed to fix errors in the video and audio streams.

If I'm wrong and your recordings are MPEG-2, then you would save as MPEG-2 MP4 instead to avoid unnecessary quality loss due to re-encoding the entire file to convert from MPEG-2 to H.264.