Mac used as DVD Recorder

[chlegend]

Does anyone know of any software that will allow me to use my Mac PowerBook (Intel, OSX Tiger) the same way as I use my Panasonic DVD Recorder?

Specifically: I use a DV camcorder (often without a tape in it) to send a signal to my DVD recorder which burns a DVD of whatever my camcorder is looking at. When I'm done recording I finalize the DVD - it takes 4 minutes from when I hit the "stop" button before I have a usable DVD.

With my Mac: iMovie has to spend half an hour thumbnailing the video, then I have to export it to a format iDVD can read (which may take 2 hours), then iDVD has to reconvert the video to burn it onto a DVD (which may take another 2 hours)! There has to be a better way! I can't take my DVD Recorder on the road everywhere I go!

[tomlee59]

Does your DV camera have a firewire port? If so, then simply hook it up to the FW port on the mac (assuming it has one), and launch iMovie.

Right now, here's what you're doing:

DV --> MPEG2 DVD --> DV (for iMovie) --> DVD.

That's a lot of conversions. Takes time, and degrades quality.

With the FW connection described above, you would simply do this:

DV (iMovie) from camera --> DVD

Much faster, and only that one necessary conversion.

If your DV camera (or mac) doesn't have FW, then your options are very limited, and they all suffer from essentially the same drawbacks as your present method.

[terryj]

you don't mention your type of Mac in your post or in your specs,
only the processor speed.

If you have say an iMac DV (gumdrop style) with Firewire, than
a digital bridge, in this case your camcorder,
or a Canopus box, or a Matrox RT box, would be your only avenue
to get video to the DVD Recorder.

If you on the other hand have a G4 tower running 400mhz, then
you could simply buy one of these ATI Radeon TV out cards.

You then hook up a standard S-VHS cable out to the S-VHS in of your recorder,
and then hook up an Y-jacked RCA stereo cable to your audio inputs
of the recorder, the stereo 1/8" plug into the headphone jack of your mac.


Set your Monitor control panel to mirror displays, and then what plays on
the Mac, records to the DV Recorder. Video, sound, everything.

Use a FS playback app like VLC, MpegStreamclip, iTunes ( mp4 only),
or Miro, and you'll get FS captured playback on the recorder in real time,
without the headache of all the conversion back and forth.
You play, you capture, you finalize the disc, your done.

[Frobozz]

The EyeTV 250+ will record MPEG 2 video in real time from your camcorder's analog output. There are some other hardware MPEG 2 encoders, too, such as from Miglia. Once the video is in MPEG 2 format it is easy to use Toast to author it as a video DVD.

There used to be a product called the LaCie FastCoder that may appeal to you. With it you capture the video via Firewire in DV format and then "play" it through the FastCoder which is a Firewire MPEG 2 hardware encoder. The MPEG encoding is in real time and easy to author to a video DVD using Toast or the CaptyDVD 2 application that was bundled with the FastCoder. Since it isn't available now you'll have to find a used one.

Lastly, since your DVD recorder has the Firewire link you can play your video straight from iMovie into the DVD recorder via Firewire. I haven't tried this with iMovie 08 but it worked well with iMovieHD on my Pioneer standalone recorder.