> From: Josh McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I wasn't really clear enough about archiving. I'm not really > interested in backing up to DVD (if I can avoid it), but rather, I'd > like to store shows on disk. A 2 hour movie takes up ~7GB when stored > in native Digital TV format, and I want to reduce that in order to > avoid filling my disk.
I also store a fair number of shows/movies on the hard drive before I eventually have to move them off onto DVD. I download the new music videos to the iPod every week while still leaving the original on the iMac. Compressing movies down to 2GB for a 2hr movie helps, but yes, it would be nice to get them smaller if I could guarantee the same high quality. I have an external 250GB Firewire drive dedicated as the EyeTV recording volume and I store the edited and compressed versions on the internal 250GB drive of the iMac. The internal iMac drive also stores all our music and other stuff though so I can't keep too many recordings on it before burning DVDs. I can see consumer RAID arrays taking off in the future for this sort of stuff. Forget 3-packs of socks & jocks for Christmas - the new consumable will be disk pacs! :-) > I've used handbrake <http://handbrake.m0k.org/> to rip DVDs onto ~1GB > movies with excellent quality (H.264, ~1024Kb/s bitrate, multi-pass). > That takes 1-2 hours on my G5 in the office, but it was too slow > using EyeTV on my powerbook. > > I've just discovered that using EyeTV to convert to H.264 as above, > is really slow, even on my fast G5 (three hours later, maybe 1/5 of > the way through!!). I know it's not exactly the same thing, but EyeTV > seems to be at least an order of magnitude slower at this process > than handbrake. Interesting. It's a shame Handbrake refuses to process EyeTV MPEG-2 transport streams. Although video DVDs also use MPEG-2 program streams, Handbrake 0.7.1 insists on looking for DVD type file structures and titles etc. Otherwise it might have been an alternative. :-( You've inspired me to do some experimentation with other apps. I just tried using MPEG StreamClip 1.7 to compress some EyeTV footage at 1000Kbps and the quality looks good (apart from coming out with the wrong aspect ratio - should be able to fix that next try!). Even with multi-pass on, it looks like it's a lot faster than EyeTV as well. http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html (Note: MPEG StreamClip requires Apple's MPEG-2 playback component for this sort of processing) > On 19/05/2006, at 12:06 , Martin Hill wrote: >> I export all the movies I record as H.264 and change the datarate to >> 2500Kbps (it annoyingly defaults to 500Kbps) which results in >> average length movies consuming around 2GB... >> ...I used to set the datarate to 2000Kbps or lower but found that a >> fair number of movies would suddenly become *extremely* pixelated halfway >> through as if H.264 suddenly gave up trying to achieve high quality at such lower datarates. Has anyone else had this problem? > > I'll let you know how I go with EyeTV, but as I mentioned, there > should be no reason why a H.264 video at ~1024 Kbps is anything less > than superb (based on my experience from DVDs). I've certainly not > seen the pixellation issue you mention. Maybe try using multi-pass... I've tried Multi-pass with EyeTV (which takes twice as long of course) in the past which didn't fix the problem. Has anyone else experienced the pixelation effect? It's a VERY major problem when it happens as the macro-pixels end up about 10 regular pixels by 10 pixels in size - totally unviewable. Only one out of 5 or 6 recordings were affected for some reason. The only way I can be certain to eliminate it is if I boost the datarate. I also find that 1 out of 10 movies will lose it's sound once compressed. The original will play fine in EyeTV, but no matter what format I choose to compress it in or what datarate I choose, the sound will drop out entirely at the same point every time. Very frustrating. Both problems have been happening to me for almost a year now with earlier versions of EyeTV and Quicktime as well as the latest versions. I'd love to track down what the problem is (in that time the iMac has also had several clean OS re-installs due to a faulty hard disk that was eventually replaced). I'll have to try compressing some of the problem recordings in MPEG StreamClip and see if it solves the problem. >> I also record music videos off Rage every weekend and extract the >> few gems in amongst the garbage and export these using the EyeTV recommended >> iPod MPEG-4 setting (which is considerably faster than H.264) to >> download to my Video iPod. > > This is a superb idea! And the Rage playlist is on the web, so you > can even pick and choose beforehand, to some degree. Indeed: http://www.abc.net.au/rage/playlist/2006.htm is useful though I usually just record all Saturday and Sunday morning Rages and quickly zip through them when I get time as I usually don't know what a lot of the music is like unless I play a few seconds of each video. There is indeed a LOT of garbage out there! Josh I'll be keen to hear of your experiences over a number of movies with lower datarate H.264 from EyeTV. Ciao! -Mart
