Thursday, February 2, 2012

Shut up and take my money!

So I've been chugging along with the turbo.264 to convert the .m2ts/.ts that the Arcsoft capture software generated. It wasn't a bad system but I still needed to fire up the PC and keep my eye on it while it was capturing the stream. That and the fact that I needed to copy over those files to my Mac to encode.

I'm trying to simplify things and sometimes I forgot to hit capture on the PC and the copying process was slowing things down. An alternative was needed. Something all Mac based. Which costs money. Oh well.

There are a couple of options on using a Hauppauge HD PVR on a Mac but since I purchased this turbo.264 unit, why not get an Elgato product to complement it? So I purchased EyeTV.

Surprisingly, it's really nice compared to the Arcsoft software the came with the HD PVR (which makes sense - free vs pay). But it had features that I didn't know about like time shifting. Since it's supposed to be DVR software, it actually buffers whatever is on screen. I need to double check on how far it goes back but that's just dependent on how much disk space you give the software to buffer said stream. Pretty darn nifty.

Exports were ridiculously quick via it's native h.264 format. It dumps recordings in a mp4 container but it seems to be encoded in the same fashion that Handbrake does. Which means that editing and managing the clips created by EyeTV taxed iMovie quite a bit where as anything re-encoded by turbo.264 seems to be far more resource friendly. So I tried to export via turbo.264 from EyeTV and the results ... not so good.

It seemed to overscan the input and zoom in regardless of what I did to the settings. The exported file looked horrible. More so than the .m2ts/.ts to turbo.264 process that I was using before. I've opened a ticket with Elgato to see if this is a known problem since I couldn't find anything in the Knowledge Base. The odd problem is that if I took the native h.264 dump from EyeTV and used the turbo.264 encoding app seperately, the aspect ratio and overscan issue did not occur.

It's like a never ending struggle ...

No comments:

Post a Comment