Elgato EyeTV recording to DVD, How ??

[Rolacoy]

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro and the Elgato EyeTV device. I recorded a program, edited out the commercials and burned it to a DVD. It worked great. I recorded another program, I showed my wife how easy it was to edit out the commercials and told her it was easy to burn it to DVD. I opened Toast 7.1.2 and dropped the file that I had recorded into the Toast Video window. A dialog window pops up and tells me that it is "an unsupported format and cannot be imported".

What did I do wrong, it worked great the first time. However, I thought that there was a button or something in EyeTV that went directly to Toast, but I cannot remember.

Can someone help me here?

[dops7107]

It wasn't from FilmFour, was it? Some channels encode their video in a non-Toast compatible format, or at least it needs to be re-encoded (slow...) before burning.

Can you give more info?

[Rolacoy]

I think that the first program that I recorded was off the sifi channel. The one that I just recorded was "Simply Quilts" off HGTV.

[dops7107]

Try exporting it from EyeTV in a different format. I think DV format isn't too slow an export, but it does take a lot of hard drive space. Then import that into Toast. In fact, better still, make short (30 second) clips from the programme that's giving you grief, and export them as different file types - see which ones work. This was the work-around i came up with for Film4. I think many of the newer freeview channels have used this different encoding method to save bandwidth.

[Rolacoy]

All of the export features were "greyed" out, But I was able to select the whole program as a clip and had about 20 export options. I am exporting it for iMovie, but the one hour program is 4.3 GB. I hope it will be compressed when it is burned to DVD.

All this said and it may work, this is not how I did the first one.

[dops7107]

4.3 GB should fit, but Toast will convert it back to MPEG-2 at whatever bit-rate is necessary to fit on a DVD. So the downside of this method is that the MPEG stream from Toast is decompressed for iMovie, and then recompressed back to MPEG (DVD format). Hardly elegant. Let us know what happens.

[Rolacoy]

My thought was that I could iMovie and then iDVD to put several on the same DVD with buttons to select which my wife wanted to watch. I thought a DVD would hold about two hours, but maybe only one will fit on a DVD. Anyway at this point I am just expermenting.

[dops7107]

Depends on the quality you're after. I don't know much about iDVD. But in Toast, it will compress your files to fit - though you don't want to go too far.

[Rolacoy]

Oh, so Toast will compress that content to fit, but the compression reduces the quality? With in reason I would guess.