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Are You Waiting For A Stoakley-Seaburg and 2007 Graphics Cards 8-Core Mac Pro

  • No. I bought the FrankenMac

    Votes: 30 7.1%
  • Yes I Will Wait 'Til Apple Gets It Right

    Votes: 246 58.0%
  • Not sure. Waiting for benchmarks on the 4.4.07 model.

    Votes: 27 6.4%
  • I'll stick with 4 cores, thank you very much.

    Votes: 121 28.5%

  • Total voters
    424
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Analog recordings defeat the purpose and will come out way inferior to native HD recordings from the ATSC tuner.
Obviously

Only alternative that can work is QAM Digital Channels on a cable system. But most cable systems are not doing unscrambled QAM yet.
I expected this much.

But I will buy the HDHomeRun networked tuners next.
That's a nice piece of hardware if I had the Macs and money for it. ;)
 
I Am An Off Air Nazi

I just read that no eyetv products can accept digital signals from satelite..so..

what do you recommend if anything to get digital signals of of satelite? or we will have to wait till eyetv makes something?

I may end up using the s-video and composite, bc thats all I can use with what I know of and plan on getting/having. when I am able I will use digital signals. I am used to watching tv, etc using analog so I dont think the quality will kill me.
Yes it will. Analog TV is CRAP. I will never watch analog TV again for the rest of my life.

I recommend you get a TERK TV5 antennae and hook it up to the HDHomeRun and start recording off air instead of satellite and cable crap.
 
Yes it will. Analog TV is CRAP. I will never watch analog TV again for the rest of my life.

I recommend you get a TERK TV5 antennae and hook it up to the HDHomeRun and start recording off air instead of satellite and cable crap.

well..thing is..i have ALWAYS watched analog tv from satellite and used dvd players with the composite cables. i dont think it will kill me to record what i can off of analog satellite in sdtv till theres a different way for me to do it.

edit: thats a lie..i used to watch tv using our analog antenae. where you got used to not focusing on the "fuzz" :)

and as far as the whole tv antennae. well i currently live jsut south of Colome, SD. we live out in the country where your more likely to see a cow than a person and antennae are either HUGE or have crappy signal, or both. :D

trust me, i would love too have digital hdtv at my hands but i dont.
 
ATSC Is Not A Forgiving Signal - Either You Have It All Or Not At All

As far as the whole tv antennae. well i currently live jsut south of Colome, SD. we live out in the country where your more likely to see a cow than a person and antennae are either HUGE or have crappy signal, or both. :D

trust me, i would love too have digital hdtv at my hands but i dont.
Digital is not partial, better or best - there is only one kind of digital off air - excellent or not at all. Have you researched how far your local affiliate signals reach? If they reach you they are perfect. Distance is not the factor as much as line of sight.
 
Digital is not partial, better or best - there is only one kind of digital off air - excellent or not at all. Have you researched how far your local affiliate signals reach? If they reach you they are perfect. Distance is not the factor as much as line of sight.

ya, i was talking about our analog signal using an antenna. we havent had an antenna for years. As far as digital, the closest station is slightly over 2 driving hours away. I looked into it on the internet and they said we are in a "red" area I believe it was. I cant remeber what exactly it said but i know it said it would require a large antanna. Currently Since I live with my parents, I'm 17. I am not at liberty of putting a large antanna on our house.
 
Thanks Multimedia

I know it's getting a little off topic but I appreciate the conversation with Multimedia regarding his workflow. I'm also using EyeTV with my MacBook (2GHz C2D, 3GB RAM). I have (3) EyeTV Hybrids hooked up to my MacBook receiving OTA signal from my garage-mounted antenna. I love being able to edit out my commercials but I currently have 2 issues:

1) Obviously, encoding for my AppleTVs is quite time intensive on my MacBook. Takes about 3 hours to encode a 1-hour show (after editing out commercials). This is why I'm excited about upgrading to a new 8-core MP.

2) Multiple devices support is an undocumented feature in EyeTV and it's obviously not ready for prime-time at least in my setup since I can sometimes records 3 shows at once but sometimes I just try to record 2 shows and they both fail. I've been trying to work this with Elgato support but since it's not officially supported it's tough. A couple of things I'm considering that might fix the problem are getting a separate PCIe USB 2.0 card for my new MP to eliminate any potential USB bandwidth issues since I only have 1 USB 2.0 channel on my MacBook. I was also considering getting a HDHomeRun unit with dual tuners but then not sure what to do to add a 3rd tuner. I'm also a little concerned about saturating my home network (Gigabit/802.11N) since in the evening I'll be recording shows from the HDHomeRun and trying to stream shows to my 2 AppleTVs at the same time.

I really do like this setup though I have to say it takes some work and time which has me thinking sometimes about just getting a couple of TiVo HD units when they add TiVoToGo support so I can archive recordings on my Mac/NAS. I have to say also that it's nice to reduce file sizes by going to H.264 but I have noticed some quality loss versus the raw MPEG-2 format that comes in OTA

Thanks,
David
 
I'm curious what jobs require pulling OTA HD and archiving them to disk. All I can come up with is someone who compulsively archives television shows for recreation.

Is there a line of work that demands that sort of activity or are you guys just doing this as a hobby?
 
I'm curious what jobs require pulling OTA HD and archiving them to disk. All I can come up with is someone who compulsively archives television shows for recreation.

Is there a line of work that demands that sort of activity or are you guys just doing this as a hobby?

I'm not archiving them to disk for the most part. This is just how I like to watch TV, on my schedule, without commercials. In order to do this either you get a commercial DVR like TiVo (which would be hard if not impossible currently to remove commercials) or you have a setup like I have described where I use EyeTV to record/edit my shows, then encode them for viewing via my AppleTV.
 
Haven't poked around enough to see this anywhere, but, just came across it on "looprumors.com" ....

It appears that rumors of an October 26th Leopard launch may have been confirmed this weekend with an official notice that went out to Apple employees.

The notice to Apple retail store employees calls for "All hands on deck until midnight, Friday, October 26th."
 
I'm curious what jobs require pulling OTA HD and archiving them to disk. All I can come up with is someone who compulsively archives television shows for recreation.

Is there a line of work that demands that sort of activity or are you guys just doing this as a hobby?
It's a hobby. :D
 
How To Keep Occupied Doing Nothing But What Requires A Lot Of Power Computing

I'm curious what jobs require pulling OTA HD and archiving them to disk. All I can come up with is someone who compulsively archives television shows for recreation.

Is there a line of work that demands that sort of activity or are you guys just doing this as a hobby?
I'm not doing it as a hobby. I'm doing it compulsively as in mental illness. :p My life has little meaning and this is all I can come up with to pretend I need to do something that requires a lot of computing power.
It's a hobby. :D
Not for me. In my case it is a serious mental illness that is all I have left that is meaningful between my death and my past. :eek: nk :(

I can see the fruits of my labor - even if they are useless. :(

I find it fascinating to watch Toast and Handbrake duke it out over 4 cores they both want all of. That's why getting the 8 core will be even so much more fun. Then it will be fascinating to me to watch how much of all 8 cores each of them will want to consume. :)
 
I'm not archiving them to disk for the most part. This is just how I like to watch TV, on my schedule, without commercials. In order to do this either you get a commercial DVR like TiVo (which would be hard if not impossible currently to remove commercials) or you have a setup like I have described where I use EyeTV to record/edit my shows, then encode them for viewing via my AppleTV.

Doesn't it sort of ruin the show for you as you're exposed the content as a consequence of editing out the commercials before you're really "watching" it? Seems like a lot of effort for what's effectively just disposable entertainment.

At least for the shows I like I really only just watch them once, so fast-forwarding through the commercials (which requires zero effort beforehand) is a perfectly adequate solution.

Perhaps if I had a long-term interest in television shows and anticipated watching them more than once I'd see more benefit from the obviously complex and time-consuming process you guys are all suffering through. :)
 
I've had tuners in my last 3 PC's (over 10 years ) and when I move completely to Mac, I'm getting a little concerned as to what my replacement tuner will be. I see where the EyeTV's are mentioned here quite a bit but was wondering if ATI has anything that will work? I can't find much on their site (AMD, now, I guess) for the Mac platform. Also, I'm curious about recording in a compressed format like .mp2. Everything I've recorded OTA is usually captured to .avi and then converted to whatever I was going to use. However, I thought that editing in .mp2 was considered a little sketchy, no?
dave
 
Doesn't it sort of ruin the show for you as you're exposed the content as a consequence of editing out the commercials before you're really "watching" it? Seems like a lot of effort for what's effectively just disposable entertainment.

You'd be surprised that once you get used to editing commercials I can pretty much edit a 1-hour show in less than 5 minutes and really not see what happened in the show. It's true though that it is a lot of work for a disposable show which is why I'm torn about whether to just go back to TiVo and FF through the commercials, especially considering TiVo has been more reliable and better quality for me.

At least for the shows I like I really only just watch them once, so fast-forwarding through the commercials (which requires zero effort beforehand) is a perfectly adequate solution.

Again, you may be right.

Perhaps if I had a long-term interest in television shows and anticipated watching them more than once I'd see more benefit from the obviously complex and time-consuming process you guys are all suffering through. :)

Well, it's partly a hobby and an excuse to own a heavy-duty MP system. :) If I decide to go back to TiVo, I guess I have to stay with my MacBook :(.

David
 
EyeTV Is The Only Game In Town - Planet Earth

I've had tuners in my last 3 PC's (over 10 years ) and when I move completely to Mac, I'm getting a little concerned as to what my replacement tuner will be. I see where the EyeTV's are mentioned here quite a bit but was wondering if ATI has anything that will work? I can't find much on their site (AMD, now, I guess) for the Mac platform.

Also, I'm curious about recording in a compressed format like .mp2. Everything I've recorded OTA is usually captured to .avi and then converted to whatever I was going to use. However, I thought that editing in .mp2 was considered a little sketchy, no?
No. Editing in EyeTV is like Buttah. Super easy to remove the commercials. The native recordings are MPEG1 and we make them MPEG2 with Toast. They are native recordings - i.e. what is coming in from the broadcaster not an avi conversion on the fly. Nothing is compressed at the computer.

You are thinking about analog tv which is dead. This is all about digital broadcasts not analog. You still watch analog tv? Man you don't know what you're missing.

ATI is out of the Mac tuner biz. EyeTV is the only digital solution.
 
When you are shelling out for a Mac Pro, and the kind of money required to buy RAM for it, I am surprised to hear that you find the EyeTV expensive.
 
You are thinking about analog tv which is dead. This is all about digital broadcasts not analog. You still watch analog tv? Man you don't know what you're missing. ATI is out of the Mac tuner biz. EyeTV is the only digital solution.

Odd that you should mention this. I just "upgraded" my analog cable service to digital cable primarily because my internet/cable TV package price would drop by close to $30 per month by making the change. Odd that I wouldn't have picked up on this earlier, but I watch VERY little TV anyway. So, I made the change and now have to deal with having to have a digital cable box. And, it was all it expected it would be: picture breakups into mosaic color blocks, frozen images, audio dropouts, and some channels which don't look very good due to shifting bitstream allocations around to the premium channels at the expense of less desirable channels. I also picked up several channels that I never knew about so I guess it was a net gain (no pun intended!).
dave
 
...The native recordings are MPEG1 and we make them MPEG2 with Toast...

I thought that the native recordings from the broadcasters were MPEG2? This is from the Elgato site:

Two-in-One TV for your Mac
EyeTV Hybrid does the work of two EyeTV hardware products for the price of one. It delivers free over-the-air digital TV to your Mac in stunning 720p or 1080i HDTV (MPEG-2) and other digital television standards, as well as conventional analog TV via standard cable or antenna

Can you explain what you are doing with Toast?
 
Digital Cable Is A Rip Off

Odd that you should mention this. I just "upgraded" my analog cable service to digital cable primarily because my internet/cable TV package price would drop by close to $30 per month by making the change. Odd that I wouldn't have picked up on this earlier, but I watch VERY little TV anyway. So, I made the change and now have to deal with having to have a digital cable box. And, it was all it expected it would be: picture breakups into mosaic color blocks, frozen images, audio dropouts, and some channels which don't look very good due to shifting bitstream allocations around to the premium channels at the expense of less desirable channels. I also picked up several channels that I never knew about so I guess it was a net gain (no pun intended!).
That's digital CABLE. This has nothing to do with digital CABLE either. They are rip off artists. This is pure unadulterated pristine perfect digital BROADCASTING.

The fact that you didn't buy a digital HDTV for $1500 to $2,000 or more also indicates you are not a serious viewer who really cares about the quality of what you watch.
 
That's digital CABLE. This has nothing to do with digital CABLE either. They are rip off artists. This is pure unadulterated pristine perfect digital BROADCASTING.

Ahh, okay. I'm with you now. Sorry, didn't make the connection. Thanks for the clarification. But are you talking about ONLY OTA programming?

The fact that you didn't buy a digital HDTV for $1500 to $2,000 or more also indicates you are not a serious viewer who really cares about the quality of what you watch.

Yikes, I'm not sure how you made THAT leap, MM. Given your measured responses on this thread, I'm a little surprised at your ability to know what I watch. My $3200 XBR Sony might disagree with you, too! ;)

Let's just say that the current state of network programming on broadcast (local affiliate) TV has really put me off watching much "TV". However, as a film buff (who suffered through the Betamax v. VHS battles AND who owns a close to a thousand laserdisks and DVD's), you might say that I have more than a passing interest in picture quality. So, "....not a serious viewer who really cares about the quality of what you watch" might be a tad harsh, no? ;)

dave
 
Well, it's partly a hobby and an excuse to own a heavy-duty MP system. :) If I decide to go back to TiVo, I guess I have to stay with my MacBook :(.

No argument from me at all -- we've all got our things. More power to you, I say. I've got racing wheels and tires for my car just so I can drive in circles around a parking lot every few months. I own a copy of Final Cut Pro to fiddle with crappy home movies I take. If you're doing it right there's no sense to hobbies.
 
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