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eyetv - problem exporting HD

twoodcc

twoodcc

macrumors P6
Original poster
Feb 3, 2005
15,307
26
Right side of wrong
ok, so i have the eyetv hybrid, and a powered HDTV antenna. they both work great, and i see a great picture on my computer. but, after recording something, i'm having trouble exporting.*

is seems no matter what i do, it takes forever to export anything. i have an intel imac 17" 1.83 ghz and 1.5 GB of ram

when i try to export in the eyetv software, it never finishes exporting. after about 12 hours, i check in activity monitor, and it's doing nothing. i've tried exporting to toast, and then use toast to make a disk image, then use handbrake to convert to mpeg-4, but it seems the quality isn't very good.*

any ideas on how to keep it good quality?

thanks in advance
 
Have you tried sending it to Imovie? I seem to remember that it was a bit quiker for me that way. Not done it for a while though.
 
I can't tell you how to solve your problem (sorry), but what I can tell you is that even regular NTSC can take a long time to export, depending on your target format. I'm working on editing some stuff I recorded in hi-res MPEG2, and when I export it to DV it takes about 1.5x real time to export, so about 3 hours to export 2 hours of video on my 1.42GHz G4 Mini. I suspect that HD is substantially more processor intensive. Can't explain why your computer shows little activity after running for a while. Have you looked at Activity Monitor earlier in the process, and does it show significantly more activity?
 
sandman42 said:
Have you looked at Activity Monitor earlier in the process, and does it show significantly more activity?
Click to expand...

see that's the thing. after waiting like 12 hours, i check activity monitor and it's not doing anything. nothing.
 
I don't know how to fix that problem, but there is a workaround. Go to your EyeTV Recordings folder, right-click on the .eyetv file of your recording and click Show Package Contents. The raw transport stream file is in there, with an .mpg extension. You can then open that up in MPEG Streamclip or ffmpegX or whatever to transcode. ffmpegX is probably faster and higher quality than the EyeTV software anyway.

MPEG Streamclip will let you trim the recording, too, and it will do a better job than EyeTV software.
 
Super Macho Man said:
I don't know how to fix that problem, but there is a workaround. Go to your EyeTV Recordings folder, right-click on the .eyetv file of your recording and click Show Package Contents. The raw transport stream file is in there, with an .mpg extension. You can then open that up in MPEG Streamclip or ffmpegX or whatever to transcode. ffmpegX is probably faster and higher quality than the EyeTV software anyway.

MPEG Streamclip will let you trim the recording, too, and it will do a better job than EyeTV software.
Click to expand...

thanks, i've tried that before with one that i trimmed in eyetv, and it didn't work right. the sound didn't match the video after using MPEG Streamclip to convert it.

i guess i have to trim with MPEG Streamclip or ffmpegX
 
I don't want to hijack your thread, but since you guys seem to have some good experience with this stuff maybe you can help me out. I'm having an EyeTV export problem of my own:

I recorded a program with EyeTV set to high quality MPEG-2 (90 min DVD, 2.7Gb/Hr) that I want to export to iMovie/iDVD to make a DVD. The program is wide screen, but it was broadcast in letterbox 4:3. I tried exporting it from EyeTV as Widescreen DV (which successfully crops out the letterbox bars) but it comes out with really bad horizontal lines that go in and out of phase a few times a second. It's as though there's a frame rate problem, perhaps, and every few frames there's an interpolation between adjacent frames, interlacing them very coarsely.

See the attachments.

Any idea how to prevent this? I want to create a widescreen DVD, and it seems like I should be able to do that, but I'll make it letterboxed if I have to.

Thanks!
 

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sandman42 said:
I don't want to hijack your thread, but since you guys seem to have some good experience with this stuff maybe you can help me out. I'm having an EyeTV export problem of my own:

I recorded a program with EyeTV set to high quality MPEG-2 (90 min DVD, 2.7Gb/Hr) that I want to export to iMovie/iDVD to make a DVD. The program is wide screen, but it was broadcast in letterbox 4:3. I tried exporting it from EyeTV as Widescreen DV (which successfully crops out the letterbox bars) but it comes out with really bad horizontal lines that go in and out of phase a few times a second. It's as though there's a frame rate problem, perhaps, and every few frames there's an interpolation between adjacent frames, interlacing them very coarsely.

See the attachments.

Any idea how to prevent this? I want to create a widescreen DVD, and it seems like I should be able to do that, but I'll make it letterboxed if I have to.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

there is a setting to prevent that. i forgot what it was called though. i'm not sure if you have the setting in eyetv software of not, but i know i've seen it somewhere. i'll try to figure out what it is, and maybe someone else will also help
 
twoodcc said:
there is a setting to prevent that. i forgot what it was called though. i'm not sure if you have the setting in eyetv software of not, but i know i've seen it somewhere. i'll try to figure out what it is, and maybe someone else will also help
Click to expand...

actually it's called "deinterlace". that is supposed to solve the horizontal lines. you have to have a program that has this setting to solve it.
 
twoodcc said:
actually it's called "deinterlace". that is supposed to solve the horizontal lines. you have to have a program that has this setting to solve it.
Click to expand...

Hmmm, I've discovered that it's something the export function of EyeTV is doing -- when I take the DV file EyeTV creates and play it anything (iMovie, QT, etc), it looks like that. So for some reason EyeTV is creating the fouled up video when I export it. I can't find a setting in EyeTV that prevents it. I've tried setting the scan mode to Progressive and Interlaced, and they both do it.
 
sandman42 said:
Hmmm, I've discovered that it's something the export function of EyeTV is doing -- when I take the DV file EyeTV creates and play it anything (iMovie, QT, etc), it looks like that. So for some reason EyeTV is creating the fouled up video when I export it. I can't find a setting in EyeTV that prevents it. I've tried setting the scan mode to Progressive and Interlaced, and they both do it.
Click to expand...
I think the Progressive Scan setting in EyeTV only affects displaying, not exporting. But I don't know why exporting to DV would introduce that interlacing problem. Does it happen only with the DV, or does it continue to happen even after it's converted to MPEG-2 and burned onto a DVD?

Maybe try exporting to DV using MPEG Streamclip or ffmpegX instead.

Another thing is that converting from HDTV MPEG-2 -> DV -> DVD MPEG-2 is going to cause quality loss. If you aren't doing anything in iMovie apart from trimming, and don't need the pretty menus, you might want to try to get rid of the DV conversion step. If you have the money to shell out for Toast, it's worth it.
 
EyeTV 500 I Have Been Successful

The way I did it was to export to mpeg program stream then convert that to something smaller, like quicktime or mpeg streamclip. It is hard sometimes it helps to check the stream info and figure out whether the stream is progressive or interlaced, so the program you use to convert the mpeg program stream can deinterlace or make a progressive movie. It definitely is not a fast process but this is the fastest I've figured out so far.
 
sandman42 said:
I don't want to hijack your thread, but since you guys seem to have some good experience with this stuff maybe you can help me out. I'm having an EyeTV export problem of my own:

I recorded a program with EyeTV set to high quality MPEG-2 (90 min DVD, 2.7Gb/Hr) that I want to export to iMovie/iDVD to make a DVD. The program is wide screen, but it was broadcast in letterbox 4:3. I tried exporting it from EyeTV as Widescreen DV (which successfully crops out the letterbox bars) but it comes out with really bad horizontal lines that go in and out of phase a few times a second. It's as though there's a frame rate problem, perhaps, and every few frames there's an interpolation between adjacent frames, interlacing them very coarsely.

See the attachments.

Any idea how to prevent this? I want to create a widescreen DVD, and it seems like I should be able to do that, but I'll make it letterboxed if I have to.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I can't answer the main question, sorry, but I can tell you that those lines you're seeing are the fields.
If the full hight of the picture was (for example) 100 lines, and the area within the letter box was 70 lines. By blowing the image up you're stretching those 70 lines across where there should be 100. Deinterlacing will help, but you're going to get a soft picture.
 
Super Macho Man said:
I think the Progressive Scan setting in EyeTV only affects displaying, not exporting...
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be so sure.
I had previous issues with exporting some footage, and a part of it showing big fat black lines. Turned out that I had to set the aspect ratio in the View menu to 4:3-or-whatever, instead of automatic, because this would mess-up with the exported file.
Maybe try all the options in EyeTV Preferences / Display / Deinterlace...

If you can't find any answer here, and haven't tried the support yet, I'd advise you to send an email to elgato. They are very friendly and helpful, they helped me out a couple of times. I actually wish all Helpdesk were that nice and dedicated... :rolleyes:
 
I found a solution (to my exporting problem, at least). My original goal was to take my recorded 4:3 video, which was actually letter-boxed widescreen content (Sci-Fi's BSG), and crop it back down to 16:9. I could export from EyeTV as 16:9 DV, which worked but I got the badly interlaced result. I've found that if I export as HDV 720p 16:9, I get a .mov file that looks good, and it's not a much larger file.

Now I'm having a problem where the exported file has a glitch. I edited the video in EyeTV, and if I playback in EyeTV it's fine, but when I export the video (so far in every output format I've tried), the resultant file gets messed up when it crosses one of my edit markers. The exported file has a static image (with no audio) for several minutes, then resumes the program, with all the content during the problem interval missing.
 
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