Mostly Harmless

Waffle waffle ReplayTV waffle waffle waffle TiVo waffle waffle waffle waffle ADVC-100 waffle waffle eyeTV waffle waffle waffle Formac Studio dv/tv waffle.

I’d go for a ReplayTV if it weren’t, apparently, a steaming pile of crap with bad tech support. (PVR Compare) What I like about it, feature-wise, is the built-in ethernet, ability to record from the line-in, and easy as pie downloading of the MPEG files from the machine. Now if it would only NOT crash every two or three days… How freakin hard is it to keep a glorified digital VCR from crashing all the time?

In the TiVo corner we have a stable system with good tech support and better TV schedules. You can get the streams off of the Series 1 models but the Series 2 boxes will be making it more difficult by encrypting everything. Only good for time shifty-ness then, not capturing and burning to SVCD ’til someone cracks it.

The Formac Studio is a video converter/PVR; it records a DV stream from the RCA inputs or its own TV tuner to a 48 gig drive. I think DV uses 10-11 gigs per hour so it only holds 4 hours or so of video, but it’s essentially broadcast quality. The nice thing is that it is cake to edit but not so easy to get into MPEG-2 for an SVCD. I think ffmpeg might do it but I haven’t tested that yet. If I had a DVD burner (that iDVD liked) I could very easily and cheaply make DVDs — but since I DON’T have one of those I’m screwed. If you have a DVD burner and iDVD you spend $50 total. If you want to just buy an MPEG-2 encoder it costs $300-$500. If ffmpeg works I still have to deal with long encoding times and use lots and lots of disk space… but it’s free!

The ADVC-100 is another DV converter but with no tuner or drive. Its big thing is AV sync which guarantees the audio doesn’t drift out of sync when doing long captures. (I don’t know if the Formac Studio has sync problems… it’d be nice if they mentioned that on their site.) The ADVC would be a nice addition to a TiVo to archive the video off to CD.

The eyeTV is the low man on the totem pole. It’s a converter/PVR with a hardware MPEG-1 encoder running over USB. The low-quality mode makes a VCD compliant MPEG-1 file that can easily be burned to, you guessed it, a VCD. The latest software release allows basic editing to remove commercials so it’s the easiest path to VCD. The high-quality mode will let you make better looking 35 minute VCDs — which is largely worthless for one hour shows which are 41-43 minutes after you take out the commercials, but would be pretty decent for doing a 1/2 hour show per disc. CDs are cheap anyway. MPEG-1 is kinda frumpy though.

What would be cool is a nice (cheap) hardware MPEG-2 encoder and some editing software that would deal with the files. The Mac world is all about DV… put a DV camcorder and a Mac in the same room and the video will leap from the camcorder to the Mac as if by magic, potentially without human intervention. Then of course you’ll be burning a DVD so phooey on you if you want to make an SVCD.

As far as I can tell it’s the MPEG-2 encoder licensing fees that are doing me in. His Steveness wants me to buy a Superdrive (DVD burner) so they can pay the nice folks in MPEG land their kickback. Interestingly, the PC software for this type of thing is about $40, what’s up with that?

So, anyway, I haven’t caved in yet and purchased anything. I haven’t decided if I want video capture or a PVR or something that does both. Price ranges are $200-$600 plus any extra drive space I may feel a sudden need to acquire.

On the other hand, decent VCRs are $80. I could buy three more VCRs and record 4 channels simultaneously for $240. It would be a huge pain in the ass and still nowhere near digital. I suppose I could always buy a $900 DV VCR, that’d get me much less functionality than the $400 Formac Studio… erm, no thanks.

I’m thinking a TiVo might be the thing, most of the stuff I’d want to encode gets uploaded to Usenet anyway and my main beef with the VCR lately is all the tape swapping between my time-shifting tapes and the Buffy/Angel/etc. tapes.