capture from tv

[Charles Martin]

> From: Don Hinkle <donhinkle at att.net>
>
> 	I'm considering buying EyeTV and just looking for extra ways to 
> justify
> my decision to spend money at this time!
> 	Thanks for your detailed reply. I didn't realize that EyeTV lacks
> quality? I thought there were different qualities of recording
> available? Are you talking top quality or average, or wot?

I think you may have misunderstood Anders. He wasn't saying that 
EyeTV's picture isn't of good quality, only that direct capture via DV 
Stream (Firewire) from a passthrough device such as a MiniDV camera or 
a D/A converter like the Hollywood Dazzle DV Bridge is of better 
quality.

EyeTV captures, compresses and stores video in a format called MPEG-1. 
It is generally considered to be about the quality of VHS tape. EyeTV 
has two different capture "options" -- Good and Better -- which are 
probably roughly comparable to the difference between taping something 
at 6-hour VHS speed and 2-hour VHS speed.

Unfortunately, EyeTV is not capable of doing any better than that due 
to it's USB and compression limitations.

Capturing things directly from Firewire, however, provides for much 
higher quality -- but at a cost. EyeTV needs only 650MB of hard drive 
space to save an hour's worth of video -- a MiniDV camera importing 
into something like iMovie at full DV Stream quality needs over 20GB of 
space for an hour of video!

There is a happy medium, MPEG-2. You can get about 45 minutes of DVD 
quality video in 650MB of hard drive space with this format, but to the 
best of my knowledge there's no easy way to get video into this format 
on the Mac ("easy" being defined as "set it and forget it" like EyeTV 
or TiVo do). Maybe someday El Gato will bring out EyeTV 2 which works 
with Firewire and uses MPEG2 compression!

> 	And, yes, I was thinking of digitizing capturing commercial videos.
> Since they go to the television by same connection that carries cable,
> why wouldn't the EyeTV capture directly? But maybe I don't understand
> how EyeTV works.

No, you've got it right. Anders was just pointing out the EyeTV does 
not capture video at broadcast quality.

_Chas_

"Executives in the PC business use the word "sexy", in such a way that 
I'm always surprised to discover that their children aren't adopted. 
The Mac interface is not "sexy", and it would be grotesque to want it 
to be. It is, in fact, playful, often well over the line into 
frivolity. The bouncing icons (and the puffs of smoke and the 
pipe-organ speech synthesizer and the way dialogs tidily resize and the 
drop-shadows on the windows and the jellybean buttons and the eject key 
on the keyboard) are not individually rationalizable on utilitarian 
grounds, and they do not pretend they mean to be. They are there to, in 
aggregate, change the nature of your relationship with the device. They 
are joyful, and they hope their joy is infectious." -- Glenn McDonald