Wasn’t the opening ceremony pretty?
Since getting a dual TV Tuner card I cannot believe how difficult it has been to find the right TV Tuner software.
My criteria centered around things like:
- DVB-T (the rest-of-the-world uses this digital TV broadcast format. Not ATSC – the USA format)
- can cope with moving window from one monitor to another. I tend to focus always on one monitor and background tasks belong on the other; sometimes I want to watch TV, other times just keep an eye on it.
- can resize the window from one inch to full screen – again focus or background
- can record (a) in the background (b) consuming less than 50% CPU (c) in a non-proprietary codec
- can schedule a recording
- doesn’t take forever to change channels
- Mediaportal (0.2.3.0)
- Good. Not twin tuner capable. Can’t switch between Full Screen and window
- Nero Vision
- Just a TV Ripper/Capture; not for watching with
- Blaze DTV (3.5)
- Very good! But cannot switch monitors.
- Sesam TV Center
- Might be good but first impressions were so cheap and cheesy I elected cut my losses and not to waste time on it
- Beyond TV
- Great! Excepting doesn’t do DVB-T, has no plans to, and that’s just too bad
- Digital TV
- Didn’t recognise the hardware
- DNTV Live
- Didn’t recognise the hardware
And also a few others I must have successfully managed to uninstall. Most really had just one thing going for them; but all of them gave me something critical to complain about.
PowerCinema 5 / PowerDirector 7
I settled on MediaPortal for a while. But then came along PowerCinema 5 which is similar but can actually handle both tuners – which means I can record on one and watch the other, or watch two channels at once (Picture In Picture), and it can handle all the other requirements. Well sort of. I thought it was really good, and it is – for watching. Sucks for capture and edit.
The Olympics is here and I’m a bit of a fan, but, like most of us, can’t stand all the fluff and commercials. So I’m recording all day and watching it the next picking out the bits of interest. Three problems have arisen;
- the recordings are consuming 8GB/hour which with 12-18 hours of broadcasting is getting quite difficult to manage
- The recordings use a proprietary audio format (AC3) when using the scheduler
- It refuses to write the files anyplace but the C: drive
There is an option in PowerCinema to decide the quality of the recordings (Good/Better/Best) and for no obvious reason mine is locked on “Best”; which is great but I’d rather lower the quality than proceed with these huge files. So, no plan just straight thinking, was to schedule something on linux to downcode them to something more manageable. No dice. Wasted several hours bashing my head against a wall of “unknown codec” type issues. The reports said it was AC3 sound but whenever I forced it it just wouldn’t work. To top it off I couldn’t edit the files with anything other than Cyberlink PowerDirector. A perfectly useful program excepting that the export encodings turn out absolutely horrid large pixelated blurred messes, no matter how much I fiddle with the options, and worse still, the exports happen at snail-race speed and 90% CPU. So 2 hours viewing time requires 1 hour to export (despite the latest and greatest intel dual-core CPU) for a very nicely edited thank you, but -unwatchable- mess.
Anyway, to cut a long story shorter I discovered that, when timeshifting only, Cyberlink use their own proprietary format, although when NOT timeshifting it doesn’t. WTF?! Fine. I just won’t timeshift. Nope. Welcome to computers. If I don’t timeshift it won’t background. The whole point is not to have to watch the broadcast 24/7. So I’m now waaay back to square one.
Surely one of all these tuners will record to a lighter encoding? Well most of them aren’t working now (trials over) so I’m back to mediaportal (GPL). It dumps to “dvr-ms” which isn’t really helping.
Today I’m trying “Nero Vision” which is producing a “.mpg” in a variety of sizes (720i) and at vastly more manageable weight but, presumably because it is transcoding, runs one core at 100% (so 50% machine utilization). Now if I can just find something to chop these things up which doesn’t take forever to export, which should be easy right because I’m not asking it to re-encode, just slice, dice, and dump… yeah, easy, right? We’ll see. The editing software is primitive. Windows movie maker crashes when trying to read the captures. Linux apps don’t read them. The exports run at the same snail pace (1:1) even when I just want to chop the excess off the ends and write to the same format. I haven’t even bothered with PowerDirector because I expect it will generate rubbish and take forever to do it…. still hard to get good help these days.
I’m starting to form the opinion that software development teams are actually only as good as the least talented member of the team: the talent does not counterbalance the no talent – but forms a chain with strong and weak links. I am the weakest link. Good-bye.
Just as I was disparaging and, even starting to research how to do it for myself, I’ve found a very worthy capture solution…
DVD Web Scheduler Pro
Good because it does one thing, and does it well. That being – to capture video from the TV tuner. “Well” because it does it without hogging the CPU, and even elevates its priority all by itself to cut down on stuttering video because you happened to check your email whilst it was recording, for example.
I can watch the result in any media player, windows media player, realplayer, whatever. No special ‘tv viewing’ software required.
I’ve hooked it in to an epg data and am very impressed that I can simply click on things on the TV guide and say “record” and i’m done. No big company marketing moron huff and puff. Just gets on with the job and does it well. No annoying quirks like proprietary codecs, or the oversight to save anywhere but the C: drive, for example. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Well done guys (or guy).
So good I even paid for a copy!