The Reality of QAM HDTV Recording
I recently procured a FusionHDTV 5 Lite. And last night recorded my very first episode of the new seas0n of Lost!
Here’s the hardware setup
• Pentium 4 1.2GHz
• 1 GB RAM
• 80GB dedicated 7200RPM ATA hard drive
• FusionHDTV 5 Lite!
Software Used
• FusionHDTV recording software and scheduler
• Womble MPEG VCR – for commercial cutting
• FFMPEG (compiled for windows) for conversion to DVD (or whatever you want!)
The video source was a Comcast (seattle) cable feed. This FusionHDTV card can decode clear QAM signal on the cable, AND from what I am told, it is one of the few cards that can do this.
The Result
It worked beautifully!!!
• 8GB of MPEG data from the 1 hour show
• I then chopped the commercials out with MPEG VCR, 10 mins and at 5GB now
• Then I converted the file to a NTSC-DVD format with Ffmpeg, 3.5 hours and 1.2GB !!! The re-encoding time will drop if you throw a burlier processor at it… or from what i am reading now the FusionHDTV 5 GOLD card has a MPEG 2 ENCODER on it and the software that is included with it can re-encode the file, thus eliminated the need for ffmpeg… I have NOT confirmed this, and I am unsure of the ease of use to get it into an acceptable DVD format.
command line used for ffmpeg conversion – HDTV transport stream (TP) to NTSC-DVD program stream (PS)
ffmpeg.exe -i lost.tp -target ntsc-dvd lost.mpg
2 Responses to “The Reality of QAM HDTV Recording”
Comment from Tony
Time September 26, 2005 at 9:59 am
after fuddeling with ffmpeg for a few hours. i finally resolved a command line that would get it into the right format
unfortunatly, the video quality suffered tremendously… the conversion caused many many drop outs. and it looks like crap ever few mins or so… looks kinda like when your HDTV signal (from over the air) is weak… it just kinda phases out for a second…
so i switched to plan B … TMPGEnc !!! and I must say, the file is bigger. i couldnt get ac3 to work… I also could not get the .TP file to load up as source…. so I had to fire up an AVI frameserver… SO … I used a frameserver, and TMPGEnc to convert the video, and ffmpeg to extract a ‘copy’ of the ac3 from the original (which is already in a good DVD readable format) …. I then used TMPGEnc to do a ‘simple-multiplex’ … now i can drop the file into DVDAuthor
what a pain! …. i will continue my efforts with ffmpeg, i just wanted to get at least one useable solution for now.
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Comment from Tony
Time September 25, 2005 at 2:52 pm
Ok so the ffmpeg conversion wasnt the best for DVD… the problem was that the show was getting cut off on the sides. I think i need to have the show resized smaller then add 30px of padding to either side.
I will post the command line options that work the best when i get them ironed out.