Grab EyeTV videos without exporting

Dec 28, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: barryjaylevine

I use Migla's TVMicro with the excellent EyeTV software as my DVR. I then convert to H264 for iPod and plug my iPod into my TV for viewing.

I prefer not to use EyeTV's export to iPod utility as it uses Apple's QuickTime and is quite slow (albeit good quality). So I've exported (without re-encoding) to MPEG2 program stream and then dropped the resulting file into MPEG Streamclip or ffmpegX, where those excellent apps do their magic quite effectively and substantially faster.

The only issue has been the need to export the video out of EyeTV because you can't drop the files EyeTV records into either of the transcoding utilities. As EyeTV can send a video it creates directly into Toast (without exporting), I suspected that there was more to the EyeTV file format that wasn't immediately evident in the Finder. Sure enough; right-clicking on the EyeTV video file in the Finder revealed that it was a package. Showing the package contents revealed the MPEG2 file contained therein.

While it doesn't seem to be double-clickable (QuickTime Player choked on it), the .mpg file may be dropped onto MPEG Streamclip and the encoding will proceed from there. As you might expect, not having to actually export from EyeTV saves about five minutes or more depending on the length of the video.

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