More Mess

Continued from The MPEG-Plus-Mac Mess…..

My second snafu appeared when I copied a 3 hour recording of the Grateful Dead Movie (complete with periodic fundraising breaks, courtesy of the local PBS affiliate) from my ReplayTV to the PowerMac (see DVArchive and mReplay), and attempted to play it back. I'd previously installed the latest version of the MPEG-2 playback component for QuickTime. QuickTime insisted that the recording was only 90 minutes (1.5 hours) long. So did EyeTV, even though Elgato's documentation suggests the company's software doesn't employ QuickTime components. But the open-source MPlayerOSX and VLC Media Player handled the entire 3 hour recording just fine.

Back to Elgato for my final grumble (at least for the moment). Although EyeTV recordings have MPEG file extensions, QuickTime reports that they have invalid formats and refuses to open them. MPlayerOSX and VLC Media Player handle the video just fine, but they don't appear to know what to do with the embedded Dolby Digital audio streams; they only output silence (which, trust me, is the preferable alternative to an application misidentifying Dolby Digital data as PCM audio and spitting out high-volume white noise!). In and of itself, this isn't an issue; EyeTV plays back its own recordings pretty well (I occasionally experience loss of audio/video sync, but closing and reopening the recording fixes that) and the program offers the ability to export to MPEG-2 program and transport streams, along with other formats.

Unfortunately, MPEG-2 export is fatally flawed, at least on my machine. Half the time, the program either crashes partway through the process, or it locks up. When it succeeds in spitting out a complete file, it's after an interminable delay which I can't understand because the source material is MPEG-2 and I haven't asked the program to do any frame rate, size or aspect ratio conversions, or de-interlacing. The resultant MPEG-2 program stream file isn't accepted by QuickTime (again, due to a claimed invalid format), nor do iMovie, iDVD, Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro seem to know what to do with it. The AC3 audio file created by a MPEG-2 elementary stream export is accepted, but the video file is not. And without Dolby Digital decode support in MPlayerOSX or VLC Media Player, the exported MPEG-2 program stream file is unusable there, too.

p.s….funny enough, a sampling of the Windows programs on my desktop PC reveals that they will accept and playback the audio and video of EyeTV's HD MPEG-2 program stream export files with no complaints or snafus, along with the standard definition MPEG-2 export from my ReplayTV. And yes….the list of programs includes QuickTime for Windows! So crashes and hangups aside, it seems that Elgato's not the only source of blame for this latter issue.