MPEG-2: Day 2

I am, in the classic engineering mold, a rather determined bugger (or is that debugger?) when I put my mind to it. So it is that late last night, and early this morning, I was beating my head against my LCD as I strove onwards towards Mac-plus-MPEG nirvana. I'm not there, but I'm closer.

I recorded House to the PowerMac last night via the Elgato EyeTV 500; for those of you who are curious, the resultant 1 hour, 10 minute file (I have the EyeTV software set by default to record an additional 5 minutes of pad before and after the show runtime) was 5.3 GBytes in size (yes, GBytes….hurry up, blue laser DVDs!). I was able to export it to a variety of formats: 16:9 DV (720×480 29.94 fps video, two-channel 48 kHz PCM audio), a MPEG-2 Program Stream (1280×720 59.94 fps video, six-channel 48 kHz Dolby Digital audio), and audio and video MPEG-2 Elementary Streams. The MPEG-2 Program Stream file size was 2.65 GBytes, exactly half the size of the original (and half the cumulative sizes of the audio and video MPEG-2 Elementary Stream files). Correspondingly, the Finder reported that the recording was just over 37 minutes long, and I confirmed the premature termination after I network-copied the file to my Windows desktop PC. I wonder if this is related to the QuickTime halfway-there bug that I mentioned  yesterday.

Using iDVD5 on the DV file, I was able to successfully burn a DVD. It played back fine on the Mac, but produced 'squished' output on my Princeton Graphics AF3.0HD 16:9 aspect ratio CRT TV and Pioneer DV-563A DVD player. Googling about, I discovered that a bug in iDVD causes it to ignore the widescreen bit of incoming DV content. A freeware AppleScript utility called Anamorphicizer did the trick for me, although those of you with 4:3 aspect ratio TVs are apparently still stuck. BUT…..the resultant DVD only had two-channel audio; I wanted to retain the 5.1 channel surround sound that was in the original broadcast.

I then confirmed that the MPEG-2 Program Stream file played back fine (albeit through only the halfway point of the show) in a number of Windows apps; Windows Media Player 9 (in conjunction with the MPEG-2 decoder filters installed with WinDVD), InterVideo's WinDVD 6, and Nero's ShowTime. WMP9 doesn't appear to support MPEG-2 hardware acceleration, judging from the loss of audio-video sync and occasional dropped video frames even with my 3.2 GHz P4 (remember, this is high definition content). ShowTime produced smooth playback albeit at high CPU utilization, and WinDVD in conjunction with my ATI graphics card did the best job of all. QuickTime 6.5 doesn't know how to decode Dolby Digital audio so it wasn't a feasible option.

I dug into the DVD Studio Pro documentation and discovered that the program won't accept a multiplexed MPEG-2 Program Stream for some baffling reason; Elementary Streams are required. As before, the AC3 audio file came into DVD Studio Pro just fine. But as before, after noodling on the MPV video file for a while, DVD Studio Pro rejected it with an 'invalid format' complaint, no matter how much I twiddled with the Encoding preference options. I've emailed Elgato and will let you know if I hear anything positive back. Reiterating one of the themes from my last post on this topic….MPEG-2 is over a decade old. C'mon, folks.