Recorder Market Is Unsettled Everywhere, Not Just USA/Canada Anymore - Page 6

The Prime sounds like exactly the same box as yours with a extra tuner added and cable card slot, very small box, weighs almost nothing. No real display just about 5 lights, if the first two are green your online and connected to the network, red somethings broke, the other three light up as each tuner is used, also green. You can get a lot more info on what the things up to online as it has it's own web page type thing that shows if all tuners and cable card are properly setup and active, and if a tuner is busy what it's tuned to, channel lineup, etc.
If you don't need or want a Tivo these things are pretty good little units, with a cable card, or not, your choice.
Just a bit more work to get up and running.

I have WMC on my Win-7 box but have never activated it. One of these days I'll check it out but I'm not in a hurry. Since I have XP on the media-pc WMC is not an option so I went open-source. My ultimate goal was always to get the recording in a format that I could download to my TiVo and use its commercial skip functionality instead of having to edit them out myself. WMC is full of DRM so I don't know what conversion capability it has for non-protected files. I have found no simple utilities for converting WTV or Win-DVR files to standard .mpg. On the other hand, you can convert .ts to anything.

I'm having some fun and just about squared away. I fully expect that when I get it tuned and tweaked it will just run quietly with little intervention on my part other than setting the record schedule and the occasional reboot.

You can edit and/or convert wtv recordings to almost any format with VideoReDo H.264 version. It only takes about 3 minutes to convert a 30 minute wtv to mpg.

I use VRD mostly to edit commercials out of shows I want to keep or to make iso images for shows I want to burn to DVD with ImgBurn. The only problem I have with VRD is editing video imported from discs made in the Magnavox HDD/DVD recorders. It's very difficult to navigate through the recordings because the time jumps around. You can try to skip backward 30 seconds or 2 minutes and it goes forward instead. If you drag the slider bar it doesn't take you to the point where you let it go. The finished video files will play properly.

I've never had any DRM problems with my recordings. but all of my WMC recordings are from FiOS QAM. I heard FiOS marks everything copy freely.

I 'View Single Post' 'Print-to-PDF'ed it for future reference.

Thanks for taking the time to type it all in!

Fios has a add here where they give you triple play for 108 a month. That would be a significant saving over Comcast and the least I'll do is use that to get CC to give me a better deal for another 6 months or so. I don't know if Fios is even available in my neighborhood and they'd have to have a pretty good HD package and all the favorites I have now in HD to make it worth switching anyways, but the good part is my Prime would work with them seeing how they use QAM and cable card and all that. I have used VideoRedo for years and just upgraded to the H64 package and it still works great and will convert almost any format to any format easily so I'd recommend actually buying it. They do give a pretty good upgrade discount if you bought a earlier version too.

I know. I've often played with VRD trial downloads and really like the program. It is the only program I recommend to people who want to edit TiVo files. I just don't need all it's capabilities for what I want to do and so am hesitant about spending $100 for it -- unless I have to. If I can just find a satisfactory utility to convert .ts to .mpg that actually works so I can send the file to my TiVo for playback I'll be happy. I've tried two free ones so far and both have problems with either audio synch or down-conversion of the audio from 5.1 to 2.0. With the fast 30 second commercial skip feature on the TiVo, I find I have little energy for editing out the commercials.

Kelson IF you've bought the earlier version of VideoRedo the upgrade is only 47 bucks, pretty sure that's what it cost me when I decided to buy it.
They had my old version and name on file and when I went to pay I was hoping I had some kind of discount and it said as a user of the earlier version I was entitled to a upgrade discount automatically so I didn't have to prove anything and got it.
I don't remember if you said you actually bought a version but if you did it will save you almost 50 bucks.

I understand that. I'll take the free route whenever possible. If I find a free program useful I donate but I've never donated $100. I feel my VRD purchase was very worthwhile but if I could find a similar program for less I probably would have got that instead. I just needed something to edit wtv recordings and it does that very well.

I was on the fence about actually buying it for a while. Then I read this thread.

I don't have one, but that may change.

Well, I've gotten very comfortable with NextPVR on my media-PC and the dual-tuner HD Homerun. There is still a lot more feature exploring to do, but it is currently completely functional and happily recording. Surprisingly, the PSIP guide info is not bad at all. I have NextPVR set to update the EPG everyday at noon which covers the schedule all the way through primetime. So true, you can't effectively set up a weekly recording schedule of one-off captures on Sunday, but for what I intend I don't have to. Using the name-based recording and "season pass" function I have set it to record several series that I want to collect to watch later. It's always checking the EPG as soon as it updates. When the next occurrence of the program displays in the guide it schedules the capture. I'll probably reset the EPG update time to 7:00pm so it has the most current guide information before primetime starts. Currently I have these programs scheduled to record on the TiVo then auto-transfer them off over the network to a NAS unit. Once I'm convinced the HD Homerun/NextPVR combination has things in hand I'll delegate that task to it and remove the season passes from the TiVo.

As to Video Redo, it is no longer a question of whether to buy, but rather which version to buy. I failed to find a free utility that will convert the .ts file to .mpg without screwing it up. It's been a while since I took a look at VRD so I downloaded a trial version of the latest VRD Plus -- it was good before but has improved immensely. After 1 hr of use I found it indispensable. It remuxed the .ts file of a 1 hr HD/5.1 show to .mpg perfectly in about 5 min -- it transfers to and plays perfectly on the TiVo. I played with commercial cutting and after you get the hang of it and set the preferences the way you want it is very quick and easy. Not only will it deal directly with .tivo files, but after you cut commercials it will remux the file and put the .tivo wrapper back in place so when you transfer it back to the TiVo it behaves as a native file with all the episode meta-data. The only decision is whether to buy the plus or the H.264 version. I really don't need the H.264 version since everything I'll be using it for will be in MPEG-2 and I don't intend to recode to H.264/AVC, but for only $25 extra I'm tempted to just buy it anyway.

The only recoding feature I'll play with is the HD --> SD recoding for making standard DVD Video recordings. This is just so I can comment on it, for the benefit of those who want to burn SD DVD's, when I make a full exposition of my experience and post a new thread.

That was my problem too when I bought the original plain vanilla VideoRedo. I couldn't find anything free that did what it can, plus it has a great interface and they even have improved it since my original version, which they updated for free.
Now I NEED WTV support and same problem, nothing free works as well and easily so I upgrade to V4 H264 BUT I did get the price break for doing a upgrade.
Probably worth it even for 100 but that's a bit past my comfort zone too so was happy to get a better price.
Hopefully you can get it or maybe talk them into a courtesy discount seeing how you do recommend it to folks.
I would have stayed with my original version but it can't do WTV files, I don't think you need that support so maybe the lower version for less money would work fine for you.
I do know the new super version can convert almost anything to anything else so that part MAY be useful to you if you want to convert to files a I phone or something else like a tablet can use.

I need the VRD Plus version at a minimum. It already costs $75 so what's another $21 for the H.264 version. It does have DVD authoring capability -- I don't care about it not having burning capability since I would use ImgBurn for that even if it did. For the price, I would feel more positive about it if the H.264 version had AVCHD and/or BD authoring capabilities. I use MultiAVCHD for that now but would always welcome something more polished and supported with decent documentation as to what the 1001 options do.

The other consideration I have is that my Media-PC is currently a 9yr old fossil with a single core P4 and only 1GB RAM. How much longer before it dies. When it does I'll probably pick up an Athalon Dell with Win-7 for $350 and give WMC a whirl. Then I will absolutely need VRD to deal with WTV files.

As I noted, it's no longer a question of if but which version. I'm going to install the H.264 version and give it a workout until my 15 day trial is up. At that point I'll decide and buy a license.

Well if your pretty sure soonish you'll go WMC then you'll need the H264 version as I think it's the only one that supports WTC natively. IF the auto conversion that the built in file manager always worked right I might have stayed with my lesser version but it has a bug with some recordings where it picks the enhanced audio track for the visually challenged users, always on my Nova caps, so I went with the best version after seeing it doesn't have this issue ever and works nicely. Of course you also could do a upgrade when you do build a new box and save a few bucks right now. I don't know how big a extra discount they give when going from normal plus to the H264 one. Actually my version is the plus I guess and so it's be 47 extra after paying for plus so maybe not worth buying it. 49 for plus, 75 for tv suite, 99 for tv suite h264 so I think you'd be better off just buying suite or H264 seeing how it wouldn't save you hardly anything to upgrade right away. At least they just charge you the extra it would cost to buy it to begin with though I guess rather then make you pay 95 upfront after paying 50 to 75...

Yes, you are right. Only the H.264 supports WTV files. H.264 it is, then. Maybe they'll add HD authoring to the H.264 version in the future. From the changelog it looks like they are always adding new stuff. Didn't you tell me the guide for WMC is free? How many days out does it go. Does WMC recode your transport files to H.264 or does it leave your recordings as MPEG-2.

Yep, guide is free if you own a version of 7 that supports WMC. That's how they get everyone to support their goodies, everything's free and easy to use, once you buy their OS. I really liked CWEPG but had to pay 20 a year to use schedules direct and my card didn't support season passes with it even.
I had used the original plus version of redo for a few years and suddenly one day it reported there was a upgrade available and downloaded it, it made the GUI much nicer and added some very useful features for free so I was a happy camper and I'm sure they'll continue to add things slowly as they figure out how to make it look and work right.

The guide goes out about 10 days.

My wtv recordings are all MPEG-2.

I ended up going with VRD TV Suite -- no H.264. It does everything I want --.ts files and .tivo files. I don't see any reason to be recoding anything to H.264 and even though I'll probably play with WMC just to see, I don't see switching to it from the simplicity of using NextPVR and the .ts files it generates. I understand that if you are using a cable-card tuner you have no choice but to use WMC and therefore need TV Suite/H.264.

Getting back to NextPVR. Although the free PSIP information was adequate, I found that NextPVR is very unreliable when it comes to auto-downloading the guide. So far I've had to manually initiate the EPG download nightly and it takes over 10 min to scan all the channels and grab the info. Not good if I can't get to it nightly or forget about it. So I gave the Schedules Direct guide a look. I set up an account and you can try it free for 7 days. Subscription is very cheap, $25/yr or $6/2month. NextPVR directly supports the guide so once I configured it to use Schedules Direct for my channels it only took 10-15 sec to download the guide. The guide goes out 8 days and provides a lot more information than PSIP. Shows with irregular time-slots (i.e. ending 2 minutes past the hour) were accurately reflected in the guide info and scheduled accordingly by NextPVR. I could see immediately I wanted to play with this longer so I gave them $6 for 2 months. Now in the coming days I'll see how NextPVR is when it comes to updating this pay-for guide. Even if it doesn't, with 8 days of listings I can do it manually every couple days in less than a minute.

Well good, if you do ever decide to use WMC or want H264 you can pop another 25 bucks any time and get the H264 version so no big deal I really liked schedules direct when I was using it, simple and fast it just works but it doesn't support the cable card part of the Prime so I'm using WMC for now, plus it only sees two of the 3 tuners, though I bet there is a workaround for that part.I used to do the same, wait till my backlog of shows to record had wound down then download the schedules again, then go through and manually schedule all the favorites it highlighted for me. I guess that does mean technically CWEPG had a season pass as you picked your favorites on a big list and it picked them out for you and scheduled them, and it uses that shedule program.

I've got a question about using a computer for recording TV.

I get the whole thing about having a TV tuner added to the computer, and even using the computer's own DVD burner to create discs, but what about copy flags?

I know you can get devices that, if put in line between a tuner or cable box and a stand-alone recorder, will filter out copy-guard signals entirely. You can do anything you want with the recording you made.

How's about with computer-based recorders? Is there a way to do it with them?

My older Divco Fusion 3 gold ATSC/QAM tuner card doesn't recognize copy flags as it was made before it was required to be included. Most of the newer ones recognize just about anything they want to shove down our throats but most normal cable shows are copy freely and most movie channels are copy once so you can only watch those on the PC or network it was made on, no editing or anything. Copy freely I think is self explanatory. I'm sure if you hunt hard enough there are ways to break anything they can lock down but I know WMC is pretty locked down once you get to copy once as none of my regular player programs will play it, just the one in Windows Media Center and maybe the windows media player that's on the PC that made the recording. That of course is for all the channels I record with my new HD HomeRun Prime which needs WMC to work with it's cable card and all the built in DRM. I believe Myth TV works with it in Lynix but I've never run it here so don't know how well it works and like that. I haven't researched all the newer copy boxes that MAY work so can't really say but I'm sure a bit of googleing would provide answers, and you'll probably have to buy anything like that online as regular places aren't really allowed to sell ones that directly do that sort of thing now.
It's the same old game as before, they make some new protection and some smart geeks break it fairly quickly but it constantly changes so what worked before may now be useless as they add new things.

gastrof,
That's a good question. Those boxes you refer to only work because they can take an analog-out signal and filter out the analog protections. The conversion of the digital broadcast to analog output removes the digital restrictions. With direct-digital recording, everything stays in place -- including the copy flags. Direct-digital recording is what you get with PC tuner cards (Hauppauge, Avermedia) or networked tuner boxes (HD Homerun).

With OTA and clear QAM it is not a problem since they can't be copy-restricted -- you can edit and burn to disk anything you record direct-digital including HD/5.1. The rest of the channels that you would receive through a cable-card enabled tuner (i.e. Ceton or HD Homerun Prime) are going to be governed by the copy flag your cable company puts on them. If those tuners are licensed for cable cards, then they have to follow the rules and honor the CCI bit. As Dartman noted above, many cable companies do not copy-restrict what they are not required to. If your cable co is on the other side of the fence and copy-restricts everything beyond the local broadcast stations then you are currently SOL when it comes to direct-digital recording -- as far as burning that recording to disk. Someone may eventually hack the Microsoft DRM and provide a software solution to de-protect the recordings, but so far I have found nothing.

Your only choice in this case is to do what you do now with a DVD recorder -- but with advantages. Buy one of those copy-buster boxes and put it between the output of your cable STB and a Hauppauge HD PVR (which accepts composite, S-video, component analog video inputs and optical digital audio input and passes them through to the TV/AVR, see the link). The Hauppauge plugs into the USB port of your PC and supplies an unrestricted video file you can do anything with. You don't have the PQ benefits of direct-digital recording but using the component connection and a digital audio output you can record in HD/5.1 from your STB/DVR if you choose. I don't have the HD PVR so I'm not familiar with how it interfaces to DVR software other than the software it comes with, but I do know it has an IR blaster for controlling the cable box and changing channels for unattended scheduled recordings. The disadvantage of recording this way is the same as for a DVD recorder -- you need the cable box or DVR to supply the source. But if you have a setup now for your DVD recorder using a copy box to record from your cable box, the Hauppauge HD PVR + PC is a drop-in replacement that gives you component video and DA inputs so you can directly record wide screen content without yet another converter in line and record it in HD/5.1 if you choose.

So far NextPVR plus the Schedules Direct guide has been doing what it is supposed to. I can set the guide update time to any hour and clear the guide beforehand to check for successful auto-downloading. I've done this exercise about 6 times and each time NextPVR has gone out and auto-downloaded the guide without a hitch. I've stopped playing and set the permanent update time to 3:00AM; I checked this morning before leaving for work and the 3:00AM guide update was right on queue. I'm convinced it works.

So, perhaps the PSIP auto-update issues were specific to a PSIP guide. All the more reason to go with a real guide -- $25/yr is more than cheap enough. Seriously, I haven't had this much fun with a piece of gear since I bought my TiVo. But pretty soon, with season passes, it looks like it will just settle down and do its job unattended at which point I'll just use it, like I do my TiVo.

I'm pretty much there now. I have all my favorites picked as season passes or whatever WMC calls it and I just check every so often to make sure it's keeping up to date and recording my goodies automatically for me. Once I have a few saved up in the recorded TV folder I fire up VideoRedo and let it auto pick out the commercials, double check and edit as needed then save to whatever format I like, lately MKV, as it looks the same and saves a SLIGHT bit of space and is still fast to convert.
I just found a extra cable that seems to have good digital signal in the stack I forgot about so my tuner in here and my old Philips 3575 have signal again if I need any extra HD and non HD tuners to watch or record from Now I just need about 2 more HDMI inputs...

How are you liking the VRD commercial skip? I'm running it on the old media-PC and it seems too slow to use. It scans through the title in just about real time. I can easily do it faster manually. For me frame-accurate editing is of no concern. I don't mind a split second of commercial so I work in I-frames, which are about 1/2 second in duration. That makes things very fast.

I used to always do it manually and yes I probably can do one video faster myself but this way I just walk away and come back later and just double check the breaks and fix the few that aren't right. It probably takes 5 minutes or so to do a typical 1 hour show and I'm sure on a low powered box it would be painfully slow as it's tied in with CPU speed and speed of the Hard drive subsystem and all that.
I have a AMD hex core 1090t so I'm pretty good on overall power to run extras and I have win7 64 with 8 gig of ram and a dual core video card as this is my main do it all box.
I do want frame accurate edits but I archive most everything I capture and I hate seeing anything but the video I want, plus every little bit helps save space.
If you want I can give you the setting for the commercial skip that MOSTLY seems to hit the commercials right on the money, it didn't work as well till I fine tuned it a bit but doubt it would help with your speed issue.

My main box is an i7 quad-core with 12GB RAM -- lots of power. I haven't put VRD on it because I kind of want to keep the video stuff separate, but I may have to. I would appreciate the settings you have settled in on for commercial skip. You could just PM them to me, if you would rather.

Yeah, you might want to try at least doing the editing on the big box if you have a easy way to get files back and forth quickly as that system is probably even faster at recoding video then mine is but anyways pretty similar HP between us on those. As far as the setting no problems as it MAY also help others get it fine tuned.
Enable black level detection box checked
Top box 10%
left box 10% right box 10%
Bottom box 20%
Threshold levels
Average 16
Peak 27
Max contrast 4
Enable fast search box checked

I think the other things you can leave at default. It also has a train and display/set levels box so you can try different settings till it works best for you.

I feel rather confident that I speak for *MANY* other 'LURKers / DREAMers' when I ask you *NOT* to take any details of your 'Experiment' *PRIVATE*!?!

Us 'Old Fart / Arm Chair Dreamers' just *LOVE* to PRINT to PDF and/or PAPER and *SAVE* this good information (for when we get a 'Round Tuit')! And I, personally, have begun to DEPEND ON the validity of YOUR research!

Thanks!

Yes, the i7 with Win-7/64 really does kick-butt when it comes to ripping/extracting BluRay titles for my NAS. I really should start using that power for the tasks I ultimately bought it for. I tend to like to try out software on the other platform until I get the kinks out and decide if it's a keeper before putting it on the main PC. I may have mentioned I have 3 Win-XP partitions on the Media-PC. Partition 1 is the production partition that runs NextPVR, the TiVo server etc. The other two partitions are my testing grounds for new software. I have them imaged and can blow away a used or corrupted Win-XP installation and re-install a fresh image in less than 10 minutes.

I have the i7 and the media-PC connected on a GigE network and I can pull a file over from the Media-PC at a sustained 40MB/s so it only takes a couple minutes to transfer a TV show. I'll put in your settings to start and if the commercial skip runs that much faster on the i7 I'll start using it on a regular basis. Once I go through the trouble of editing the files they go on the NAS for network streaming, I won't bother sending them back to the TiVo -- no need to once they are edited and I don't need commercial skip.