For a few months I have avoided using my Macs or buying anything for them. But I am getting over depression, wanting to mess around, and the wife joined a band. Things are starting to get a bit creative here again.
So on a whim I started searching for Astarte video stuff. They invented Toast. I have CD-Copy which is amazingly useful, only secure-rip tool existent for OS 9 so far as I know. And I heard that Astarte tools formed the basis of the original DVD Studio Pro application. It seemed like for OS 9 video work their stuff would be great.
Just minutes of looking and I found a computer lease liquidator outfit offering Astarte's DVDirector Pro, we agreed to $30 for it postpaid and now it is here. It includes two PCI cards, the infamous Wired4DVD MPEG decoder card, and a MediaPress MPEG encoder card. There are installers and licenses for M-Pack (MPEG encoder), A-Pack (AC3 audio encoder), the main DVDirector application (basically does menus, like DVDSP), Toast DVD 3.7.1. Also apps for managing the PCI cards, and utilities for MUX, subtitles, etc. And they included all of the required cables and adaptors I could need, including an iMate USB>ADB adaptor which is worth $30 itself.
So now I am trying this stuff out. First thing I am wanting to do is rip some VHS tapes I want to archive so I can see them - I don't usually have a television set up. To my surprise, I am having difficulty with the Wired4DVD card: it plays VOB files on my hard drive but DVDs in the drive show up as torn and pixelated noise. I might have better luck using an older DVDR drive with this setup, I know OS 9 could be picky about CD drivers. Or maybe some alternate extensions might work with what I have. I have had hair-pulling experiences ripping tape before. My $10 Aurora Fuse card yielded nice picture, but the audio always went further out of sync for the length of the recording, it wasn't a linear offset. It was too much work to fix files longer than a few minutes. And I scored a cheap Matrox RTMac encoder which I heard good things about, but couldn't get it to work with my version of Premiere. Hopefully the MediaPress will be what I needed.
I am also intrigued by the possibilities of offloading MPEG 1/2 en/de-coding from Max/MSP/Nato. But since I set up my Mac with new OS 9 partition I forgot to authorize Max on here so I can't test it now.
So on a whim I started searching for Astarte video stuff. They invented Toast. I have CD-Copy which is amazingly useful, only secure-rip tool existent for OS 9 so far as I know. And I heard that Astarte tools formed the basis of the original DVD Studio Pro application. It seemed like for OS 9 video work their stuff would be great.
Just minutes of looking and I found a computer lease liquidator outfit offering Astarte's DVDirector Pro, we agreed to $30 for it postpaid and now it is here. It includes two PCI cards, the infamous Wired4DVD MPEG decoder card, and a MediaPress MPEG encoder card. There are installers and licenses for M-Pack (MPEG encoder), A-Pack (AC3 audio encoder), the main DVDirector application (basically does menus, like DVDSP), Toast DVD 3.7.1. Also apps for managing the PCI cards, and utilities for MUX, subtitles, etc. And they included all of the required cables and adaptors I could need, including an iMate USB>ADB adaptor which is worth $30 itself.
So now I am trying this stuff out. First thing I am wanting to do is rip some VHS tapes I want to archive so I can see them - I don't usually have a television set up. To my surprise, I am having difficulty with the Wired4DVD card: it plays VOB files on my hard drive but DVDs in the drive show up as torn and pixelated noise. I might have better luck using an older DVDR drive with this setup, I know OS 9 could be picky about CD drivers. Or maybe some alternate extensions might work with what I have. I have had hair-pulling experiences ripping tape before. My $10 Aurora Fuse card yielded nice picture, but the audio always went further out of sync for the length of the recording, it wasn't a linear offset. It was too much work to fix files longer than a few minutes. And I scored a cheap Matrox RTMac encoder which I heard good things about, but couldn't get it to work with my version of Premiere. Hopefully the MediaPress will be what I needed.
I am also intrigued by the possibilities of offloading MPEG 1/2 en/de-coding from Max/MSP/Nato. But since I set up my Mac with new OS 9 partition I forgot to authorize Max on here so I can't test it now.
