MPEG encoder keeps stopping!

[CJ_Miller]

This is driving me nuts. I have three PCI cards for encoding video, and none of the have ever, ever worked right for me.

Currently I have a VCR on loan and have needed to encode a few tapes, so I have been trying to do this over the past day. I am using a Wired MediaPress card which is part of my Astarte DVDirector Pro package (the ancestor to Apple's DVD Studio Pro). What kills me is that no matter how I set up my system, it stops recording on me at an *exact* time, it's so exact that it seems like it should be trouble-shootable, but I have run out of ideas for the moment. This is on a MDD 1.42 GHz box with maximum RAM running Mac OS 9.2.2. I have done a few performance tweaks - switched the energy saver settings off, virtual memory off. The MediaPress manual recommended setting the disk cache down to 1024, which I did. I am using the fast ATA bus to record to a separate, non-system drive.

What happens is that every time the encoding stops once the file reaches 730.1 MB. I tried recording to a different drive and this also stops at the same size. And the program, MediaPress 2.3.1 supposedly has large file support for files of more than 2 GB. I have tried doubling the RAM of the MediaPress application... there is nothing else going on with my computer regarding disk activity. WHY 730.1 MB? There doesn't seem to be anything I can do, I am stumped.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Out of curiosity, what is your source material? If you are capturing from the same starting point on the tape, its possible time-base errors on the tape are causing the capture device to stop.... although you likely tried other tapes. For SD video work I would lean towards a modern machine, they can all do MPEG-2 software compression in real time or faster.

I usually lean towards lossless compression (1 hour of 720x480/60i HuffYUV compressed video is roughly 35-40GB) and do a final pass to MPEG-2 or h.264 post-edit depending on the destination media (DVD, Youtube, etc).

 

[CJ_Miller]

I have tried several tapes. From different tapes, and different times, it is always when the file is 730.1 MB. The VCR is a Daewoo VHS deck, it's fairly recent and seems to output a clean signal. I am sure the problem isn't the source.

As for modern machines, I don't have any way to encode video on my more modern ones.

I too prefer lossless compression, but am going with MPEG now because it;s what this card offers. I have an Aurora Fuse which records uncompressed motion JPEG, but it's got other problems.

 

[NJRoadfan]

There are plenty of very good open source codecs out there, just not for OS9. I'll be honest, WIndows is a bit more adept in the area of analog-to-digital video workflows and codecs. FFMpeg is available for OS X however. While I'm not a fan of using DV for VHS, it might be a better choice if you have access to a DV camcorder that can do analog pass through and only have a Mac available.

Daewoo? Its VHS, the source is NOT going to be clean even with a better deck and pristine tapes. Video tape in general is riddled with sync errors that generally trip up capture devices or worse, are falsely detected as Macrovision. 730.1MB seems pretty arbitrary, is the actual playback length of the files different every time?

 

[CJ_Miller]

Ok, so if I was using different software and equipment on a different computer running a different OS - I could try something else. That sounds straightforward enough!

I wish I could use my TBC, but it died last year and I haven't been able to replace it. But what I am seeing here does not appear to be sync errors. The playback lengths tend to be similar when the encodes are done with similar settings. The 730.1 MB threshold indicates to me that this is a software/system problem. I have seen instances like this before, where something was made for an older Mac, but a much later one is somehow "too slow". It probably isn't, but that's what it tells me.

 

[CC_333]

The software telling you that a newer Mac is too slow, when it works fine on an older Mac that ruly is slow, probably means that the software in question is not compatible with said newer Mac.

That being said, is it possible to try a newer version of said software?

Or maybe try it on an older Mac??

c

 

[CJ_Miller]

I have always struggled to do any media work, so if I simply assumed that things were "incompatible" when they didn't work straight away, I would never get anything done. Nothing has ever "just worked" for me, ever.

I have found one way around the 730.1MB barrier - I was recording as MPEG 1 with multiplexed video and audio streams. When I opted to record them as separate streams, I could suddenly record larger files. The problem with this is that (not unlike with my Aurora Fuse) the results are completely out of sync. If the files are the exact same length of time, and start at the same moment, how can they be minutes out of sync? If I only knew... The results so far have been unusable.

As for what systems these are supposed to run on? The DVDirector box says to use at least a G3, and IIRC the MediaPress box shows them using a B&W. Ther only other viable system I have is an 8600 with stock SCSI which will be far too slow. This is what burns me, the documentation of these things always insists that you should use the fastest system that you can. On my MDD I can copy a gigabyte between drives in a minute, so recording a GB over *an hour* should not be a problem. I was hoping that some pro audio or video people might chime in and suggest some performance tweaks for how the system is set up. Configuring the system you have for the task at hand makes more sense than trying a whole different computer when something goes wrong.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Do NOT use MPEG-1 with analog sources, its incapable of storing interlaced content. Only use MPEG-2. Separate video+audio streams shouldn't be out of sync. The biggest problem with this era of hardware capture cards was the buggy drivers and software. Didn't matter if it was the Mac or Windows software, they both were horrible to deal with. I still have bad memories of fighting with Adobe Premiere and a miroVideo DC2000. Ugh.