- Nov 12, 2006
- 5,334
- Boat Info
- 1999 Sea Ray 330DA
Twin 7.4 MPI (310 propshaft HP) V-drives
- Engines
- Twin Mercury Marine marinized 7.4L L-29 V8s
Cast iron block w 4-bolt mains
Finally had some time to fool around with the Mac and video today. I wanted to see how difficult is is to download video to the Mac in both SD and HD, play back the video, and copy it to other media.
Download the Firewire SDK from Apple's developer web site. The download is free, the only requirement is signing up to be an Apple developer, which is also free. It's useful to have the XCode development software on your system, but you don't need to have it. For playback, you need VLC, which you can get from Videolan's web site. Lastly you need a video source with a Firewire connector. Lots of new HDTVs have this. I have Comcast's dual tuner DVR, which is a Motorola 6412 converter. It has a Firewire connector that can be used to both control the tuner and feed video. Verizon uses this box, too if you have FIOS and an HD DVR. I haven't switch to FIOS yet.
Grabbing video is pretty easy. The AVC Browser tool shows all Firewire devices to which you computer is connected. I have a Firewire hub setup with both the HDTV and 6412 connected, so I just connect the Mac notebook's Firewire port to the hub. AVC Browser showed both the TV and the cable box, I selected the 6412. From AVC Browser, there's a series of tabs. One of the tabs allows control of the cable box. You need to open he device by clicking the Open Device button.
Channel number can be selected. The up, down, left and right arrows also work, so by selecting channel 1 and using the arrows, an On-Demand movie can be captured as easily as any other channel. Note that the DVR function to save On-Demand movies is disabled, but that does not inhibit captures from the Firewire port. The working Firewire port is an FCC mandate. :smt038
There's button on the AVC Browser to enable monitoring the video. Click it and you can watch the video coming into the Mac. That's fine as it goes, but that's not capture. To capture, start the DVHS application. It works like a digital VCR You can record and playback with this app. Open the statistics slide and set the record and playback channels to zero. Then you can record and playback video. When recording, the stats show in the slide as to frame rate and data rate. SD is in the 4MB/s range and HD is around 19.
Once captured, you can open the file with VLC and play it back. Next task I want to do it to re-code the video with H.264 (MPEG 4 Part 10) which will reduce the file size to about 10% of the MPEG 2 file. Definition will suffer a bit, but I want to see how much it degrades. Should also be able to transcode for Apple TV if I can get the frame rate down to 24 FPS. Apple needs better codec support for that device. 720p@24 isn't that great. On the other hand, a Mac Mini on the boat connected to the flat screen TV should do a good job on playback. Carry a 500 MB firewire drive between home and the boat and you'll have hours of HD programming.
Well it works. Just need to try some new codecs. Once that's done I might try to modify the sample apps into a single simple grabber app. Of course, it's getting near boat launching, so don't know how far this project will get.
I'll post some SD and HD captures to the web during the week so you can see the results. I'm hoping to recode both SD and HD with Quicktime Pro to see how much smaller the files will get with that codec.
Best regards,
Frank C.
Download the Firewire SDK from Apple's developer web site. The download is free, the only requirement is signing up to be an Apple developer, which is also free. It's useful to have the XCode development software on your system, but you don't need to have it. For playback, you need VLC, which you can get from Videolan's web site. Lastly you need a video source with a Firewire connector. Lots of new HDTVs have this. I have Comcast's dual tuner DVR, which is a Motorola 6412 converter. It has a Firewire connector that can be used to both control the tuner and feed video. Verizon uses this box, too if you have FIOS and an HD DVR. I haven't switch to FIOS yet.
Grabbing video is pretty easy. The AVC Browser tool shows all Firewire devices to which you computer is connected. I have a Firewire hub setup with both the HDTV and 6412 connected, so I just connect the Mac notebook's Firewire port to the hub. AVC Browser showed both the TV and the cable box, I selected the 6412. From AVC Browser, there's a series of tabs. One of the tabs allows control of the cable box. You need to open he device by clicking the Open Device button.
Channel number can be selected. The up, down, left and right arrows also work, so by selecting channel 1 and using the arrows, an On-Demand movie can be captured as easily as any other channel. Note that the DVR function to save On-Demand movies is disabled, but that does not inhibit captures from the Firewire port. The working Firewire port is an FCC mandate. :smt038
There's button on the AVC Browser to enable monitoring the video. Click it and you can watch the video coming into the Mac. That's fine as it goes, but that's not capture. To capture, start the DVHS application. It works like a digital VCR You can record and playback with this app. Open the statistics slide and set the record and playback channels to zero. Then you can record and playback video. When recording, the stats show in the slide as to frame rate and data rate. SD is in the 4MB/s range and HD is around 19.
Once captured, you can open the file with VLC and play it back. Next task I want to do it to re-code the video with H.264 (MPEG 4 Part 10) which will reduce the file size to about 10% of the MPEG 2 file. Definition will suffer a bit, but I want to see how much it degrades. Should also be able to transcode for Apple TV if I can get the frame rate down to 24 FPS. Apple needs better codec support for that device. 720p@24 isn't that great. On the other hand, a Mac Mini on the boat connected to the flat screen TV should do a good job on playback. Carry a 500 MB firewire drive between home and the boat and you'll have hours of HD programming.
Well it works. Just need to try some new codecs. Once that's done I might try to modify the sample apps into a single simple grabber app. Of course, it's getting near boat launching, so don't know how far this project will get.
I'll post some SD and HD captures to the web during the week so you can see the results. I'm hoping to recode both SD and HD with Quicktime Pro to see how much smaller the files will get with that codec.
Best regards,
Frank C.
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