[Harvey]

There have been a few threads with people describing issues with EyeTV 2 recordings and Toast 7.1.2, but I can't seem to figure out if anyone has been successful with this combination.

My problem is that I get jittery video on DVDs made with 7.1.2 using EyeTV 2 recordings. I've tried a number of things (none of which has helped), including:

- Putting only two ~45 minute episodes on a DVD. Toast lets me put three episodes on a DVD, but I thought reducing that to two might results in better quality.
- Turning off buffer underrun protection in Toast.
- Burning at the lowest speed possible (1X).

As I noted in a previous post, the resulting DVDs play fine in my Mac, but the problem appears when playing the DVD in a standalone player. I don't think it's the DVD player or the DVD media, though, because:

- A DVD of the SAME TV shows (even at three episodes per DVD) made using Toast 6 plays perfectly in the standalone DVD player. I'm using the same DVD media, as well. That to me indicates it has something to do with Toast 7.
- A DVD made from footage recorded with a digital video camera, edited in iMovie and burned using iDVD using the same DVD media, plays perfectly on the same standalone DVD player. So, I really don't think it's the media I'm using or the DVD player, or the combination of both.

Toast 6 works for me, but I'd really like to use the nicer main menu choices that Toast 7 offers - that's the main reason I upgraded to Toast 7.

So my question is, has anyone made good DVDs from EyeTV 2 recordings using Toast 7 (7.1.2 in particular)? If so, any advice on settings?

Thanks in advance.

[tsantee]

Jittery video is typically the result of the field dominance of the interlacing lines being reversed. This wouldn't be noticed on the Mac because it removes interlacing when playing on a computer display.

I don't have an EyeTV so I don't know why the fields would get reversed. Toast's Custom Encoder window has an option for forcing the field dominance to either upper or lower field first. The default is automatic. In automatic it seems to me that Toast figures certain kinds of files always have fields in a default order. Toast doesn't check the file to determine its field dominance.

If you have MPEG Streamclip you can use its "Get Stream Info" command to see what the field dominance is for the EyeTV MPEGs. Then instruct Toast to use that order instead of automatic. I'm not sure this will make a difference but it's worth a try.

[willzerbillz]

This is not a solution, rather to let you know that I'm seeing the same effect. The DVD's I made from eyeTV recordings were quite blurry. I have only had the goodies for a couple of days, and all I've tried is raising the quality setting in the eyeTV2 software to "best." This didn't make a noticable difference, the quality seems below VHS. I thought the problem may be a poor MP2 encoder in the eyeTV device, however your comment about Toast6 working better is interesting. Thanks for the information.

I'm also have freeze up problems discussed in various locations on these boards. So far I'm not feeling good about the eyeTV/Toast experience.

[tsantee]

willzerbillz, on Jan 9 2007, 09:05 AM, said:

This is not a solution, rather to let you know that I'm seeing the same effect. The DVD's I made from eyeTV recordings were quite blurry. I have only had the goodies for a couple of days, and all I've tried is raising the quality setting in the eyeTV2 software to "best." This didn't make a noticable difference, the quality seems below VHS. I thought the problem may be a poor MP2 encoder in the eyeTV device, however your comment about Toast6 working better is interesting. Thanks for the information.

I'm also have freeze up problems discussed in various locations on these boards. So far I'm not feeling good about the eyeTV/Toast experience.

I now have an EyeTV 250 and haven't noticed this problem. Did you use the Toast Media Browser to transfer the EyeTV video to the Toast Video window? Did Toast state that it was multiplexing the video when you clicked the burn button or did it say it was encoding? What brand of media did you use and what DVD burner are you using?

[willzerbillz]

tsantee, on Jan 9 2007, 10:10 AM, said:

I now have an EyeTV 250 and haven't noticed this problem. Did you use the Toast Media Browser to transfer the EyeTV video to the Toast Video window? Did Toast state that it was multiplexing the video when you clicked the burn button or did it say it was encoding? What brand of media did you use and what DVD burner are you using?

Thanks.

No, I wasn't using the Toast Media Browser, but rather used the Toast button on the EyeTV Programs screen. I have seen at various times the progress bar indicate "multiplexing", and at other times it has said "encoding." The disks have taken a long time to finish--progress is so slow that I start it and get ready for work, checking perhaps once before heading out the door to see if it's going okay. I'm going to try to look at the next burn more closely. Your response makes me think that there's something to know here, so please provide more detail.

My first few burns were with Memorex DVD-R disks; yesterday I acquired some Verbatim DVD-R's and made a burn with one today. The computer is a Powerbook G4 with a 1.25 Ghz Power PC and 80G hard drive. I'm using the superdrive for the burning, and it is a Matsushita drive.

I cleared about half the hard drive before I started all this. Through the EyeTV recording preferences, I changed the location of the EyeTV Archive to an external Seagate 7200 rpm USB2 hard drive.

Last evening I began to wonder about the bit rate. As an experiment, I set the bit rate as high as it would go using the custom device setting in EyeTV. I set the display to Progressive Scan and recorded "Nightline" from a Time Warner Cable source that is always quite good. Then I burned the DVD (a Verbatim.) When I got home from work I viewed it--first on a 50" rear projection HDTV, then on a 27" CRT. The later looked pretty decent, about like VHS, but still not stellar. The 50" still looked pretty fuzzy.

I'm trying to isolate the variable that makes the recordings poor. I'm used to DVR recordings from the TWC supplied Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8200, and frankly I thought that the EyeTV/Toast DVD results would be in the same ballpark. Are my hopes too high?

I'm hoping that there is a bottleneck in the speed/quality equation, and it's not on account of a lousy MPEG2 encoder in the EyeTV (or lousy tuner, for that matter.) I always thought that the Powerbook had enough guts for this kind of thing. I've made iMovie projects and iDVD disks that I judged to be pretty darn good, although obviously we're talking about vastly different source material than a cable broadcast. Frankly, just watching television on the Powerbook is nothing to write home about. The picture wouldn't impress anyone into buying it if it were sitting in a row of tv's at Best Buy. At first I though that this to be that the video card and/or LCD display of the computer wasn't quite optimized for television, but now I'm thinking that this may be as good as it gets regardless of hardware.

Eventually this rig will be used on a iMac G5 1.8 Ghz that belongs to my Father-in-Law--it's going to be his toy. I'm just using it for a while to shake out problems.

If the Apple superdrive is always going to be a problem, then I would appreciate a few names of external burners that are known to be good bets. Right now, based on my "Nightline" experiment, I'm thinking that the bit rate needs to be raised to the max, and that means that a 2 hour movie would have to be on a dual layer DVD. This was something that didn't dawn on me until yesterday. (Yeah, I thought I was pretty good at this stuff, but I can always surprise myself.) Are there any tradeoffs when using a dual layer? The ultimate goal is to play the disks back on a console machine, with movies on a single disk. Thanks again.

[AndyKyr]

I'm having a similar problem with Toast 7. But it's not EyeTV thats really bugging me here. I am an animation student, and can create beautiful pristine images with Maya, use Quicktime Pro to save them as a movie file, which still opens and looks great on fullscreen, but after burning to a DVD, it appears fuzzy like poor quality VHS. When a QT file is burned to the DVD as a data disk, it still looks great, so what is wrong with video DVD burning?

I am using the apple superdrive, and TDK DVD-R disks and video quality is set to best. Sadly, toast has just not provided acceptable quality for a professional looking demo reel, and I can't figure out if it's just a flaw in toast or something I'm doing. Does anyone get pristine quality from Toast, or is this just the standard? I can't afford to upgrade anything right now, so, any suggestions on a fix?

[tsantee]

I'm having a similar problem with Toast 7. But it's not EyeTV thats really bugging me here. I am an animation student, and can create beautiful pristine images with Maya, use Quicktime Pro to save them as a movie file, which still opens and looks great on fullscreen, but after burning to a DVD, it appears fuzzy like poor quality VHS. When a QT file is burned to the DVD as a data disk, it still looks great, so what is wrong with video DVD burning?

I am using the apple superdrive, and TDK DVD-R disks and video quality is set to best. Sadly, toast has just not provided acceptable quality for a professional looking demo reel, and I can't figure out if it's just a flaw in toast or something I'm doing. Does anyone get pristine quality from Toast, or is this just the standard? I can't afford to upgrade anything right now, so, any suggestions on a fix?

I'm not sure if this will help, but go to the custom encoder settings window (click the More button to get there). Now turn on Half-Pel. Also, depending on the length of the video you can raise the minimum and average bit rate. If it is less than 1 hour those can be near 8 mbps.

[AndyKyr]

I'm not sure if this will help, but go to the custom encoder settings window (click the More button to get there). Now turn on Half-Pel. Also, depending on the length of the video you can raise the minimum and average bit rate. If it is less than 1 hour those can be near 8 mbps.

I will try this, thanks for the tip!