Simple Replay to DVD burning

[plyons10]

Despite multiple threads on this topic, I am unimpressed with the answers I recently found, after having purchased my first DVD player (and having a friend who missed last week's West Wing -- I offered to burn it for him).

I know all about Womble, rtvedit, etc...

But many people (mostly those who don't "know" better) seem to have good success rates with one-step processes. I am, first of all, interested in hearing from you people!

I burnt a one hour Replay mpg using Ulead Movie Factory 4.0 (with all the default settings) with no problems. Plays on both my DVD players (one old, one new) and there were no observable synch issues (even at the end).

Am I correct in assuming that all this Womble and rtvedit stuff is only necessary if you want to edit out commercials or it you have really long mpgs you want to burn?

[aeblank]

I like movie factory, and it is what I use.
I happen to edit it with VideoReDo first, but it is good to know I don't need to.

[hdshark]

Step 1. DVArchive to get shows from TV to computer
Step 2. VideoReDo to edit and fix shows
Step 3. Burn (without transcoding) with DVD Movie Factory

Hopefully, the next version of VideoReDo will burn directly to DVD while saving edits...

[chain777]

I do the same, but with Nero. It can also deal with Replay MPEG's by itself.

[plyons10]

[QUOTE=hdshark]Step 2. VideoReDo to edit and fix shows
[/QUOTE]

See... this is exactly what I mean.. fix WHAT???? I knew I didn't care to edit my show... sooooo... what am I fixing?

[miscrms]

Peter,

From what I understand the mpeg format used by the replay is somewhat non-standard. This _can_ create problems when you try to put it on DVD but not always. This also seems to vary depending on replay model, computer OS, tools, phase of the moon, distance from Meca etc. In addition, the replay is fairly infamous for having data or timecode breaks in its files every so often. I believe it is the somewhat weak rf reciever that results in these occasional signal loss blips, but I don't know. If you don't fix these it will most likely hang your dvd burn, or if it should succeed it may crash or freak out your dvd player.

If you don't make many DVDs, and don't care if some of your files just can't be correctly written to dvd then the simple methods are fine. If you (like me) make a lot of DVDs, and record a lot of shows specifically to make DVD sets (where you _really_ want every episode to work), then it becomes more efficient to develop a more complicated recipe that works ~100% of the time.

My personal recipe is as follows on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and rtv4040, med quality recording imported w/DVA:

1. Open in Quicktime Player w/ Mpeg 2 add on ($20).
2a. Find in/out points of commercials, and type into .evt file
2b. If player shows symptoms of time/data breaks (incorrect length, wierd jumping while scrubbing back and forth) open in streamclip
3a. run rtvedit with timcode set to external source. (I batch process at work on an Apple XServe G5 DP w/ XServe RAID Fiber Channel storage at about 30sec. per 2 hour movie :cool: )
3b. run correct timecode breaks in streamclip, edit out commercials, set repair data breaks, and save with "convert to mpg2" not save as.
4. drop finished video into Roxio Toast Platinum 6 ($30 ebay) and burn

Here's why:
For my setup (YMMV),

1, 2a: rtvtools does not read rtv4k files, so I have to generate .evt by hand to remove commercials. Of the players I have tried, Quicktime's time values match up with rtvedit in external timecode mode the best. I should probably just buy QT Pro ($30) and make my edits directly, since I have to scrub to every in/out point anyway.

2b, 3b: streamclip results in audio sync issues about 20% of the time, so I use it only as a last resort when I need to repair broken files. Since probably < 10% of my shows have breaks, the casualty rate is <2% of shows that I cannot get a clean file to burn from. I have not had good luck running a streamclip fixed file through rtvedit, so I edit these manually in streamclip.

3a: for some reason rtvcnvt results in audio sync issues about 30-40% of the time. I have yet to have a problem with sync or otherwise burning directly from the rtveditted files. This seems exactly oposite of what most find, so I don't know what's up here.

4. There are probably free ways to do this, but toast works well, adds simple menus, and one of the latest patches specifically adds support to improve audio sync on PVR content. I think it was about this time that I stopped using rtvcnvt and had better luck burning rtvedit files direct.

Rob

[Jeff D]

Funny that someone over on DDB posted a thread on his technique on how to autor DVDs easily with the tivo files. Silly that the guy came up wiht the long technique that costs money on software were there's a free tool that does it all. Not the best at authoring DVDs, but it does work.


The time you'll notice sync issues (at least in my experience) is with LONG programs, greater than 2 or 2.5 hrs. There seems to always be a clock drift that doesn't get noticed until it runs for an extended period of time (2+ hrs). I believe the rtvtools stuff corrects the problem and allows the files to play correctly.

So, despite others and yourself having luck with the 1hr programs there could be issues. Just know that going in.

[plyons10]

I appreciate the more detailed comments.

My real purpose in starting this thread was to let people know that for many users, there is no need to make this process expensive and complicated.

[seank]

One thing to keep in mind is that mpegs from a replaytv in medium or high format might have bitrates that exceed the official DVD spec. Since the mpeg bitrates are variable, this might not always be the case. Some DVD players might choke if the bitrate exceeds the official DVD spec.

From what I understand, you are safer using Peter's simple method if you use standard replaytv recordings.

-Sean