Cornell vs. Hahvahd, CSTV, and Tivo

If anyone out there get's CSTV, and happens to have a Tivo, could they record the game tomorrow night? It would be REALLY nice to convert the Lynah East game onto a high quality DVD for posterity sake...

I am volunteering to do the conversion if I could somehow get the files.

I've already set my TiVo, but how would I send it to you?

And don't forget CSTV Primetime that starts at 7:30. They usually end that with a preview of the upcoming game!

Well, too late to set that, since I'm going straight from work to John Harvard's. Oh well...

How large would a 3 hour file be? Do you have a DVD burner? Where do you live?

I'm sure we can figure some way of transferring the file.

RedAR wrote:

How large would a 3 hour file be?

No idea. Keep in mind, I know nothing about all of this technological stuff. I'm still excited because I have two VCR's hooked together that let me copy videos.

Do you have a DVD burner?

No - see above.

Where do you live?

Belmont, MA - a mile outside of Cambridge.

RedAR wrote:

How large would a 3 hour file be?

No idea. Keep in mind, I know nothing about all of this technological stuff. I'm still excited that I have two VCR's hooked up together to let me copy videos.

Do you have a DVD burner?

No - see above.

Where do you live?

Belmont, MA - a mile outside of Cambridge.

I am in Cambridge, so we could probably arrange for me stop by to somehow transfer the file (I have a 160GB external HD, which I am certain is enough capacity to hold the entire game).

Let's email after the game to see what can be done.

Age, any pointers on transferring video files from Tivo to a Mac?

I usually just run S-Video and RCA audio out of the TiVo into a DV bridge straight into my mac and capture on-the-fly while it's playing. Extracting the files from the TiVo would require adding an ethernet card to the TiVo and doing some hacking, so that's probably not a good option. If you have a laptop with about 30G free and a Firewire (IEEE 1394) port, and a DV bridge, you could theoretically go over and capture in one shot. Though the prospect of a 3 hour capture on-the-fly without dropping frames or crashing seems daunting on a Windows machine. Only had trouble doing that once on a Mac. For the sake of thoroughness, to capture on-the-fly using Final Cut Pro (Capture Now), you can only do 30 minutes at a time in FCP 3. FCP 2 will go as as long as it can. You need to change the preferences in FCP 4 to do more than 30 minutes, which is the default setting. So, uhh, don't use version 3.

Another option would be to capture from the TiVo to a digital camcorder in 1-hour chunks, then dump that via Firewire to a computer and put it all together.

Unfortunately I have Dish Network and they still haven't picked up CSTV, so no, I don't have it

Thanks Age for your advice.

I just got myself a dual 2.0 G5, and though it's here primarily to run some simulations, I figure I can give it a "rest" one night and let it burn some DVD's.

I still do have my TiBook, so getting it over hopefully won't be too much of a problem.

Sully, can you email me, and perhaps we can work out some time when I might be able to copy from your Tivo?

Do you have a DV bridge? I used to have a Hollywood Dazzle, which I used for the last 2 DVDs, but the Formac one's a bit better. Hoping to get one of those soon.

EDIT: (and 25-30GB free on your laptop? If your external 160 is firewire, you may be pushing it doing DV capture and write to disk on the same 400MBps Firewire channel)



Post Edited (01-12-04 11:18)

I do have a firewire pcmcia firewire card. What is the bandwidth on the pcmcia slot? Also, for the formac dv bridge, I wouldn't need the TVR version if I'm just doing a on-the-fly capture, right?

Except for the G5's which are now 800 Mbps (and the only 800's at this point that I know of) any IEEE-1394 is 400Mbps. That, of course is a theoretical upper limit. On top of that, you're dealing with the PCMCIA bus limitations, which might max out at less than that, but I'm not positive.

Now, you said you're using a TiBook, which has built-in Firewire. Are you suggesting using the built-in Firewire for the DV bridge and the PCMCIA card for the external drive? If that's the case, you should be ok. It might even work with just the built-in Firewire if the external drive has 2 firewire ports (TiVo->DV bridge->external drive->laptop), but I'm not sure.

Yeah, I was thinking of connecting the DV bridge to the built-in firewire, and the external hd to the pcmcia slot. I think that should do it (of course, I have to get the DV bridge). The other hitch is if Sully will let me stop by to grab the video.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, some of the newer Powerbooks (aluminum) has Firewire 800 built-in. That doesn't really help here, since I don't have a newer Powerbook.



Post Edited (01-12-04 13:51)

RedAR wrote:
Also, if I'm not mistaken, some of the newer Powerbooks (aluminum) has Firewire 800 built-in.

Yeah, the 15" and 17", but since you said TiBook, I was alread rambling a bit and decided to be breif(er).

Unfortunately, I've run into a snag in terms of converting the TiVo feed to DV. I got myself a DV bridge, and tried to bring the video into my computer, but while the audio came through, the video wouldn't. I've tried importing in both Final Cut Pro and in iMovie.

Sully and I are planning on trying again, and I would love to get some info on what I may be doing incorrectly. If anyone (Age?) could give me some pointers, I would really appreciate it.

My next attempt will be to try to run the feed directly into a DV camera, but I have to get my hands on a DV camera first.

I'll try to keep you all updated, and if I can get the video onto my computer, then I should be able to create DVD's (at cost) for everyone.

redar,
if you are able to convert it into pretty much any format (mpeg, mpeg2, mpeg3, avi, etc.) i should be able to figure out how to convert it to dv format and then burn it. i am going to be doign the same thing with some tv shows that were recorded with a tv tuner card that i want to burn on dvd. i can let u know what happens with those if you get stuck. i also hope to get a digital camcorder that can convert vhs/s-video into video files on computers that can then get burned. lemme know

He needs to get it as DV before any other format. I've been a slacker, but I'll see if I can help.

Update:

Video has been transfered to my computer, and I've done the first round of editing. Still, it's 9 minutes too long, so I'm trying to find things I can cut out. There is an interview with Mike Eaves regarding the WJC, and I figure I can cut that entire segment out. That'll leave in Adam speaking out about the Div. III thingy.

I'll keep you posted when I've actually burned a DVD.

redar
if u have a good internet connection you could always upload it to my ftp server too. it will take a while but if you feel inclined...when it is done of course

Since you've already got the footage down and almost ready to go, if you can make a DVD image with all the requisite VOB files, just run it through DVDShrink, and it will automatically size the whole project down for you, no need to cut anything.
Er, that is of course if you have a pc, I don't know if that program is coded for Mac.

For anyone else out there who is interested, my windoze notebook was able to go from a DV deck to an external 160 to the computer. no frames dropped. On-the-fly didn't work so well, and it turned out that pushing to DV tape was better anyway, because the timecodes are laid down, and some programs allow batch capture, so you can scan through and skip the commercials.

/me checks the Mac-PC fire for some embers and pokes them...

Muahaha. My hockey game DVDs were on-the-fly DV captures to my Mac from my TiVo with no dropped frame. 3+ hours, no problem. And on a 3-year old Mac at that

As for RedAR's issue, I think he's using iDVD or something (ick). The bitrate is variable with DVD Studio Pro. If iDVD will let you build the DVD on your drive and it comes in over 4.5G, you could use something like DVD2One to recompress it to fit on a DVD.

Yeah, weaning myself off of half-decent hard drives and systems and onto a notebook hasn't given the greatest results. I bet you could dig up an old mac still using SCSI and get better performance than my <pause to access drive> crappy <HD light flashes> setup. 512MB of RAM and winduhs still has to drop everything it's doing just to cache some data.
Heck, for that matter, maybe I should go out and buy an Amiga off of ebay. They're still good enough for some cable broadcasters...

Age,

Yeah, because I've never done any video editing apart from iMovie, and the only DVD I've ever burned is using iDVD, that is the route I'm taking. I do have access to Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, but don't have to time to fiddle to figure out how to do things there.

The game was captured using iMovie, and has been edited (commercials removed), and is ready to be burned. I was intending to use iDVD 4, which allows for 2 hours at full quality. I'm sure it'll allow longer videos if the quality is reduced, but I'd prefer not to do that.

If you can guide me in getting my edited iMovie files (with chapters predefined) into DVD Studio Pro for burning, then by all means, I'd rather do that. Otherwise, I'll have to cut some footage since I don't want to lower the quality of the video of the game.

D! wrote:


Heck, for that matter, maybe I should go out and buy an Amiga off of ebay. They're still good enough for some cable broadcasters...

I've got a NeXT Dimension you can buy. Even does composite and svideo...