Here's my plan.
We have acres of old videos - 20 years worth. Our VCR is dead and anyway it's time to move on.
My idea is to capture the video to a big external USB drive, point iTunes at it and then stream it from the PC upstairs to something like an Apple TV downstairs, thus making it easy to find and see old stuff quickly.
I have discovered there are a million ways to skin this cat. I have got a capture card that an old VCR will feed, and that creates a vob (dvd style) image on the USB disc in real time quite nicely. But I've hit a major stumbling block.
Converting the video files to mp4, which is what iTunes seems to want, takes a VERY long time. In the order of three to four hours per 20 minutes of film. I've tried a couple of free converters so far.
The ones I have actually done are streaming just fine via iTunes, and play well. It's just so slow.
So, in brief, am I doing something massively wrong, or does it in fact really take as long as this to convert vob files to mp4 files? If it does then I might have to rethink the whole idea, as hundreds of hours of video is going to take me the rest of my life to do.
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I think you are creating the wrong file in the first place.
I would be capturing straight to Avi.
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As Zero says, capture straight to an MP4 video container makes more sense. But make sure the format you choose is compatible with the device that will play it. Natively, Apple does not support AVI as a video container. What a surprise - not.
A fast way of converting your DVD files (the VOB files are MPEG2) is to use Handbrake. It would take maybe 20 minutes on a fairly fast PC.
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Yep, Z is right, keep 'em larger as I think iTunes will generally downsize them for use on a portable device and quality will suffer.
I have all my "multimedia" on a network drive and have a small footprint PC (Acer) under my main telly with DVI out and digitally connected to the home theatre. That way not only can I play my multimedia files (using Windows media Player or similar) but also we can browse the internet together from our armchairs when shopping (e.g. for holidays) and can also view photos, listen to music or whatever.
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I'm using Handbrake, and chose the Apple TV preset. (iTunes won't seem to touch anything except an mp4 or a m4v file, whatever that might mean). 3 to 4 hours to encode. My original 1.5GB or so comes down by a factor of three.
Manky PC (it's about three years old) or some other setting I need to alter in the incomprehensible depths of the software?
Just tried another bit of software - bit quicker but the audio is miles off.
This might be one of those game isn't worth the candle exercises.
Edit: The Pinaccle DVD capture thingy I've got won't capture to anything except a VOB and associated support files.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Thu 23 Dec 10 at 17:12
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Are you sure?
With the drivers it should be seen by other capture programs, MS movie maker for example, that can save the file in other formats,
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Ah, hadn't thought of that. I'll see if I have movie maker. It's running something weird like Vista Enterprise, so heaven knows. It's a work PC, not something I chose for home use.
Thanks for the heads up. Something else to explore.
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Even for a 3 year old PC, I am surprised Handbrake is taking that long. My 4 year old desktop with a Pentium 4 3.6GHz would be a lot faster than that.
What graphic card do you have? If you have a recent Nvidia one then you could try Badaboom to use the GPU on the graphic card. You'd need to be sure the resultant file worked for iTunes and the use you intend, e.g. Apple TV (which is not very flexible without hacking and the latest ones run the same operating system as the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch - namely iOS 4.2).
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The graphics card is of a vintage to match the machine, and is a Radeon of some sort I think. Not exactly high powered. So no recent Nvidia.
To be fair, I have another brand new work PC which is bound to be a better bet, but every time I think about actually plugging it in and getting it all set up I lose the will to live, so haven't bothered. But if processing oomph will help then perhaps I will spend 48 hours solid downloading windows updates or whatever it takes these days.
I liked the idea of Apple TV because as I understand it we could drive the thing from the iPhone, and hopefully Mrs C might understand that. She never has got the hang of turning on the TV, getting to the right channel and getting sound from the amp. An epg might as well be Martian - she can cope with press the "channel plus" button on the remote and that's all, so with 200 channels odd she basically only watches the first few. Amazing, as she's actually very bright, as long as it's not electronic goods.
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>> Ah, hadn't thought of that. I'll see if I have movie maker. It's running something
>> weird like Vista Enterprise, so heaven knows. It's a work PC, not something I chose
>> for home use.
>>
Should be a free download from Microsoft if that's a viable option for a work machine.
edit
www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d6ba5972-328e-4df7-8f9d-068fc0f80cfc&displaylang=en
should do as you're not looking to burn the captured video to DVD
Last edited by: spamcan61 on Thu 23 Dec 10 at 17:44
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Thanks Spamcan - I'll give that a go.
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An update.
Spent most of the Christmas period on this (what else is there to do)?
I won't list the multiple failure points, but suffice it to to say the whole idea is binned beyond redemption. It's was not an easy or user friendly experience, and I've lost patience with trying to get everything (or anything in fact) to work together to give any results in any sensible time.
On the plus side I think the time has come to can the home broadband entirely, given that we have very little use for it, get rid of the Virgin box and use the time more productively - get some reading done!
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Getting video into iTunes - Zero
