Eureka!
What a surprise! I’ve finally done it! Yes, I’ve finally taken a video stream off our Dish 501 PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and transcoded it on the pc… with no audio sync issues!
Odn stands with his legs apart proudly making a V sign with his right hand toward the camera shouting VICTORY!
I don’t know how long or how many sleepless nights I’ve devoted to video conversion, editing and the holy grail of saving perfect digital copies from our PVR but I’ve finally done it and it feels great! It’s kinda like an RPG I kept dying right before gaining a level with various problems but now I’m level 2 in video conversion! Woohoo.
I didn’t even plan on doing this today it just kinda happened.
So how do you do it? Well I think I’ll write a tutorial one of these days (nothing too technical) to help others. Lets just say for now that TMPGEnc rocks!
After that fun and unexpected discovery I decided to look for a good DVD player since Parr’s mom has been wanting one. We’ll I want one too but it’s easier to justify when it’s for someone else. I started out my search looking for players that could handle the DIVX format. I figured I could save/reuse all my existing video on the computer without having to transcode anything.
We’ll a few hours later I had come to the horrible conclusion that yes, there are DVD players that can handle DIVX, OGG and even had hard drives and ethernet in them. The bad news? All of them currently act like a windows machine. Crashing, lock ups, finicky about media and worse. Bleah!
You know, I love computers. I really do. More that most people realize I think. I do not however want a big complex overkill of a machine for every task.
I do not want to troubleshoot my toasters micro operating system because it doesn’t like bagels. I don’t want my cars steering system freezing up on me and I certainly don’t want my automatic star trek doors to not open because I lost too much weight.
Some things are best done specialized. Like when you call a plumber, he may not be a good music teacher but he sure can stop that leak.
Specialization is a good thing.
Think I’ll go buy a regular DVD player tomorrow. Maybe with that nice Gift Certificate Dj Clawz gave me for the wedding.
