It was just so frustrating. The TiVo produces .ty files, which are little more than wrappers around an MPEG-2 file. So I dutifully acquired tyc and built it for Mac OS X. Now I can get the MPEGs out. First problem, QuickTime doesn't grok 'em.
So out comes the wallet and I buy the QuickTime MPEG2 component ($20). Now I can play my MPEGs. W00t! The interface feels sluggish, but that's okay. But I can't edit my MPEGs! Oh wait, I need QuickTime Pro to edit. Ok!
$30 later, I can edit. Well, I can edit regular Quicktime files and some other video formats. But not MPEG. What? At this point I do what everyone does, corral my favourite Quicktime engineer at a party at WWDC. I whined at him about it and he very patiently explained to me how Quicktime's video model doesn't really fit with MPEG2 very well. MPEG, like all the good codecs, periodically encodes an entire standalone frame (a key frame) and until the next keyframe encodes only what's changed on the screen. One way it saves space is to say "hey, this bit in the last frame has moved over here in this frame". That's okay, and Quicktime can deal with that--most codecs do that. But MPEG can also say "hey, this bit in this frame comes from this bit in this future frame", so there are forward dependencies as well. This makes life hell for QuickTime. Or at least, that's what I think he said--I was drinking a lot at the time and it was loud and past my bedtime.
So anyhoo, QuickTime with all its expensive addons turns out to be only good for playing back the movies. Strewth, I might as well have saved my money and used VLC. It's free and also plays back formats that Quicktime horks on, like those bloody AVI files that Microsoft people insist on creating.
Ahem. Ok, anyway so there I am able to watch the TV shows on my Mac. But how do I burn to DVD? I can just create a filesystem and slap the MPEGs in there, but that means I can only play them on another computer. What if I want to play them on a DVD player (e.g., "Tech-deprived neighbour, you have got to see this Daily Show with the Spice Girls, it's hilarious!")? Obviously I use DVD burning software.
And which DVD burning software should I use? Roxio Toast 6 Titanium got good press, so away I go. This time I'm learning, and I try on a friend's machine. Good thing I didn't shell out $80 for Toast, as while it will happily re-encode the MPEG to DVD specifications, it screws up the drop frame flag.
It was easy, for a reason I haven't yet figured out, for NTSC to be broadcast as 29.97 frames per second. That was great for analog TVs, but sucks for digital where programmers want everything to be an even number. So you can get NTSC in a 30fps variety. There's a flag in the MPEG header to say "hey, this says 30 because I only have an int to represent frame rate, but really it's 29.97, so you'll have to fudge two frame a minute except for every tenth minute (!) to keep in sync with the audio. This isn't happening with the DVDs I burn with Toast, so I end up with video out of sync with audio. Mostly bearable on a 30m Daily Show episode, but unsurvivable by the end of a two hour movie.
So, score one for me: I didn't buy Toast. What about Apple's DVD authoring software? Out comes my iLife box ($50) and I install iDVD. Nope, can't burn from MPEG. I have to convert to DV before I can use iDVD. This takes too long and uses too much disk space. What about third party tools? MPEG2Works ($10) is a wrapper around free tools, and they choke partway through conversion.
So the hell with it. I fire up the old Windows machine and google, and discover this helpful page. And the software it points to ... just works! And it's free! And it lets me edit movies and creates the DVD filesystem for me. I can use Nero ($76) on the PC or Toast on the Mac to do the actual burning et voila! DVDs I can play in my DVD player.
So, lesson learned. For some things, the Mac doesn't "just work". Windows might be buggy malware-infested crapware that is impossible for me to depend on for a living, but when it comes to things that make the RIAA and MPAA twitch reflexively, buggy and filled with an infinite number of teenage monkey hackers beats stable and used by crusty old farts like myself.
--Nat
Nat Torkington is conference planner for the Open Source Convention, OSCON Europe, and other O'Reilly conferences. He was project manager for Perl 6, is on the board of The Perl Foundation, and is a frequent speaker on open source topics. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook.
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