Canopus ADVC300 vs Elgato Eyetv 250 for A to D video conversion

I need to digitize several shelves of old commercial and homemade VHS tapes and convert to DVD with iMovie/iDVD and Toast (I use iMovie 6). I have looked at the Canopus ADVC300 and Elgato Eyetv 250.
Would someone comment on how these 2 devices compare regarding quality, ease of use AV synch etc. Are there other products I should be considering.
Thanks,
Bill

Cannot comment on either, BUT:
I use the Canopus ADVC110 which does a superb job - and is cheaper than the 300!
AFAIK the Elgato is a TV tuner and recorder, but not a converter to DV that iMovie can use.

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FCP and the Elgato EyeTV 250 - Recording Live Gameplay

I have my Nintendo Wii connected to my Mac Pro, via the EyeTV 250. Due to the EyeTV's current limits, it is impossible to simultaneously record and play gameplay footage without a considerable amount of lag, using just the EyeTV software. The EyeTV FAQ suggests using a 3rd party program to get around this problem....
Another option is to use 3rd party software to capture what's happening on your display - you can isolate the EyeTV video window and record, while you're using EyeTV to play.
I am still fairly new to the world of digital video and editing (first year film student), and I am having trouble figuring this one out. How do I get this working? Any help would be appreciated!
Message was edited by: MuttonChopYaz
Message was edited by: MuttonChopYaz

I don't think there's any way to make FCP do this if that's what you're asking. You need some screen capture software.
SnapzPro is one, there are others.
http://www.eskimo.com/~pristine/screen.html
Message was edited by: J S Langham

Terratec Cinergy Hybrid T USB XS vs Elgato EyeTv 250 plus

Can anyone tell the difference in performance of those two. I have started to digitise my old VHS tapes and was wondering which will make it better.
Thank you

Elgato EyeTV Hybrid tips & tricks

I didnt know where else to put this so im posting this here. I'm looking for any tips & tricks or whatever you want to call it with the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid for Mac. Reason this being is because im using an Xbox 360 with this and i feel my experience could be much better, with quality and responce time.
I know all the Converting/Encoding whichever is all being done by the iMac so i suppose id have to live with the response time but is there anything i can do to the settings for quality? Anything you want to suggest please do, id be happy to try it and give feedback.
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There is no interface with the Eyetv to the Dish receiver that would permit channels to return. Your Eyetv is only as good as the channel the reciever is set to. In other words, your Eyetv will retrieve any channels that are not regulated by a reciever to interpolate them, ie: "Over the air" and/or a "straight cable connection" without a set top box. Whether it be a Dish network or a local cable company, any circumstance of a set top box will not be compatible with Eyetv for the lack of it's abilty to change the channels on that box. The only circumstance I have ever seen is when a viewing/recording device has an IR blaster that transmits the channel selection to that set top box and changes the channels much the same as you would with a remote. That being said, there is still the issue of that particular device knowing the IR codes to your particular box.
Your Eyetv is good for "Over the Air" and/or a straight Cable coax connection only. Sorry.
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.8)
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Eyetv 250 Program Guide

Hello, I have just purchased an Elgato Eyetv 250. I'm wondering how, or if, I can connect into my Rogers Cable TV program guide (Canada).
Could someone please help me with this? I need to decide whether or not to take the unit back to the store within a number of days.
Thanks,
DragonflySue

I don't even know where to direct you since neither of the things you mention are Apple products.
The iMac forum maybe?
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=132

ElGato's eyeTV 250?

Hi everyone,
I am looking for a way transfer my VHS tapes onto DVDs. I also want to record from TV if possible. I have been suggested to try eyeTV 250 by Apple. I am looking for good video quality. Can anyone who has used it provide me with some feedback? How is the output quality? are the videos full screen?
Feedback is much appreciated.
Rio.

I use EyeTV 500 all the time and have transferred about 300 tapes. Quality is dependent on the quality of your VHS tape. You can select progressive scan and that gives a bit better improvement over the quality of the original VHS. You can edit them easily enough then export to various formats (avi, mp4, dvd). Make sure you have Toast to burn to DVD and a fast cpu (3ghz). A one hour VHS takes up about 2 gig space.
I highly recommend the product and the procedure. I try and copy a tape every other day or so and if you have a large collection you can transfer everything over a period of a few months.
Tim...

EyeTV 250 Plus - Signal Loss

Anyone besides me have this issue with the 250 plus?
I have the Hauppauge 950Q from my Vista plugged into the Mac now to use with the EyeTV software. The signal is 75% strength and the quality is 100% 720p and 50% at best for 1080i. 720p I can see okay but the 1080i stops and goes once in a while.
With the 250 plus, I have 100% quality but 10%-20% strength with the 720p and then it's jumping percentages of quality on 1080i with the 10-20% strength. Both are way horrible.
Is the mac mini not powerful enough to run any tuner or is there a stronger HD tuner for Elgato EyeTV that anyone knows of?

Here is a link to the hardware requirements for the EyeTV 250 Plus. http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/250plus/product3.en.html
There is also some FAQs. http://support.elgato.com/index.php?m=knowledgebase&a=view&parentcategoryid=1&languageid=1&group=englishdefault
I would recommend posting your question on the Elgato forums. http://forums.elgato.com/
If you are unable to obtain a sufficiently detailed response there you can submit a ticket to their tech support. http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/support/select-support.en.en.html
Good Luck!

DIY Fusion drive with elgato, eyetv 3

I've got the imac 27" 2011, and I have set up a fusion drive and generally I have no issues with it.
However when watching TV (a waste of an imac i know) with elgato eyetv, it pauses every so often. Generally if you listen during this its because the main drive as reving up as its gone to sleep, I know in the system preferences I can tell it not to spin down, but that will cause the drive to eventually fail.
My questions are really to those who have a fusion drive (from the apple directly as a preinstalled build) if anyone else is running the elgato eyeTV 3 and experience anything similar?
Or to everyone else can the Fusion drive be altered so that the live TV stream gets written to the main Hard drive rather than to the SSD?
Any thoughts?

The drive will fail no matter what you do with it. That is the fact of hard drives and drives in general.
So stop putting it to sleep and stop the waiting.
No it can't be altered as that is what a Fusion drive is. The System determines what data gets written to each drive not the user. If you want to make that choice then you should not be using a Fusion drive setup.
Also with ANY Fusion drive When, Not If, Either drive Fails they both fail and you are left with Nothing. Kind of like RAID 0 (Zero).
I personally would never use a Fusion drive setup. Better to have a slightly bigger SSD and a secondary spinning drive to store data on. Like moving your "i" tunes, photo and other User/library files, Doc and Downloads, to the spinner and leaving the SSD for the OS and programs.

Can I view Timeline Playback via my Canopus ADVC300?

I have a Canopus ADVC300 attached to my Mac Pro via a Firewire connection. The composite video out is connected to a SD TV. Can I make the timeline playback to this TV as an external monitor? (I used to do this when I had my PC and used AVID Liquid.) I was able to "Print to Tape" and gat the video on the TV, but I'd like to be able to see the timeline playback directly. What would be the correct settings? Has anyone done this successfully? Please let me know.
Thanks
Art

Yes, you can. I have one and works just fine.
Set the video out to Apple firewire NTSC (or PAL), all frames, audio follows video.
Make sure your audio is also being fed from the canopus or you'll have playback sync issues.
fwiw, Print to Video is for sending to a VTR.
x

Using Canopus ADVC300 (or similar products...)

Hi - figured I'd start this in a new thread....
I'm trying to import a lot of old home movies into iMovie (or Final Cut) from both VHS and DVD. The usual DVD conversion tricks (Cinematize, etc.) get the job done but result in a LOT of noticeable quality loss, which is a big problem when dealing with bad quality home footage to begin with. I was thinking about investing in this Canopus ADVC300, which seems to be the perfect solution for my VHS tapes... but can I use this product for DVDs as well? I.e. can I plug a 3rd party DVD player into the Canopus and have it "clean it up" and convert to DV the same way it does to VHS? Is there another product that would do the same thing? I'm perfectly willing to invest in the $500 or so that the Canopus costs - but not if there's a better option or if this won't work for my purposes.
Any help or suggestions would be great -
Thanks!

REPEAT OF ANSWER POSTED ELSWHERE FOR YOU:
Will this product allow for conversion from a DVD player as well, or just VHS?
Yes. In fact, they will work with an device capable of outputting a composite and/or S-Video analog signals and mono/stereo analog audio signals that you would normally plug directly into your TV to watch -- TV tuner, Sat receiver, VHS, VHS-C, beta, Video8, Hi-8, camcorders, some digital cameras, DVD player, iPod, etc.
I'm able to put my DVD home movies into iMovie through Cinematize (using my computer's DVD drive), but the quality loss, combined with the quality loss of iDVD, is almost unbearable... especially since I'm using old, low-quality footage to begin with.
The preferred method here is to keep the content in a digital format rather than converting to analog and then recapturing to DV for use in an editor. Since it sounds as if these are personal, unencrypted DVD content, normally you would simply copy the the VOB title sets to your hard drive, convert them to an editor compatible format, import them to your editor, and re-edit as needed. The strategy here is to convert the moderately high distribution compression format to a low compression, high data rate compression format for editing. This process is not designed to improve the quality of your DVD content, but rather to prevent further loss in quality. When done properly, there should be little "visual" loss between the original DVD content and your final product. In fact you may be able to adjust contrast, brightness, or and/or saturation of the video if it is a poor as you indicate.

MyTV.PVR vs EyeTV 250...Is there a winner?

Hy everyone,
I was looking for opinions regarding myTV.PVR vs EyeTV 250.
Without knowing much about VHS tranfering and recording digitally via Cable TV and before I found out about the existence of EyeTV 250, I purchased myTV.PVR (which came with Eskape software). The salesman assured me that it was a good purchase but I guess they would say anything to sell products.
I told him that my intention was to transfer VHS tapes onto DVDs and also to record from Cable TV onto DVDs via my MacPro. I wanted to get the best video quality possible and something easy enough to use.
Now I'm wondering if I would have been better off with EyeTV 250 instead.
Which one gives better video and sound quality and has better options?
Any opinions?
Rio.
2x2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1GB RAM

I can answer. I've transferred about 300 vhs tapes over to DVD, AVI, MP4, etc.
Quality is dependent upon the quality of the VHS. I have VHS tapes that were created directly from digital video camcorder (medical procedures, surgery training) and the DVD quality is as good as any high quality commercial DVD. I have BetaMax tapes from the 70's and they burn to DVD from EyeTV as good if not better then their original quality. With EyeTV you have several quality options and can select Progressive Scan (which doubles the number of video lines for higher quality. You'll need at least 4Gigs of space for each VHS tape but once burned to DVD you can delete and move to the next.
Toast is the most superior EyeTV is built with Toast in mind. Simply drag an AVI or directly select Toast from EyeTV of any resulting VHS/Digital file that you capture and it will burn a fine DVD with Chapters, Titles, and more.
What I like most about EyeTV is the editing capabilities. You can cut out all the crap, re-edit the movie if you want to improve it (in case you are a budding movie editor yourself) and burn it to DVD.
As for easy - yes, it's pretty straight forward. If you have a two hour VHS movie, say a commercial release of an older James Bond (which is non-Macro, i.e., encrypted) movie it will take two hours to record it. Once recorded you can then edit the items you don't want (warnings, junk...) save the edited file (very quickly) then click on the EyeTV Toast icon and burn it to DVD. If using Progressive Scan you'll get a very high quality DVD. How much time required to burn the DVD depends. If you are using a 3Ghz Mac Pro with 8 Gigs of RAM (my system) it takes about 20-30 minutes.
If you have commercial VHS tapes that are encrypted (MacroVision is used) you'll need to obtain what some sellers call "an enhancer". This is small machine (size of two packs of cigarettes) that sits connected via RCA cables or via SVideo and reconnects out the opposite side to EyeTV, then your video is automatically decrypted.
The resulting DVD quality is "enhanced" and you get a fine quality DVD.
If you are copying over films or TV shows that you have recorded on VHS tapes then the quality is about as good as SVCD, depending on how well your antenna receives the signal. You'll have to cut out the commercials (easy to do with EyeTV) and the resulting DVD quality is as good if not a little better then the original VHS recording.
I did all of the above for about six months and finally realized I could copy a VHS tape via EyeTV and export it to high quality DiVX or AVI format which resulted in an average size of about 700megs. These media files play beautifully on a Mac using the DiVX player or RealMedia Player, QuickTime Pro, VLC and many more media players.
The nice part of the latter is that you can get four or five full high quality movies on a blank DVD. Thus, rather than four or five DVDs you get one DVD with for or five movies.
I hope this explains it all to you. Try buying a used EyeTV 200 off of eBay which is just as good as the EyeTV 250 and 500. They all use the latest EyeTV software and unless you have movies in High Density on VHS (which you won't) you don't need EyeTV 500 (that's what I have) but it does a fine job. Another Mac user that taught me much was a guy who bought a used EyeTV 200 on eBay for just $50. We exchanged DVDs we made from each system and they were both of excellent quality.
I hope this helps.
Tim...

Exporting files from Eyetv 250 plus to imovies09

I AM TRYING TO COPY VHS TAPES TO DVD DISC USING EYETV 250 PLUS. CAN COPY FILES TO EYETV FINE. IN EYETV THEY ARE ABOUT 3 GB. WHEN I EXPORT TO IMOVIES09 I GET 3 FILES, A THUMBNAIL FILE ABOUT 300000MB, A QUICKTIME FILE OF 3 GB AND A DV MOVIE FILE OF 30-40 GB. THIS IS FILLING MY COMPUTER VERY FAST.

A couple of thoughts...
The current version of EyeTV software is 3.3. Make sure you are on it.
You should be able to open the "Recordings" view of EyeTV.
Right Click on the recording you want. Click Export in the Pop Up menu. In the Format box, Choose "For iMovie 09"
Give it a place to save to, and click SAVE.
Now open iMovie. Click FILE/IMPORT/Movie... and navigate to the file you just created in EyeTV.

VHS plus CANOPUS ADVC300 to DVD without editing and hours of rendering....

I really need to capture video from my Canopus ADVC300 and save it in MPEG4 format so that I can create a DVD without wasting hours rendering the video. Currently I get a .MOV (i.e. quicktime) file and then iDVD spends hours rendering. My home DVD Recorder captures and writes DVD on the fly - isn't something like this available for the Mac? I am happy to save to HD then write the DVD but it's infeasible for me to capture (say) two hours of video which I don't even want to edit, only to have to wait hours and hours and hours for iDVD to render it before creating the DVD.
Hope I haven't been too unclear.

Hi!
i have an ADVC 300 which i bought from amazon, i need to convert my old analog video camera tapes into digital format in the PC , usuing the following :
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.007E.B00
SMC Version (system): 1.41f2
Serial Number (system): W89161YC71C
Hardware UUID: 7079659B-32F7-56F4-B0BD-7894E37684A6
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled
when i click in ADVC Picture controller 300 it opens and when i click on PREVIEW i cant see anything , i tried opening final cut pro to capture the videos with no luck, i use a firewire from Belkin which is a 9 pin to 6 Pin (800/400)
I need help
thank you

Canopus ADVC300-Is there anyway to use this converter with PE 13?

I recently upgraded to PE 13. It would not recognize the Firewire-connected Canopus ADVC300 as a capture device. A tecchie at Adobe told me that they removed this option (through the DVD Camcorder menu) in Version 13, which only allows WDM captures. I still have PE8, which, I suppose, I could use to input via the Canopus, as long as PE13 will read the project files. Any other suggestions to get PE13 to input the Canopus video converter? The ADVC300 cost me $300!!

In your earlier posts (orig & #3) above you mentioned that you have PE8 & PE10 --still installed-- which do capture via firewire (from the Canopus unit) you essentially already have everything need. Why mess around with any of the work-arounds offered by Adobe.
I too have PE10 and I have been very successfully using an earlier Canopus unit (ADVC100) for many years.
All you need to do is use the PE10 to capture your analog videos.
Then you can literally abandon the .prel (and all other PE10 created files. The only file(s) you need to keep are the .avi files.
Launch PE13 and copy/move/import the .avi files from the PE10 asset folder to the PE13 asset folder.
All of the recommend work-arounds will create .avi files --they too would have to be copied/moved/imported into PE13 the same way. The .avi files from PE10 are the same as those created by the work-arounds.
It is truly unfortunate that Adobe removed the firewire support in PE13.

Elgato TV Tuner for G4 Powerbook 17"

I have a G4 Powerbook [1.67GHz/1GB RAM running 10.3.9]. Does anyone have first hand experience with the Elgato TV tuner for Mac? Can you get a near, full screen image or is it some mean little window floating on the screen? Thanks for whatever you can contribute.
PowerBook 17" & G4 Quicksilver desktop Mac OS X (10.3.9)

I've had my ElGato TV tuner for several years. I really like it. It works like a charm on my pb G4. You get three choices of picture size, smalll, medium and full screen.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to connect the pb to the TV. Somehow, I just can't figure out how to connect the S-video and the audio. Or, is it all contained in the S-video? Can anyone explain and/or tell me what kind of cable and connections I need?

Canopus ADVC300 vs Elgato Eyetv 250 for A to D video conversion

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