Multimedia forum: Best way to save TIVO shows to DVD?

My best advise would be to forget using the computer and go directly from Tivo to a cheap DVD burner. I picked one up at Walmart for $150 that does a fine job, even burning in 2,4 or 6 hour mode. When my DVR starts to fill up, I burn movies to the DVD using DVD-RW disks and they even will play on my computer.

This option is not available for us DirecTV folks. Don't know why, and the rep couldn't tell me either. I guess I'm looking for a software solution. Thanks for the link to the Tivo forum.

Tony

Mr. Scotty,
I also have over 200 movies that I would like to transfer to DVD. I was talking to another guy who wanted to build me a system for over $3000.00 to do this.
You say you are 80, well I am 64 and not near that stupid. I knew there had to be a simpler and cheaper way.
I have the Tivo, VHS player/recorder, Computer {Dell 4700} With DVD burner. I also have several stand alone DVD player/burners.
Could you possibly start me in the right direction to accomplish this?
Anything you could do will be greatly appreciated.
You can contact me by email if you wish.
Thanks,
JT

hey, my tivo is almost full and i need to make room but i dont want to delete my shows so i need to burn them to a dvd. i do not want to buy a dvd burner right now, so is there an easy way to do it without buying a dvd burner?

my tivo is getting filled and I would like to save some of the movies and other shows to a DVD-R. Can you tell me how to get started using a DVD burner directly from the tivo.

Nice to hear someone else feels my pain! I appreciate all the suggestions, I have tried Ulead MF3 and plan to buy it. Do you think the Pinnacle breakout box would really capture better than the breakout box that came with the All-in-Wonder, if I used the Pinnacle software?

I used the SVHS and composite audio inputs of said breakout box and the ATI software to capture, and finally got my mpeg converted by MF3 and burned with DVDShrink onto a standard DVD, the MF3 burner didn't seem to recognize the dual-layer media. Results were acceptable, but inferior to the original Tivo recording. I'm just wondering how much better the Pinnacle breakout box could be than the ATI.

Again thanks for the excellent answer.

Tony

I appreciate your taking the time to help.

Well, dvd players can only understand the _ts file format; but here's the catch -- the _ts format is actually mpeg-2 by another name. So, once you convert a file to the mpeg format, with the appropriate compression for the amount of time/video quality that you want to burn to dvd, the dvd conversion process is simply a file copy/merge/rename one.

That is why I use Pinnacle Studio to do the initial conversion to mpeg & Ulead MovieFactory to do the burn. Moviefactory is savvy enough to just copy & append the smaller mpeg files I make into video_ts files & then quickly burn them. I have done a complete dvd in 29 minutes using 4000 Kbps compression (= 2 hours of video per dvd) Normal Hollywood commercial dvd's use about the same compression on 2 layer discs (4 hrs/disc). You can drop to about 2500 to get 4 hours per disc, with a corresponding loss of quality.

The basic law of PC video conversion (cpu-based) is 4 to 1. That means 4 minutes of processing time to render 1 minute of mpeg video. Now, if you go from mpeg to mpeg, that is a waste. If you go from high quality DV or avi to mpeg, that is a necessity. Using a high-capacity hyper-threaded cpu will help a little, but is mostly useful if you edit video & add special effects, etc. The cpu can then handle the multiple "layers" of video more quickly; but the dv to mpeg conversion is still a slow deal.

Only dedicated conversion hardware can convert on-the-fly in real time. This kind of hardware is readily available in dvr/dvd combo recorders. These are dvd recorders with hard drive storage & limited editing capabilities. I actually opted for one of these instead of TiVo to use with my Directv box. With it, I can record at a preselected compression to edit & then transfer to dvd internally. These units are very limited in the types of disc format they will accept. Basically it is just dvd-r, with maybe a dvd-rw or dvd-ram 2nd option.

If you want to use a PC, however, it will take 16 hours processing time to cram 4 hours of recording on 1 dvd.

I cope with the process by dividing my video into 10 minute chunks, at convenient break points. I can easily wait 40 minutes to process each chunk individually & then assemble them with MovieFactory. My MovieFactory is set to render mpeg to slightly higher quality than I have already rendered using Studio (4500 vs. 4000). Therefore, since it cannot compress upward, it accepts the already rendered mpeg files & just assembles them into video_ts on my hard drive, which takes less than 15 minutes for 4+ Gb, and burns the dvd at 2.4 to 4x, depending on disc type, in my Sony 4-way burner (dvd+-r/rw, external firewire).

The +r discs burn a little faster than the -r. The MovieFactory disc capacity bar gives very good estimates of remaining space & warns me when I cut the fill point too close. Using this method, I practically never have a burn failure or error message. I also have multiple hard drives in my system, both internal & external. I use one as my source & a different one as my temp work space. This is very important in reducing the time needed to render the video from avi to mpeg to video_ts.

Doing it all on a single drive means that one drive controller is both reading & writing at the same time. Transferring the files from drive to drive means that one controller is reading while the other is writing. Since it is impossible for 1 controller to be in 2 places on a drive disk at once to perform the read operation & the write operation together, I save considerable time using 2 disks. My system even has a scsi controller card and a scsi 160 hard drive, which is really fast for internal disk transfers.

It is also very inportant to defrag the drive that will be capturing & processing the video just before every operation. Maximizing free space allows the drive to work at its highest possible speed. Also, never fill the drive to more than 50% capacity to give it working space.

I would have recommended the full version of Pinnacle Studio over the SE edition. You really don't know what was cut out of the software to make the "lite" version and the SE may have been written to support only certain types of hardware.

The full versions of both MovieFactory & Pinnacle Studio offer pre-defined profiles of mpeg video file types. I take the high quality dvd file type and modify the video compression to 4000 Kbps, or 4 Mbits, to create a custom file type. I then capture in dv format, which creates avi files at something like 1 Meg per minute of video. After I edit my video, which is basically to trim the leader & trailer off & cut out commercials, I have Studio make an mpeg file to my specs.

When I create a disc with MovieFactory, I set the same mpeg compression specs, that I used for Pinnacle Studio, in a custom file type. Then I import the Studio-created mpegs directly, watch the disc filler bar at the bottom of the screen until I reach a maximum of 4.1 Gigs, and page through to the last screen where it finally creates a disc. I have played with creating just the file structure on my hard drive, to burn later with Nero, and with creating an iso image, to do the same. But my favorite way is to just let the MovieFactory do the burn itself. The disc image & file folder techniques were mainly used when I was close to overloading the dvd disc's capacity & wanted to see if the final product would fit on the disc before actually trying a burn (cuts down on failures).

Trying to "shrink" a video to force it to fit on a dvd is going to destroy the video quality, because the shrink process is just recompressing the file to a lower bitstream count. Uncompressed video is 10 Mbit/second. 2 hour dvd quality is 4-5 Mbits and 4 hour dvd quality is 2-3 Mbits. At the 4 hour quality, you can already see quite a bit of loss in video quality. Stuffing 6 or more hours of video on a disc will produce unsatisfactory video with pixelation, digital color flattening, & loss of clarity. If you can find a way to split the video into 4 hours maximum time per disc, you will be pleased with the results. Any more than that will be disappointing. Remember, discs take less space than tapes. So it won't hurt to replace 1 6-hr tape with 3 2-hr discs.

Perhaps as disc capacity improves & the technology matures to higher capacity home burners, you may be able to hold more on a disc. For now, we have to respect the limitations of what is available.

What I'm trying to say (but not very well) is that it May Be possible to capture in the correct mpeg formt, but don't bet on it. Mpeg capture hardware usually has a fixed capture compression; and that compression most likely is not satisfactory for your particular needs. Converting to the correct compression is a 4-1 realtime process that must be done in your pc. Capturing in an mpeg format that your burning software doesn't like still involves that 4-1 process.

My solution, which works for me, is to capture in high quality (because my breakout box requires cpu "help" that my 1.3 GHz cpu cannot provide, the minimum speed is 1.7 GHz). I have tried a breakout box that does all the conversion work itself; but the video results were unsatisfactory.

I capture in small increments, 10-15 minutes, 20 minutes tops. I edit & then render each segment into dvd 2-4 hr/disc compression using Pinnacle Studio. This is the 4 to 1 time waster. Using MovieFactory to later assemble the pieces & burn them avoids a repeat rendering if, & only if, I set the mpeg compression & audio specs to be the same as in the Pinnacle software.

I avoid burning with Pinnacle mainly because the MovieFactory seems to be faster (sic) AND MovieFactory has an excellent disc capacity gauge. This last has saved me a lot of time & wasted discs due to bad burns.

I edit with Pinnacle because it is easier than most other packages to scan, cut, layout, & add transitions. It is also very "interactive" about the conversion process. It actually displays each key frame that it renders in realtime as the process takes place. So you can see the video as it is being saved (without sound being played back, but that is being rendered, too). The resulting mpeg files are ready for dvd. They are playable on the computer & only need a file format conversion to the file names that a dvd player can accept. Remember that I said mpeg-2 & video_ts are actually the same file format with 2 different names? MovieFactory simply copies the rendered (from Pinnacle) mpg files to a temp area on your hard drive, merges multiple files together into 1 GB _ts files, & creates the menu, index, & intro files that meet the dvd player spec.

Once I use Pinnacle to edit & render my video, the time-intensive work is done. MovieFactory just assembles the imported videos into dvd-friendly chunks, gives it dvd-friendly names, & burns the whole thing to disc. It can convert & burn 4.2 GB of video (a full disc) in under 30 minutes. The file translation takes about 10 minutes & the burn about 20. Faster discs & burners can go quicker than older, slower ones. All the time-consuming work was already done by Pinnacle.

However, using this method, I can spend 2 hrs. per night rendering, and still be able to use my PC for limited other work (rendering likes to take 100% cpu capacity), and have everything pre-formatted for a simple collect, copy, & burn that takes 1/2 hour when I am ready. Try multi-tasking during an all-at-once edit/burn & you could lose everything! I can also erase the original, high quality, space-gobbling unedited video after I have created & viewed the rendered mpeg files.

To sum: I capture, edit & render with Pinnacle (the 4-1 process). I create the menu & burn with MovieFactory (about 1/2 hour). Pinnacle seems to take much longer to create & burn a dvd than MovieFactory and I don't like the menu layout options as much.

As for the dedicated set-top dvr/dvd recorder, I can record up to 4 hours per dvd with acceptable video quality on a 42" plasma screen. It takes 2 hours max dvd size to equal Hollywood commercial dvd video (actually, this quality equals Superbit dvd quality). Commercial dvd's are recorded at 4-5 Mbit/second. 5-6 Mbit/sec is the 2 hr per disc compression. 8-10 Mbits give 1 hr per disc. 3-4 Mbits will permit as much as 4 hours per disc.

I generally use the set top unit to record 2 hour or 4 hour discs, no longer than that. The nice thing is that I can record to the unit's hard drive in the compression that I want to burn my disc at (SP for 2 hours, & LP for 4 hours). I can then edit the video right on the unit's hard drive and dub to dvd at high speed, which just copies the edited video file directly, with no further conversion. The high speed dub takes maybe 30 minutes per dvd & the finishing process, which makes it viewable on virtually any dvd player, takes another 3 minutes. The video compression is done real-time right in the recorder.

I have a Panasonic DMR-E85H with a 120 GB hard drive & up to 32x dvd recording. I record some shows using the unit's hard drive & dvd, & export some others to my PC for recording there. The stuff I export is usually short clips from multiple shows that I want to add fades, etc. to. The dvr doesn't do fancy editing, just scene cuts & order rearrangements. I like it because the video quality is as good as the best TiVo quality & recording is quick & easy. The price is high, about $600. For my purposes, which include transferring tapes to digital & saving some TV shows, sans commercials, it is the perfect solution. I can do 2 or even 3 dvd's a night, once the hard drive originals are edited.

For example, you can record an entire football game to the unit's hard drive at the LP compression (which fits 4 hours on a dvd), spend 1/2 to 3/4 hour finding & editing out the commercials (with exact frame precision), & probably fit it all on a single dvd.

You can dub to dvd at high speed, which is probably under an hour, and finish the disc to make it playable on regular set top players. DVD-R discs have been on sale for as little as 40 cents each, recently. So, an entire football game takes 1/2 hour of work to prep & another hour to burn & finalize. You don't have to lose use of your pc while the thing is rendering & you can go away, or do something else while the set top unit is recording or dubbing or finalizing.

The best part, for me, is not having to pay extra for the TiVo service. I just recorded the entire Spider-man cartoon series from 1997 to 6 dvds over a period of a few weeks, with every episode in sequence -- all in the set top unit. Since the eps still have not all been released commercially, & those that have are out of sequence, I have a unique personal collection. Once I subtract the potential cost of ownership from buying all of the commercial releases, & the value to me of my labor just finding the darn things, I have almost paid for the Panasonic unit just on those recordings, alone. And I can discard all of the video tapes that I had of the series, saving storage space, too.

Don't ask, the recordings are finalized & therefore not copyable. They are for my private collection, only.

The PC is used mostly for home video clips, & partial clips captured from the airwaves that need storage & assembly, along with some editing transitions to make the playback smoother. This is mainly because I, like you, hate the huge delays PCs need in order to render & burn video in dvd format.

My PC was less than 1 year old when I started video editing. At the time 3 GHz processors weren't available, & when they finally came out, the cost of that much power was prohibitive.

The cost of a computer with enough oomph to capture, edit, render, & then burn video in 1-2 hour chunks (as in a recorded TV show) is about $3000 (remember, it will need extras to cope with video capture & editing). You can get a cheaper one if you work only in short video clips that get assembled only at the very end for dvd mastering/burning. If the only work to be done is record, trim the unwanted parts, & burn a dvd, then the $600 DVR is the best solution at a fraction of the price.

Besides, it takes hours to capture & render video to dvd format. The DVR records in real time, can be set to the desired final disc capacity & then transferred in a high speed file copy operation.

So, for cost, the DVR is cheaper; and for time, the DVR takes much less. I use both, but reserve the short clips & home video for editing & adding fancy effects, etc., using a computer. For fast & simple copy/burn operations of professionally edited video (read movies & TV shows) the DVR is almost unbeatable.

I haven't tried Video ReDo, but then there are a lot of editors out there that I haven't tried. I have used Roxio, Nero, Ulead Video Studio, Ulead MovieFactory (not an editor, just a layout tool & burner), Pinnacle Studio, Pinnacle Liquid Edition, & Adobe Premiere. Of all editors, Pinnacle Studio was the most intuitively easy & Liquid Edition probably the most powerful (even over Adobe Premiere). A lot has to do with how pleased you finally are with the results.

The Pinnacle Studio does very little reprocessing. It only renders the video when you finally elect to save it in some format. It will save uncompressed video (avi), compressed (mpeg), or burn direct to dvd. So any reasonable package will be able to allow editing without reprocessing the original file, especially the dedicated video editors (as opposed to burning software add-ons).

If you have any video to edit, it might be worth your while to try downloading a demo & working on a copy of a short clip, just to see how it suits you.

If you like the results you get, post them.

A word of advice. If you have dvr files in the 10g range, forget about getting it all onto one dvd in a decent resolution. The standard dvd will take about 4.7g of data at a maximum. Your best bet is to use one of the video editing packages to split the file in two and render it to two separate dvd's. Yes I know, the new double layer dvd burners have double the capacity of burn on the proper media. But the software support for this advanced feature is spotty. And consider the economics: a single layer dvd goes for about 39 cents. A double layer dvd blank goes for 7 to 8 dollars. Be prepared for more $8 coasters by pushing the technology envelope.

I have never been able to record anythiong with this PC. I finally gave up trying. Nero is too complicated for me, so With Nwero in Germany, they are no help to me what-so-ever,I puirchased a Philips DVD Recorder, and now I copy from TV, VHS....Whatever. I have just completed changing 500 VHS movies that I have collected over the years, the quality is great, and I can choose how long to record from 1 hour up to 6........I hope this helps

Scotty
tiggerw@alltel.net

Yes but you are doomed to have all those nasty commercials forever intruding on that favorite movie of yours. Editing with the computer before commiting to dvd has its advantages.

Download Pavtube Video Converter. Convert your tivo files to SD video.Then burn to DVD via DVDFlick.
Click the Format bar and move to Common Video and then select a format from drop-down list. Click Settings button and set output size, bitrate and frame rate. Smaller bitrate value leads to a smaller output SD file, which occupies less space.

Pavtube video converter(35USD): http://www.pavtube.com/video_converter/
DVDFlick(Freeware): http://www.dvdflick.net/
DVDFlick supported format: http://www.dvdflick.net/features.php

PS: if you update to win7,Windows DVD Maker is not a bad choice.