Dumping Grounds

Every once in a while, a problem gets solved so elegantly that you wonder if someone is looking out for you. Today was one of those days, so hopefully with a little luck, I can get the Google-indexed, so if anyone has the same problem, they can solve it just as easily. (I am incidentally, the #1 indexed site for the phrase “Classic BMW sucks”, which I think is funny.)

I am sure I am not the first person to have gotten the idea of using the PVR-350 hardware MPEG encoder card for the purpose of digitizing video for your DVD Studio Pro projects without having to use Compressor (which, while versatile and elegant, is slow). However, there don’t seem to be many people acknowledging the problem I had with their incompatibility (which is not surprising, I guess, since one is a PC product, and one is a Mac product… maybe not everyone uses them together. Personally, I think it’s a great combo, since I don’t want my authoring machine (the Mac) tied up while I am digitizing video on the PC. The problem arises when you try to import the resulting .mpg files into DVD Studio Pro. You will get the incredibly informative message that tells you that the file is of an “incompatible format.”

Well, with that very helpful piece of information, I went about trying to get that file into Studio Pro. (Without re-rendering that file through Compressor, which defeats the whole purpose of using hardware encoding in the first place) I knew that Compressor outputs two files, one audio and one video, with timecodes to keep them in sync. The PVR-350, on the other hand, outputs one file, with both audio and video included, which Quicktime reports as “muxed.”

Well a little Google investigation on “DVD Studio Pro” and “Muxed” turns up what turns out to be a little miracle worker of a program, called MPEG Streamclip, by Squared 5. This application does a huge assortment of things, but the particular feature I needed was the “de-muxing” of MPEG files. The incompatibility seems to lie in the exact resolution I was using (NTSC standard - 740×486) which gets scaled to an exact 4×3 ratio. Specifying the output from MPEG Streamclip to be “scaled” and the audio file to be MP2, rather than AIFF (for maximum speed). The resulting file set goes into Studio Pro with no trouble at all, and it even associates the two, so that when you place the video into the current project, the audio automatically comes along for the ride.

MPEG Streamclip is also extremely fast. It successfully de-muxed a 2 GB MPEG file in about 10 minutes on my Powerbook G4 (1.25GHz) The same file would have taken around 2 hours to re-encode in Compressor. It’s fast BECAUSE it doesn’t re-encode. There is no loss in quality, as there would be in Compressor.

Oh, and by the way, did I mention that MPEG Streamclip is free? Completely free? Sans charge?

Sound too good to be true? Maybe it is, but it saved my butt this afternoon.

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