My obsession with NHK has payed off. I've been selected to be a Program Monitor. The welcome packet has arrived.

After getting a rooftop antenna for OTA TV, I discovered that channel 18.2 carried programming from NHK at some hours during the day. I became completely addicted and started wanting a way to timeshift the shows so I could watch them on my iPhone during lunch.

My thought on timeshifting was to treat TV shows like podcasts in iTunes. New shows update, old shows are removed, shows sync to iPhone automatically.

Elgato's EyeTV is the standard way most people would do this on a Mac. And it works great. But, not being able to leave well enough alone, I wanted to improve the builtin workflow of EyeTV and do it exactly how I wanted. There were a few dealbreakers with EyeTV that needed to be fixed.

Problems:

EyeTV  records massive raw MPG files, about 1GB per 30 minutes.

EyeTV gives no output options for cropping, exporting, or codec type to AppleTV or an iPhone.

EyeTV exports very slowly.

My local TV channel broadcasts the HD feed from Japan in a letterboxed 3:4 window. This makes reading subtitles very diffucult on a small screen.

Need a way to encode metadata into the file itself so it will read correctly on multiple configurations

Solutions:

Encode with Handbrake instead of EyeTV - allows for user-selectable output options, and will encode files to 1/4 their old size as mp4 files.This will allow more shows to fit on an iphone.

Handbrake also uses all 8-cores on my Mac resulting in much faster encodes.

Have files properly tagged and added to the iTunes library.

Have tagging metadata written directly into the file , not just the iTunes xml file.

With files properly imported in iTunes their watched status can be easily tracked, and old shows can be easily deleted.

Crop the letterboxed 3:4 image so it will fill a 16:9 screen.

Process:

There are many many programs on Mac to convert and manage video.

I downloaded and tried many of them, and everyone of them had some sort of failing. They wouldn't tag the shows correctly, wouldn't play nice with iTunes, etc etc.  Luckily, EyeTV comes with hooks for Applescript , and allows them to be triggered at various times such as when a recording begins or ends.The workflow I eventually managed to setup is a hodgepodge of Applescripts and shell scripts.

Software needed:

Atomic Parsley http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/

Download this script and put it in /Library/Application Support/EyeTV/Scripts and restart EyeTV

Download the CLI version of Handbrake

Put the AtomicParsley, and HandbrakeCLI binaries in /usr/local/bin/ or somewhere appropriate.

By placing that script in your EyeTV scripts directory, EyeTV will now automatically use handbrake to encode files from mpg to mp4.

I wrote a quick and dirty script and set it as  folder action that triggers when Handbrake starts to write to a temp directory:

#!/bin/bash

// set variables

path=/Users/username/Temp/eyeTvTemp/*.m4v;

filename=$(basename $path);

filename2=${filename%.*} ;

 

//check for size of file. If it's a placeholder less than 1000 bytes in size, wait 300 //seconds and try again.

s=$(stat -f %z $path)

if (($s < 1000))

     then sleep 300

else

 

//If the file is larger than 1000 bytes, then tag it with Atomic Parsley using the file name as the show name, and genre as TV Show.

for i in $path;

do /usr/local/bin/AtomicParsley "$i" --stik value=10 --genre "TV Shows" --TVShowName "$filename2" -W;

 

done

fi

 

_______________________________

We will be using some folder actions on OSX to trigger the various scripts. Handbrake writes out a temp placeholder file , but folder actions trigger right away. This would grab the temp file and mess up the whole process.

The next section just checks the file to make sure it is bigger than 1000 bytes, if it isn't it waits 5 minutes and then tries again,

Last the actual tagging, It calls Atomic Parsley to tag the genre as "TV Show" and the type to TV Show. This allows the shows to stack in the correct manner under one icon in iTunes. 

It also names the tag with the name of the file, which works great for me, but probably isn't what you want with shows that have episode titles. Most of the things I record are news style shows, so they don't have episode names. The variable is quoted since atomic parsley doesn't deal with spaces in filenames.

The -W flag overwrites the original rather than copying the file , which is the AP default.

The final stage of copying the file is to send it to the "Automatically add to iTunes" directory. This is done with another folder action that waits one hour before copying a file to give some safety time for the file to encode. It probably should be folded into the tag script, but it just happens I had an automator workflow already built for this, so I just re-used it.

So after all that, what do we get? EyeTV records shows I specify in it's program guide. On RecordingDone , Handbrake is invoked and crops and compresses the show, then writes to a temp dir. The instant the file appears in the temp dir, the folder action is invoked for tagging. Once tagged, its then copied via folder action to iTunes, where it can then be enjoyed on AppleTV or on my phone.

Overcomplicated? Definently. But it works. Hopefully some of the above can help someone in their scripting efforts. Or just buy a Tivo.

The Dingoo A320 is a neat little device for emulating game systems, but there a few gotchas when using the A320 with a Mac.

1. The A320 will disconnect from the USB port after a few minutes.

This is very frustrating when trying to transfer large files. The solution is to either not use the Dingoo to transfer files via USB to internal memory. Or, just use the SD card for files. Remember you have a 5 minute timer running to transfer files before it craps out. This is not an issue on a PC.

 2. Ejecting the A320 will crash it.

If you use the standard Mac software eject button to dismount the unit, it will freeze up and have to be hard reset. If you just yank out the USB cord, it will update and unmount just fine, but the Mac will give you a warning about disc corruption etc etc. So one way or the other, there will be some kind of error when it comes to unmounting the A320.

 3. Formatting the miniSD card to install Dingux will not work on a Mac.

You will not get any errors, or anything out of the ordinary, but it won't work. The boot sector for Dingux is corrupted in this process. You need to format the SD card on a real PC. Using VMware or Parallels won't work either. I don't have Boot Camp installed, so I wasn't able to test that. Avoid many hours of frustration and format the card on a PC.

This weeks theme at the Drawing Club was Vampira. Tried real physical acrylics this time, no Photoshop!

Haven't been able to stop by The Drawing Club since I've been out of the country for the last year. Finally got to drop in last week and do some sketching.

http://www.thedrawingclub.com/workshop/russ-meyer-theme-photo-and-artwork/

Just a quick listing of who I find is invaluable to follow on Twitter for vfx news. Many vfx companies and supes have twitter accounts and will post job openings there. (@dneg , and @MPC_VFX for example).  But there are a few that if you work in visual effects, you need to follow. I find twitter to be a better source of up-to-the-minute information than many of the dedicated sites that cover cg.

Who you should be following:

@Variety_DSCohen

David S. Cohen , writer for Vaiety and covers technology and visual effects. Lots of good info daily about the state of the business. Also good info that many other news outlets should be covering, but aren't.

@VFXSoldier

The mysterious VFX Soldier likes to stay anonymous, and that's ok. He (She?) covers the important vfx labor and union issues.

@VisualEffectsSo

Official Twitter feed of the VES (Visual Effects Society). It's not perfect, but it's the closest thing we have to a union or a voice.

@alba

Eric Alba is an independant vfx supe, and posts great links everyday that are related to cg, animation, and vfx. Not sure how he has time to prolifically tweet and supe.

@vfxblog

Ian Failes writes for fxguide.com (another site you should be reading daily).

oh yeah, and me: @MichaelLevineTD

Australia is a lovely country with wonderful people. But it sucks when it comes to trying to watch streaming video.