Streaming video with EyeTV 2.5 to an Ipod Touch

EyeTV Version 2.5 from Elgato Systems allows to stream a recording to an Ipod Touch or Iphone.
I found no good documentation or howto after a few searches on Google. Therefore, I documented the process for your further reference. I tested this on an Ipod Touch but assume it's similar for the Apple Iphone. I also assume the mac with the Eyetv software and the ipod touch/iphone are on the same wireless network.

First, open the EyeTV Preferences panel and select Wi-Fi Access :
and click on start. The following question comes up:
Don't click "Prepare All" because it will transcode all your recordings to H2.64 and that will take a while. (Depending on the number and the lengths of the recodings you have. You can start it later when you've verified your set-up works and pleases you). After pressing "Don't prepare", you get the following window:
The addres where your Ipod Touch/Iphone has to connect to is, in this particular case, http://192.168.2.4:2170/eyetv/
In your case, the URL can be different. Take the URL to left of the "Send Email" button in the EyeTV Preferences window under the "Wi-Fi Access" tab. You can immediately enter that address into the browser to verify the EyeTV streaming server is up and running.

Next, go to "Show EyeTV Programs" in the Window menu of the EyeTV program. Select a short recording (or make one for a test) and select the recording. The recoding turns into blue. In the action menu (the one with the gear icon) select "Prepare for Wi-Fi Access Again" :
After a while, the recording is transcoded to H.264 and stored for streaming to the Ipod Touch. This can take as long the time of the recording or longer depending on the speed of your system.

Next, take your Ipod Touch, start Safari and surf to http://192.168.2.4:2170/eyetv/ :
Tap on the recording you want to stream and, after a short period, a thumbnail with a start button in lower right corner appears (a small triangle inside a cirkel). Tap the start button.
And the recording is streaming to your Ipod Touch/Iphone:
After a while, the movie controller automatically disappears.
The recording can be streamed from your mac to the Ipod Touch while your mac is showing live TV.

Spore comes to Nintendo Wii

I've just read an interview with Will Wright. He announces some marvelous news: his new game "Spore" will also be released on the Nintendo Wii in the second quater of 2008. Just to wet your saliva go and look to Spore on EA's 360° panofantastic display.

Also "Lego Star Wars" is coming to the Wii end of 2007. The online mode is reserved for Xbox 360 and PS3 only. And Guitar Hero 3 for Wii and ... I'm gone write that nice letter to Santa Claus soon!!!

Unboxing Ipod Touch

Convert muxed MPEG-1 to MOV or MPEG-4

A lot of Sony digital picture camera's also capture video. Some store the captured video files into muxed MPEG-1 files and have extension .MPG. To check if your Sony camera does this, proceed as follows. Open up the "Window" menu in Quicktime and select "Show Filminfo". It reports the structure of the file as "MPEG1 Muxed, 640x480 pixels" (other sizes are possible). Those files can be played back by Quicktime but when exporting to another videoformat or saving as mov, the audio does not come along. Importing such files into Imovie '08 or Final Cut Pro 2 also do not work propely. (Read iMovie does not work with muxed MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 clips about that and written by Apple).

To get rid of those pesky muxed mpeg-1 files, I now describe a procedure that does not need recoding of the captured original file. Instead, it allows to losslessly transforms the muxed mpeg-1 file into a Quicktime mov file without any convertion loss nor lengthy encodings. You only need one freeware tool that you can download from Apple's side.

To get rid of the muxed MPEG-1 files you need MPEG Streamclip. (MPEG Streamclip for windows). I tested this with a movie file captured by a Sony Cybershot DSC-W1. First, I started MPEG Streamclip:

Next, I dragged the MPEG movie movXXXXX.mpg to the application (XXXXX is the number of your movie, in the test case it is mov01249.mpg):

Then, select from the File menu, "Demux to M2V and AIFF":

Specify where the two new files must be saved and click Save.
Now, double click on the new movXXXXX.m2v file to open up Quicktime Pro. If you now export the movie or save as mov, the audio will be in it. This is because if movXXXXX.aiff is in the same directory as where movXXXXX.m2v is stored, Quicktime Pro will automatically load the video with extension .m2v and the audio file with extension .aiff together. (as explained by Heny Kautz). You can now save as a movXXXXX.mov file for editing or export to another format (for exmple MPEG-4). This is the resulting file in MPEG-4 format mov01249.mp4. You can download that file, play it with Quicktime and try to import it into Imovie '08 or Final Cut Pro 2. It should work. Succes.

Make mp4 files faststart with MP4box

The beta Flash player 9 , allows for playback of mp4 files containing AVC video and AAC audio. The example worked but the entire file was first downloaded before playback started. This is because the so called moov atom, is not in front of the file. To fix this on Mac OSX, I first downloaded MP4box (for OSX/PPC). Then, I issued the command: mp4box -inter 500 test.mp4 and uploaded the test.mp4 file. Now, the demo is faststart!

To make sure, I made no errors, I made a second example that is indeed not fast start. The I issued the mp4box command:

The resulting file benefiet_inter.mp4 is included in a third demo that is fast start: Third Test of mp4 in Flash version 9

This is the info you get from mp4box -info:

l02958:~/Desktop ln$ ../../../Applications/MP4Box -info  benefiet_inter.mp4
* Movie Info *
       Timescale 600 - Duration 00:03:35.006
       Fragmented File no - 2 track(s)
       File Brand mp42 - version 1
       Created: GMT Wed Oct  3 17:55:44 2007

File has no MPEG4 IOD/OD

Track # 1 Info - TrackID 1 - TimeScale 600 - Duration 00:03:34.920
Media Info: Language "English" - Type "vide" - Sub Type "avc1" - 5373 samples
MPEG-4 Config: Visual Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x21
AVC/H264 Video - Visual Size 384 x 224 - Profile Main @ Level 1.3
NAL Unit length bits: 32
Self-synchronized

Track # 2 Info - TrackID 2 - TimeScale 32000 - Duration 00:03:35.008
Media Info: Language "English" - Type "soun" - Sub Type "mp4a" - 6719 samples
MPEG-4 Config: Audio Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x40
MPEG-4 Audio AAC LC - 1 Channel(s) - SampleRate 32000
Synchronized on stream 1

It would be nice that somehow I could figure out where the moov atom is with mp4box. But that's for another post.

From 2399 to 2400: more then 65 love games needed

My collegue aiming for the ultimate 2400 Nintendo Wii Tennis level has continued his quest and completed already 65 love games. He says he'll persist in the chase of 2400 fame until 140 love games. Stay tuned.

Google.be availability in 2007 is 99,996%

The uptime monitoring company Pingdom issued a report comparing uptimes of google sites. In Belgium, Google.be was unreachable for 22 minutes in the period from September 1, 2006 to September 1, 2007. This cumulated downtime is close to the average of 23 minutes for all 32 international google search sites measured in the report. All sites have an availability above 99,99%. This is considered very good.

Via Tweakers