The ConvertX has landed

I got home from work on Wednesday hoping to find a box sitting in the entryway waiting for me. I also expected to find a somewhat pissed off Amy (for being woken up by the shipping company – she’s working nights this week) waiting for me but alas, I found neither. (Not finding a pissed off Amy was a good thing)

Turns out they (Purolator) had stopped by at 1130 but had somehow managed to not wake Amy up. This makes me wonder whether or not they actually rang the doorbell, but then why wouldn’t they have rung the doorbell? Anyways, they left a note saying that the package could be picked up after 1800 that day.

When I got home from work it was around 1720 or so and since the pickup location was way in the east end (Hawthorne Rd) I figured if I drove over there that I wouldn’t be there before 1800 anyways so I decided to go.

Traffic wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, but I did avoid the Queensway so perhaps that is why I was pleasantly surprised. I arrived at the Purolator depot right around 1800. The first thing I said to the guy was, “You guys really have to get a west end location!” to which he replied, “We’ve got a couple of them, one of which is in Kanata”. I was shocked! Why the hell was my package directed to the east end location for pickup when I lived about as far west in Ottawa as you can get?! Obviously their system needs some work.

Anyways, I gave the guy my ticket and away he went to try to find my package. After about 5 minutes he returned and said that they were still looking for it. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. Finally, after about 20 minutes, my package was found. I signed my life away and headed back home. Round trip took me nearly 2 hours so I might have just been better off to drive to Montreal to pick the damn thing up myself!

I took a few pictures of my current setup before clearing space for my new toy (I’ll post the before and after pictures when I get around to it). I unpacked the PX-TV402U and connected it to my satellite reciever and my mac. I then entered the activation key that came with the EyeTV software and I was up and running. I had to perform an ‘Auto Tune’ on my input signal since I was using the coax input (the TV tuner) and this took a few minutes. Strangely enough, it found more than the 1 channel I expected it to find. I have yet to see what is on those other channels.

After the auto tuning was complete, it was already tuned to channel 3 and voila! TV on my computer screen! Sweet Stuff! I should mentioned that when I plugged the unit in it make some comment about quality being reduced since I only had USB 1.1 instead of USB 2.0. That will be corrected once I get my mac mini. Even with the ‘reduced’ quality I was suitably impressed.

As my first test of the PVR capabilites of this unit I decided to record the movie “Anchor Man”. I set it up to record the movie that night between 0415 and 0600. I wasn’t sure how it would handle the fact that my ‘user’ wasn’t active at the time. Turns out it doesn’t matter. When I got up the next morning I checked on it and it had recorded successfully!

Now I figured it was as simple as just selecting export to iDVD. When I did that, it said the file size would be 19.8 GB! Ouch! That isn’t going to fit on a DVD. So I explored my exporting options a bit. I eventaully selected an export to MPEG-4 which gave me a file size of around 1 GB. I had no idea how long the export would take so I started it right away. 3 to 4 hours later it was finished.

I fired up iDVD and selected the mp4 file that was just created by the EyeTV software. I got some error about the length being too long and that I had to change a setting. I found the setting, it was something about best quality verus best performance, and changed it as required. I popped a blank DVD into my drive and clicked on Burn.

Once again, I didn’t know how long this was going to take. I started my stop watch and then walked away. By the time I was ready to go to bed it had been running for 4 hours and 45 minutes and I could see no end in site. The software doesn’t seem to give you a progress bar when it’s doing “Asset Encoding”. I wasn’t sure what would happen if Amy switched to her user profile while this was going on so I asked her to just leave it until it was done. She was annoyed but assured me she would wait. I tried to use this as an opportunity to show her we needed to get another mac but I don’t think she was buying it.

When I got up this morning the DVD tray was open and my user profile was no longer active. I assume the job finished sometime last night and Amy switched over to her user profile to check her email but I’m curious why she wouldn’t have closed the tray. Oh well. I closed the tray myself and started up the DVD player application. Everything seemed to have worked beautifully. I’m really curious how long it ended up taking. Since I didn’t have time to watch the movie before going to work I ejected it and put it downstairs by the DVD player so I can watch it when I get home. I’m really anxious to see how it’s going to look on my 32″ TV.

So all in all it took probably 10 hours to create a DVD with 2 hours of content on it (which included the initial recording of the show). I think this time can be significantly reduced if I encode directly to MPEG-4, but in order to do this I think I need a USB 2.0 port. After I get the mac mini I’ll be able to verify this.

All in all I’m very happy with this purchase. Even at USB 1.1 speeds the live TV is great quality and I like having the ability to pause and rewind. I would definitely recommend this product to anyone.