OK, I’ve just looked at the most recent Google brainwave inversion tracking stats for the site and found some traffic from discussion.apple.com. Seems that someone flagged the original Humax post I made as a ‘long winded’ approach to getting video from everyones’ (well, in the UK at least) twin decoder DVB PVR and converting it from MPEG TS.

Looking back at that post, it’s slightly out of date, so I’m re-casting that information here for people to follow as a simple recipe to video success on their Macs.

What you need to do:

1) Get a copy of the HumaxGUI application from Andrew Smith’s site and install it.

2) Connect your Hummy up to your Mac with a suitably long USB cable.

3) Open the HumaxGUI Application and connect to your PVR. This works just like an average FTP package – select the file you want and hit transfer.

4) Go and make tea, and more tea, and perhaps do the ironing. Take the dog for a walk, come back in, take a nap etc.

(Yes the USB implementation that Humax have achieved absolutely stinks for fast data transfer – so you’ll have time on your hands. The best approach here is to queue up what you want to transfer and then let it batch run overnight.)

5) Once you have the files on your Mac, you will need to either watch the files with something like VLC which will run just about anything.

6) If you want to change the video format to something else (QT, MP4 or MPEG2) then you will need to transcode it using either VLC (not had much luck there myself), or use the excellent MPEG Streamclip. The only caveat here is that for MPEG2, you might need to buy a copy of the Quicktime MPEG2 component from the Apple Store online. I think this runs at around £15 / $20.

That’s all there is to it. Honest.

Posted: February 6th, 2007 under Out of Office, Video.
Comments: 31

It looks as though MPEG_TS to MPEG2 using MPEG Streamclip has finally given me the route to get Humax TS data from the 9200T for use on other formats. The good news is that I can start to recliam some disk space and tidy up the Humax Library Menu, which is a bit poor at coping with long lists.

The only remaining issues seem to be with getting a connection in the first place. The USB connection is a bit fickle from time to time, and it’s often not possible to connect to D2 where the TS streams are stored. One method that seemed to get around this was to go to the MP3 / Album section of the Humax menu system. The box is expecting a connection and seems to give a better hit rate of getting a proper connection.

Empirical testing, with no sound reasoning (at this stage) – but hey, whaddya expect for a five minute job?

Related posts:

• Humax Transfer Saga Continued…
• The Faffiest Way To Get At Your PVR Content – But At Least It Works

Posted: November 10th, 2006 under Hardware, Out of Office.
Comments: none