Some of the following has been mentioned in quite a few posts so it may help if I listed my experience in converting TF7000HDPVRt recordings to a format the Beyonwiz would play. This may help prospective Beyonwiz owners who currently own a TF7000HDPVRt.
The Beyonwiz will play some TF7000HDPVRt SD recordings without converting the recordings but the skip functions will not work & the recording can at times freeze. As a general rule the Beyonwiz will not play TF7000HDPVRt HD recordings reliably without converting, however some will play with some restrictions and issues.
Procedure:
- The 7000's recordings were copied from the 7000's Internal HDD to the 7000's Ext2 formatted External HDD. This took 23min 47sec to copy a 60min 6351MB 'SC10 HD 1080i HD demonstration loop' recording which is a copy rate of 4.45MB/sec, so this can take some time depending on the number of recordings to be copied. Be sure to re-name any recording names with the 7000 if they contain any illegal Windows file name characters; \ / : * ? " < > |
- The .mpg files from these recordings were copied from the 7000's Ext HDD to a Windows XP PC's Ext HDD formatted as NTFS. The PC's Int HDD can naturally be used if this drive has enough free space. The 7000 shows its Int & Ext HDD's free space compared to the total size so a quick calculation will give the approximate space required. To copy the .mpg files from the 7000's Ext HD to the PC's Ext HDD I used 'Ext2 IFS' at www.fs-driver.org which allows a drive letter to be assigned to the 7000's Ext HDD and lets Windows Explorer read the drive for copying.
- The copied .mpg files were cropped to the correct length using 'MPEG Streamclip' at www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-win.html which also requires either 'Apple QuickTime' with an optional MPEG-2 plug-in decoder or 'QuickTime Alternate' (download link from above Squared 5 web page) to open the 7000's .mpg files. Cropping is optional but it can make quite a difference to the used HDD space if a lot files have been copied. To crop the files mark the start point with the 'i' button & the finish point with the 'o' button then click 'trim'.
- 'MPEG Streamclip' was then used to convert the .mpg files to 'TS with MP2 audio' so the Beyonwiz can play them correctly & still have forward & backward skip functions. 'VLC Media Player' at www.videolan.org will play the files for confirmation if required.
- Once the files have been converted they can be streamed from the PC via wired LAN to the Beyonwiz.
- One option is to copy the converted files to a USB Ext HDD formatted as NTFS which can then be connected to the Beyonwiz's USB port & played from there. The Beyonwiz will only read from the NTFS partition so another option is to have one NTFS partition & one FAT-32 partition. This way any recordings made on the Beyonwiz can be copied to the FAT-32 partition for backup or playing at a later time & the NTFS partition used for playing other file types larger than 4GB.
- Windows XP format will only format FAT-32 up to 32GB, so an easy way to format a large FAT-32 partition is to use 'fat32format.exe' at www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/ which will quickly format large partitions. This is a quick format so 'chkdsk/R' should be run from the command prompt after formatting to check & mark any possible bad sectors. 'fat32format' will format a 500GB USB 2.0 Ext HDD in approx 10 seconds but running 'chkdsk/R' on the same drive will take between 1 & 2 hours. (edit added): I find ‘guiformat.exe’ (the Windows GUI version of ‘fat32format.exe’, also at www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/) quicker & easier to use than the command line ‘fat32format.exe’.
If anyone has anything to add to this please let me know.
Other user's findings and comments:
From 'prl' :
- I've found that "Convert to MPEG with MP2 audio" in MPEG Streamclip also works. The BW will also play converted files that have AC3 audio (original with AC3, and "Convert to MPEG"), but the playback of HD with AC3 is less reliable than HD with MP2 over the network.
