TEAC HDB850 (cheap and cheerful PVR)

[kevin]

  
 Picked up a cheap ($40)  TV tuner (TEAC HDB850) from Costco (Melb) the other day.  The main feature is that it's got a PVR (USB recorder) in it.     Took a little while to get familiar with it, but it's pretty neat little device.  

  If you use it as a tuner plugged into your LCD, then it gives a cleaner picture than the built in TV tuners especially with low resolution channels (which is basically all of them in our area (720P)).   Suspect it applies some lighting filtering over the image, but can't be 100% sure of that.    

 The record feature uses AVCHD (MTS) formatted files, the files are split into 500 meg blocks, which is about 15 minutes of video from the limited testing so far.   The files aren't encrypted, so they can be played back on your computer (media player in win7 supports them directly) as well as VLS player on older systems.    But, those players don't seem to be aware that they're multipart files.  So they play the 15 minute chunks and that's it.    Guess if you dragged the parts in sequence to the player, then you could watch the recording as if it was a single file.

    What I'd like to do, is join / convert them into a more common (smaller) everyday format like XVID/DIVX, h264 for FREE :).   There's commercial tools that do it, but it's not worth spending money on.   Found a few solutions, but there's a few too many steps in them for my liking.    Should be as simple as point the converter at the first file and then sit back while it does everything for you.    

   The device only has a single tuner in it, so you can't record and roam channels if you're watching the devices output on your TV,  but you get round this by using the antenna pass through, assuming your TV has a built in tuner.    So you connect aerial to the TEAC input line, then run the aerial output from the TEAC to the input on your TV.   Your TV will function as normal, here the Digital channels are under the DTV source,  if you want to watch the output of the TEAC, all i did was run video out of the TEAC into different source (such as open HDMI slot or composite video input ).  This allow me to swap between the two tuners at will.   So I can record stuff on the TEAC and roam through any channel on the TV without impacting what's being recorded.    

  Related Links:   

    -  TEAC HDB850 Joining MTS Video Files

[kevin]

  Turns out I already had a number video conversion tools that will indeed import and convert AVCHD (MTS) files to something a little more practical.   It's not all smooth sailing though, as for some reason they seem to force changes of resolution/aspect ratio or drop audio sync.   But they only seem to support conversion and not joining..  So have to join them with something.. but what   

Here's a video on the joining process

 This tool (Bellow) will actually let you join and convert them in one pass, but seems to either ignore the output resolution  constantly or you end up with audio sync problems.   The link bellow is the newer version than i'm using, and apparently the installer comes with a payload of malware, so not too keen on installing it (the price of FREE in 2014).  

 Free-AVI-MPEG-WMV-MP4-FLV-Video-Joiner

[kevin]

 Have had some success with joining AVCHD files via Free-AVI-MPEG-WMV-MP4-FLV-Video-Joiner,  it's pretty inflexible from the users perspective.   It gives a list of presets and that's about the only input you gets.  In this case it seems converting the files to APPLE TV gives a reasonable result.   Meaning it keeps the aspect ratio and audio sync is good.    

 Didn't really want to install this program so i didn't.. Rather after a little research into what type of installer it uses,  it appears to be currently using Inno installer.  Thankfully, there's a few tools around to extract the files from these, without you having to the execute the installer (and potentially get a payload of unwanted junk apps also), I used the program bellow and recommend that should do too !

  http://innounp.sourceforge.net/

  Innounp is a command line tool, I recommend downloading the two files to a common temporary folder, somewhere that's a short path.  For example, you could make a folder on your C drive called TEMPJUNK.


  1) Make a TEMPJUNK folder (call it whatever you want - keep it short, you'll have to type it in the DOS prompt  later !)  

  2) Download Innounp from http://innounp.sourceforge.net/
 
  3) Now copy the archive to your TEMPJUNK folder,  Extract/copy the innounp.exe file from the archive into your to your temp folder.  

  4) Download  Free-AVI-MPEG-WMV-MP4-FLV-Video-Joiner    The file should be about 5.1 megabytes.  Be careful not to start the installer (you know don't click on it :) ).


  5) Copy the  FreeAVIMP4WMVMPEGVideoJoiner.exe your TEMPJUNK folder.

   6  Rename the FreeAVIMP4WMVMPEGVideoJoiner.exe  file to something much shorter, like Installer.exe  just so it's easier to type from the command line.

   7  Launch a DOS prompt

   8  Type the Drive Letter .  For me this is E: (enter) - Then type CD TEMPJUNK enter )

   9  To extract the files type innounp.exe -x Installer.exe   (See second picture bellow)

   It'll now extract the files out into your tempjunk folder..    The folder called {app}  should now  the program files in it everything event well.     

     Have fun !

[kevin]

  Not having much luck really with joining and converting the clips from the recorder.   It's possible, the easiest option seems to be with Free-AVI-MPEG-WMV-MP4-FLV-Video-Joiner, open the files (it doesn't like some of the file name eg mts1, mts2 etc etc, so you might have to rename those files),  if you select MOV output and Apple TV, you get a joined file that retains the original aspect ration and the audio is in sync.    But for some reason it does like to scale the image quality down..  Looks ok on the TV but it's very noticeable loss of quality.

 Another program seems to think the files are BDAV files,  they may well be for all i know.  As the AVCHD joining process outlined above doesn't work with them.  All I get is audio..


 So going to follow down that rabbit hole a bit..

 starting with

 http://www.iorgsoft.com/AVCHD-Video-Converter/


 Video Help has lots of information on all things video conversion
 http://www.videohelp.com/tools

 pazera-software seems to gave every combination of convertor you could ever want and all freeware..
 http://www.pazera-software.com/


  LossLess video codec for windows
  magicyuv.com/

[kevin]

  TEAC HDB850 Joining MTS Video Files

     Video recordings made with the TEAC HDB850 device are automatically split into 500meg chunks, which we can only assume is to enable the device to work with the FAT32 file system (32bit) storage devices .   The problem with this, is that you can't play the entire recording back on another device without first joining the parts or a player that's aware of the multi part file format (there must be sometime out there that does this ?).   Even when you play the recordings back on the TEAC HDB850 (from USB stick) there's often a slight pause as it changes between chunks, it can even get a bit lost if you're fasting forwarding and hit the end of a chunk.   There may well be a firmware upgrade to fix that, but it seems unlikely given the seek time in finding a file on none solid state drives isn't uniform.

     Frustratingly I've been looking into various video joining applications /  video joining discussions across the web looking for a FREE and simple / quick solution that works with TEAC HDB850 produced files, there are methods, but they often require commercial applications that are beyond the scope of the problem,  like a lot of Video editing packages seem to support the MTS files (After renaming the parts), but the one's i've tried seem to leave little gaps between the chunks from time to time or worse drop audio sync.

     Now being a programmer, I decided to have a look into writing a simple multiplexer that would stick the chunks back together.    I was assuming the files would have an obvious header/wrapper structure, where you could pull out the video/audio packets and stick them back together into a bigger chunk, without any need to decompress / recompress anything.   But a quick look at the files and there doesn't seem to be any particular header so it seemed like you could just Join the files together with any old file joiner.    And yep that actually works !  (limited testing !)


    To join a TEAC HDB850 produced recording with 3 parts called TEST for example, there would be 3 videos where    TEST.MTS is the first chunk then  TEST.MTS1 is the second,    TEST.MTS2 would be the third..

    Steps:

    1)  Download the File Joiner X64  this package is specially written for 64bit operating systems with 64bit file system (like Vista/Win7/Win8).  It's possible though you might be running a 32bit edition of those operating systems.  If so, choose the 32bit option lower down the page.   The package doesn't need to be installed, but you will need to extract the files using RAR (or some decompression program that supports that format.. Google if you're not familiar with RAR.. )    

    2)  The file joining software above seems to default to alphabetically sorting the files you either drag or add.   You can stop this by deselecting the [ ] Auto button on the the right hand side of the window under the up/down arrows.  Now it should list the files in the order that you added them.   They need to be in order, from the top to bottom, so part one (Test.TMS) should be at the top, followed by Test.MTS1 then Test.MTS2 and so on.   (See Picture Attachment)

    3)  Once all the files are added and in the correct order,  you can simply hit the JOIN button in the bottom left hand corner.     The program will assumed the output name is TEST in this case, so that's the what new joined MTS file will be called.   Notice the name doesn't have an extension.    It's good idea to manually entering a name, so you can easily differentiate the joined MTS file from the parts, such as TEST-FULL.MTS  (don't forget the file extension)


    4)   Watch your new joined MTS movie file in your favourite video player.  


    Well.. hopefully this information/process helps you.  It works for files recorded with TEAC HDB850 device and possibly other similar devices.  I'd say give it a try !



    Free File Joiner (64bit & 32bit versions available)

    http://www.igorware.com/file-joiner