User talk:Nebula
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Nebula Talk
Hi Peter, Can I ask what format the recorded files will be in v4?
The v3 mpg format is excellent for the most part - superb playback in DigiTV regarding skipping, REW, FF, etc. However, the one downside is that the editor VideoRedoTVSuite will not retain the subtitles after editing. I have asked them to implement this and they briefly looked into it but they were very busy with other more important things and the final response was: "At this point we don't support subtitle processing the proprietary Nebula program streams, only transport streams."
Links to forum threads: [1] [2]
Answer: Thanks for the info. I do remember having a conversation with someone at videoredo about this, but this was a couple of years ago and the world was collapsing at that point so my memory is a bit hazy. Its a bit dissapointing to hear that they won't support it, and that they also refer to the program streams as proprietory which they are not. Rather than go into the rights and wrongs of their decision, the thing to address is what're we going to do about it.
The obvious answer is to make everything transport stream (TS) based, but this has several disadvantages. Firstly it adds considerably to the size of the recording because there is a header associated with each 188 byte packet since the format is primarily designed to be used over a network where packet loss is possible. Secondly, we have to consider legacy support (I personally have thousands of recordings going back 7 years), and lastly what would be the time impact on adding that support to DigiTV.
In the end, the decision is probably already made in that for the new MPEG4 AVC format that's coming up, recordings will either have to be stored as TS files or as MP4 (Apple) format. This isn't a simple task however, and is certainly not doable in the timeframe that I have for the V4 beta. However, I can promise that a save to TS option (with all of the associated playback/trick mode facitlities) will make its way into a sub-version of DigiTV eHub, while still supporting the more efficient MPG format. --Nebula 12:46, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Response: Having looked into the format to try and help and encourage them, I also thought that it was not proprietry, but I'm no expert by any means. At the end of the day, they were very helpful and I was well aware that there was just not enough demand for my request to make it worth their while (as far as I could tell, there were two of us).
Now that DigiTV is resurrected :), maybe a word from you to the nice guys at VideoRedo might help them along. I too have lots of archive recordings I would love to edit without losing the subtitles.
One more thing - Nebula & DigiTV v3 has served me well since purchase and I love the configurability of it and the feature set. It seems nothing else even comes close. I was very sad to see Nebula go under, but extremely glad to see you back and wish you well with v4.--Jof 14:24, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
