Editing Consumer-recorded DVDs on Mac

[djbrennan]

I live in UK and have a Sky+Box. I can copy my recordings from the Sky+Box to my DVD Recorder, but can't edit them on it. What I want to be able to do is take these programs, burn them to DVD and then edit/view these DVDs on my Powerbook. My problem is that the recordings will have to be copied to DVD using EP (Extended Play) or even XP to fit say three/four hours to a DVD. What s/w do I need on my Powerbook to edit/view these compressed formats? Incidentally, I am assuming, becasue I think I read it somewhere that I cannot record directly from teh Sky+Box to my Powerbook.

Any help, ideas, suggestions welcome.

Denis

[patrickl]

Whether you use XP or EP recording shouldn't matter, it'll just reduce the video quality. If you plan to import as DVD format you'll need something like Mactheripper (a free program) to transfer it as a Video TS folder (mostly .vob files) to your Powerbook's hard drive. To edit you'll need to convert the Video TS folder into another format (something like .mov, mpeg. avi, etc). MPEGStreamclip will do this well (again it's free!). You can do very basic editing in Quicktime Pro, but for more complex editing use iMovie, though it can take an age to render movies, even if you've got a powerful machine with lots of RAM.

[fryke]

handbrake can make that in one step. DVD -> MPEG-4. However, quality (XP, EP) _does_ of course matter. The end result can be vastly different.