Copying Video From a Motorolla DCT6312 to a Mac
My Motorolla PVR has a firewire output for connecting to a “firewire television”. Is there such a thing?
Occasionally I would like to archive a show since I have very little control over what the PVR deletes when it runs out of disk space. I am also interested in watching shows on my IPod.
Last night, I connected my Mac to the PVR using firewire and tried to capture the video using IMovie. That doesn’t work at all. After a little digging, I found a program called IRecord which does capture the video in a format called MPEG-2 Stream.
Quicktime won’t play an MPEG-2 Stream unless you fork over another 20 bucks. MpegStreamclip relies on the upgraded quiktime to work as well. A little more digging turned up
FFMPegX which lets you transcode an MPEG-2 Stream to other formats, like quicktime or MPEG-4. The format I was unsuccessful converting to was DV, which would be nice for bringing content into IMovie.
There is currently no way to actually copy the mpeg files right off the PVR despite the USB and ethernet ports on the device, which apparently don’t do anything at all.
Technorati Tags: video, ffmpegx, imovie, irecord, pvr, dct6412, firewire, ipod, quicktime
September 11th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Yet another reason why I plan to take the route that Jeff Yeo did - build my own home-brew PVR. So far I’m favouring a classic Xbox as the platform - a refurbished one from an EB store would do just fine. Hack the Xbox to run the lovely xbmc media management software, an Xbox 360 skin to make it pretty, and voila! A PVR… well, actually, more of a Personal Media Player - this setup doesn’t record. But since I tend to “find” digital versions of the shows I want to watch anyway, this works for me [grin]…