Monday, April 9, 2007

This is how I did it on my Mac

I wanted to get a TV show from my Comcast DVR and burn it onto a DVD that I could play at a later time... I know most of you are thinking, "Wait... why wouldn't you just hook up a DVD recorder to your cable box via firewire and hit record?"

Well, I suppose I wanted a challenge. Anyway, I thought I would pass it along for your general consumption. This is written by a video newbie, for a newbie... This is educational only. Don't steal stuff... don't break copyrights, etc. I did this as an adventure into video formats... I hope you find it enlightening. I am not a video professional. I am a casual consumer mac user... I know you are probably smarter than me. If you have useful comments, please leave them.

Perhaps some one else has figured this out already... but if not, I'll share how I got it working.
 
First things first.  I have Comcast Digital Cable (in Denver, CO) with a motorola DCT-3412 DVR.  I am running Tiger on an original 500Mhz Titanium powerbook. (I know.... a real screamer - but the good news is, your mac is probably better than mine, and therefore it should do all of this.... just faster!)
 
My Setup:
Powerbook connected to external firewire drive, connected to Comcast box.  (you can do it directly, but I wanted to have plenty of room, thus the external drive)

Software You'll need:
Apple Firewire SDK (I used version 22 - they are now on version 23)

MPEG streamclip

Quicktime MPEG 2 playback

DVD Studio Pro - I know, but you can pick up older versions on eBay for cheap!

Toast

Optional Software
VLC - You can watch the raw footage from the DVR with this player

I start with my Powerbook on but the cable box and the external drive turned off.  I plug the firewire cable from the cable box into the external drive and turn them both on.  I then connect the external drive to the powerbook.
 
I use AVCVideoCap from the Apple Firewire SDK to record the footage in realtime. The DVR showed up right away for me in the list of devices. This is what AVC looks like. Select the tuner in the window and click "Capture from Device"



You are prompted for a save location. Once you select the destination, you get this menu:



As soon as you click on "Continue" the recording begins and you see the "Frame/Packet Count" window rapidly count up. It records for as long as you told it to. I hit play on the DVR first, and then click "Continue" on AVCap after. It's okay if you have excess footage at the beginning and end... in a later step you can trim the front and back end of the video.



-sidenote-  This is a good place to mention, you can record Live TV, or TV that you have already recorded with the DVR. I have successfully recorded programming from the major networks, as well as basic cable channels like TBS, TNT and USA.  However, HBO, Encore, Sundance, and any other "paid" channels do not work... from what I have read online, they must be using some kind of encryption.  It's wierd, because the file is there... it has a size, but nothing I have found, will play the file.

When it finishes, it should say Recodring Complete.  You will now have a ".m2t" file on you computer.  This is an mpeg 2 stream (correct me if I'm wrong)

The next few steps deal with getting the video onto a DVD.
 
You need to buy the Quicktime MPEG-2 Playback Component. Once you have that, you can use MPEG Streamclip (linked below) to convert the m2t file into a format that can be used on a DVD.

Drag one of your m2t files into MPEG Streamclip, it should show up in the window:



If you need to trip some off the front or back, do it here. find the place you want it to start and push the "i" button on your keyboard. This sets the "in" point. The scroll to where you want it to end and push the "o" button. This sets the "out" point. now click "Trim" from the edit menu. That chops the excess off from the beginning and end.

You can see that MPEG streamclip has lots of options. For those of you with video iPods, you could break off here and use this app to rip your video to MPEG4.... but I digress. From the file menu, select "Demux to Headed M2V and AC3"



This process goes pretty quickly, since it isn't really encoding or decoding the video... it is just splitting the audio and video apart. The finished product is Two seperate files, a filename.m2v and a filename.ac3.

I use DVD Studio Pro version 1.5... I know... horribly outdated, but I have yet to spring for a newer version. If you use a newer version of DVDSP you will probably have to wing it through this section... but I imagine it will be just as easy (or easier) for you with a newer version.

Import the m2v file and the ac3 file into DVDSP. I'm not going to get into a DVD Studio Pro tutorial here... because frankly, I couldn't. I am a NOVICE at this app, and can only perform the most basic functions in it. Here is a shot of what it looks like:



** Be sure and tie the audio file to the video file. Drag the audio file from the asset window and drop it onto the video file in the Graphical View window.

From the File menu, select Build Disc "Discname" (whatever you have named the disc project). This process takes a little while. On my machine, I think it runs at about 7x or 8x.



Here is a shot of the Progress window:



DVD Studio Pro builds a VIDEO_TS folder and an AUDIO_TS folder in any location you specify:



Now you're in the home stretch. In Toast, select "Data Disc", drag the VIDEO_TS and the AUDIO_TS folders into toast.





Be sure to select "DVD-ROM(UDF) in the sidebar:



Now click burn! When it's all said and done, you should have a DVD that can play in any commercial DVD player or computer. I hope you'll leave comments that are helpful to other video tinkerers....


Digg!

43 comments:

Jason said...

This is fantastic! I've got a similar setup and have been able to get the raw .m2t stream over to my MacBook, but have settled for watching everything in VLC instead of burning to DVD. Thanks for the walkthrough!

Raj said...

You are using MPEG Streamclip and the Quicktime MPEG2 playback component (which you had to pay for) for the demux step. You could use ProjectX:
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-x)

This is free and open source, so you might want to mention it. Check out my blog for some similar content and a soon to come tutorial on using ProjectX.

ampnerd said...

Hi, Thanks very much for the great post. The AVC Video cap works as described without a hitch and is a hugely useful tool for me. You mention in your post that it also works with programs already recorded onto the DVR but I could not find a way to browse the contents of the internal drive in the Comcast box. I thought maybe that the AVC Browser app might work but it didn't seem to. Have you found a way to transfer previously recorded content from the DVR to you Mac?

Thanks again

Sean

Unknown said...

Hi,
Thanks for the info. The directions worked great, with a minor clarification I thought I'd share. On my DVR box (from Comcast in the Denver area, model # DTC3416) previously recorded content appears to "play" on channel 0.

To record from your DVR,
1) start AVCCapture, select your DVR, hit capture
2) select a filename
3) get your recording from the MyDVR menu ready to play (I usually started it then hit pause immediately until I had the next dialog ready to go).
4) On the capture dialog, in addition to filling in the record time, check the box that says "allow channel change" and put 0 as the channel to change to.
5) hit ok on the dialog, which will start your recording
6) hit play on your DVR remote
Then pick up these directions from there.

Also, as a side note MPEG StreamClip will also output to dv (digital video) which you can then get into any old video editing software such as iMovie and edit just like you would video coming from a digital camcorder. I'm also a relative beginner at editing video, but I think dv might be better quality than MPEG-2 ?? Using iMovie, you can also edit out chunks from within the recording, such as removing the commercials :) and send the edited video directly to iDVD to actually burn the DVD.

YodaMac said...

Awesome post! Thanks. I am having some trouble, however.

I am not burning to DVD, but instead taking your mentioned "off-shoot" path and converting my DVR shows to MPEG-4 for my AppleTV. (using the provided AppleTV preset in MPEG Streamclip)

Trouble I am running into is once they are in iTunes I cannot seem to modify the "tags" at all (for instance - changing a file from Movie to TV Show using "Get Info")

iTunes just "hangs" and then the file becomes unusable! :(

Any thoughts?

Unknown said...

I've been playing around with this some more and noticed that if you do certain DVR operations while capturing the stream, StreamClip complains that timecode is messed up. Sometimes it can repair, sometimes not, but I've found it's easier to just avoid doing these operations while capturing, which are:
1) fast forward
2) rewind
3) 5 second skip back button
4) start playing the recorded program AFTER starting your capture
5) allowing the recorded program to end BEFORE the capture ends
Happy recording.
- Suzanne

Scott said...

Everything works, but I get no Audio. Any ideas?

Unknown said...

I can record Live TV with no problem, but any time I try to record from the DVR memory, I don't get any audio or video, just a black screen for the duration of the recording, any ideas?

TheArrogantAfterglow said...

I have a problem. I have everything downloaded and everything hooked up just like the instructions. I even have the Apple Quicktime MPEG2 update thing. I don't have any problems getting the files from the DVR to my computer, and I'm running all this on a Mac too, but after the files are done recording, when I try and import them into MPEG Streamclip, it tells me that there are no audio and no video tracks.

Anyone know what the problem is?

Unknown said...

Wow that is such a great tutorial! Thanks so much for sharing this! I used to use a DVD recorder but that only recorded SD (if you recorded hd it would make it crapy and black bars at the top/bottom) and this is so much better in quality. Wish I had a macbook pro though cuz I have to drag my computer over to the TV.

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nice blog, good, this is good information for me u can also u know make post about H.264 DVR, Digital Video Recorder.

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