Hackszine.com: Export video from your set-top box to your Mac

Export video from your set-top box to your Mac

Ever since I got my first set-top box at the end of last year, I've been itching to connect its FireWire port to my Mac. My friend Emilie called today to alert me to a CBS Sunday Morning report on Maker Faire, which I managed to record, and that gave me the push I needed to figure this all out.

There are a few sets of instructions out there on how to do this, but in a nutshell, you connect your Mac to the set-top box, load up a program that can record directly from FireWire set-top boxes (unfortunately, iMovie won't cut it), and do whatever editing you need to the video once you've brought it in.

I found that Ammesset Software's iRecord did the trick perfectly: I checked its preferences to make sure that my Motorola DCT-6412 was detected, told my set-top box to start playing back the video I had recorded, and selected New Immediate Event from iRecord's File menu. When it was done, I selected Stop Event from File menu.

This left me with a .m2t file that I didn't know what to do with at first. Squared 5's MPEG Streamclip is a free program that can open and convert all kinds of streams. Using MPEG Streamclip, I was able to trim the clip and export it to one of the many supported codecs.

Resources

iRecord - Link
MPEG Streamclip - Link
What to do if iRecord's events get stuck in pending mode - Link
macteens: Make your own Home Theatre Mac (HTMac) - Link
AnandTech: The Mac mini as a Media Computer - Link

Posted by Brian Jepson | Jun 3, 2007 07:31 AM
Home Theater, Mac | Permalink | Comments (4)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: therealdonquixote on June 5, 2007 at 3:11 PM

Sweet tutorial!! I was wondering if you had any experience with the MOXI set top DVR. Its also manufactured by Motorola. It has 2 USB ports in the front 2 firewire (IEEE 1394) ports in the back and even more USB ports, plus an ethernet port.

As far as I can tell no one has been able to get any system to recognize the MOXI box as new hardware or anything for that matter.

I triple boot windows, ubuntu and backtrack 2.0 on a pretty powerful laptop. I can install a patched Mac OS X partition if I need to or even use my desktop PC, but I am dying here trying to capture recorded video from the MOXI box.

I don't have much to offer in return, except a link on my shite blog: TheMostBoringBlogInTheWorld...
That's about all though. Regardless I'll blog this tut asap.
Thanks for the sweet hack!!
TheRealDonQuixote

Posted by: cheese1113 on August 8, 2007 at 11:57 AM

Wow this is great! My cable box is "kinda dead" and I needed a way to get all of the recorded video onto my computer. When I try and run MPEG Streamclip it says I need to buy the MPEG-2 plugin from apple. Did you run into this problem?

Posted by: bjepson on August 8, 2007 at 12:05 PM

cheese1113, thanks for mentioning that plugin.

I bought the plugin a while back from Apple and forgot I had it on my system. It set me back $20: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/

Posted by: cheese1113 on August 8, 2007 at 1:07 PM

Cool thanks for the info. I will go and buy it. Seems like a small price to pay for this awesome set up. I really enjoy hackzine, keep up the great work!!

Max