DVR To Mac - What Software To Use?

Here's the deal. I have a Motorola BMC9012 DVR that has s-video and 2 firewire ports on it. I want to transfer some of my cooking shows off of it and onto my Mac. I have an iMac Core 2 Duo that does not have a s-video port, but firewire ports.

Here is what I know. I know that the firewire ports on the DVR do function since I can add an external HDD to one as per the manual. I also understand that I will never be able to get the DVR menus to appear on my Mac, but that this is a non-issue (from what I have previously read). I know that I cannot "pull" the videos off, I will have to capture during playback at a 1:1 time ratio. This is fine too (most of these shows are only a 1/2 hour in length).

I have read a lot on this where some people say it will never work, and others say that they are doing it all the time. This is fine, I would like to try it anyway. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but I'd still like to try.

Here is what I don't know. What software will I need to do the capture? After that, any tips / tutorials would be a nice bonus. I am a fairly quick study, I just need a push in the right direction.

Thanks to all who reply!!

Scrapy

a couple of options

Hi,

I used iMovie to capture TV shows through the s-video port on my DVR. But I have to use my video camera as the conduit to convert the s-video output and audio to a firewire data stream. As you said, this is 1:1 time frame. So I plug, the S-Video out and audio out from my DVR to my Video Cameras inputs and then plug the firewire into my video camera and then the other firewire end into my Mac. iMovie recognizes the feed as a camera and I then hit play on the DVR and Import in to iMovie.

I understand you would like to skip that and just go directly DVR -firewire- Mac. By the way it is cool that your DVR even allows any functionality through those ports, but back to your issue. Unless the DVR can be set-up to stream what ever show you play as a digital feed through the firewire, I don't think it is possible. I guess you could try hooking up the the firewire to the DVR connection and then to your Mac firewire connection and bring up iMovie and see if you luck out and your Mac recognizes the DVR as a video camera. In which case you could import. But I doubt it will work like that, but who knows maybe you will get lucky.

Good Luck.
Richard

rdean said:

Hi,

I understand you would like to skip that and just go directly DVR -firewire- Mac. By the way it is cool that your DVR even allows any functionality through those ports, but back to your issue. Unless the DVR can be set-up to stream what ever show you play as a digital feed through the firewire, I don't think it is possible. I guess you could try hooking up the the firewire to the DVR connection and then to your Mac firewire connection and bring up iMovie and see if you luck out and your Mac recognizes the DVR as a video camera. In which case you could import. But I doubt it will work like that, but who knows maybe you will get lucky.

Good Luck.
Richard

Click to expand...

So far so good.

I connected the DVR to the iMac with a 6-pin to 6-pin cable. Then I powered up the computer and went in to the System Profiler. It did see the device and even it's name (Motorola 9012).

I then fired up Apple's AVCBrowser and opened a connection to the DVR. Then I had AVCBrowser send the stream to VLC. VLC opened up and bada-bing...it was streaming to my computer.

So, this is where I am at now and where I need help. I really am a noob to all of this, but learning quickly.

I used VLC to capture the stream. It did so just fine. However I wonder if I am using the proper settings, and if this may be why I am having the peoblems I will mention next. I set VLC to capture video at mpeg1, and audio at 192k mp2. Then I set it to wrap as a .ts file. Then I streamed a 1/2 hour show. After I was done, I took the .ts file and opened it in VLC and it played back perfectly.

I do want to edit the commercials out, but not knowing what to use to do that yet, and being eager to see what else I could do, I fired up ffmpeg to compress the file down. This was a disaster. I do have all of the components that ffmpeg needs properly installed and the paths set correctly but most of what I tried wouldn't work. Trying to make a .mov or an xvid resulted in a zero k file. When I tried to make an x264 .mp4, it would run and create the new video, but the result was a video file and an audio file. The audio file was zero k in size, and the video file would play but without audio.

This is where I am at now. I guess I need to know the best settings to capture to, what to edit what I capture with, and then what the deal is with compressing the vids down to xvid or mp4.

Yeah, I didn't say this was a quick question.

\o
Scrapy