Saving DVR'd shows to mac?

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I know some laptops have the capability to take your DVR'd shows from your TV and save them to your laptop.

Is that even possible on a mac?
 
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We have a TiVO and Toast Titanium and can do this easily. Not sure what specific DVRs this works with, but ours is a "real" TiVO, not from the cable or satellite company.
 
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most cable boxes dont allow you to get the data off as the TIVO boxes do. if you have a cable provided box you will most likely have to play it back from the DVR and use a piece of hardware to record the playback as it goes back to the TV.

you can also take a look at the different EyeTV Products that allow you to run your TV through your Mac. i use the 250 Plus and am very happy with it.
 
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bumping this....

how would you record the playback? what's the best video capturing software?
 
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bumping this....

how would you record the playback? what's the best video capturing software?

The few times I've been compelled to do this I simply record the DVR played video to a DVD Recorder, then go from there. You could maybe use a VCR, but the quality would suffer...
 

Slydude

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On some cable boxes there is an active firewire port which can be used to connect the box to a Macs firewire port. The output can then be captured. there are some problems that you may encounter:
1. Some providers have blocked this port via a firmware update (there may be an FCC rule in place that still prohibits them form doing this. I haven't checked recently).
2. Even with an active connection some programming will not transfer over properly with the result being either no picture/no sound. This seems to be a result of the copy protection flags on some content.

As far as software goes I have been using steventoth.net AVC Noodle a bit and also a program called AVC Video Cap which is part of the Firewire SDK available from the Apple site for free. There used to be a program called iRecord available but I don't think it is in active development anymore. If anyone knows otherwise please post.
 

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