Cox Cable Box HD-DVR Fun, FINALLY COPY VIDEOS TO YOUR COMP Options

[impala454]

I think I might have posted this topic three or four times in the past, messed with it, gave up, tried again, searched, gave up, etc. This time we have victory (mostly).

For those who have Cox Cable (suddenlink, blah, whatever), have the Motorola DCT6412 PIII box (HD-DVR), and want to stream video directly from the box, I found this great link here:

http://replayguide.sourceforge.net/dct6412/

This guy developed firewire drivers for the box, so you can basically just plug it into your computer via a firewire cable, and your comp will see it as a TV-Tuner. He also did a small app that decodes the "transport stream" from the box and converts it to mpg. I have a windows MCE 2005 box right by the TV and I'm going to see if I can actually use it this way to simply record straight to the comp as well (as soon as i find the damn firewire port that came w/my motherboard).

only downside is that some channels are copy protected and provide no output at all. the link has instructions on how to check which channels are, but so far the ones i've found with the protection enabled are:

ESPNHD
HBO (all of them)
DISCHD
HDNET
HDNET Movies
Discovery channels 100-105 or whatever

in general your more "premium" channels will be protected. regular every day stuff seems to be ok (ESPN, FSN, discovery, foodtv, etc). i imagine some uber-nerd will come up with a decoder for the 5c encryption some day and we'll be able to record anything.

obviously you still have to sit there and let your PC record while the show runs, but this is way better than using some coax A/V output to a video capture card and losing a lot of quality.

[impala454]

final update on this: does not work as an MCE tuner even though it shows up as a TV Tuner. i assume the guy probably didn't do his drivers that extensively. and the choppiness in the HD recording wasn't my roommate's laptop's fault, it was some shitty software the guy recommended to convert the stream from ts (transport stream) to ps (program stream (mpg)). i simply changed his suggestion in his how-to on using the .ts extension to using .mpg, then adobe premiere 2.0 had no problem importing those files to do whatever i wanted with.

oh and one last thing, video capture programs... like windows movie maker, seem to want to use the device, but always say it's in use. someone else might be able to find some way around that i dunno. the app the guy who did the drivers works fine though so i guess it's no big deal.