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.

[zetec]

i have 2 happauge cards, one with a BT878 chipset and one with some other BT chipset i forget. They're somewhat old, but that's no excuse for not supporting legacy hardware. I also tried a sony card with some conexant ripoff of the BT chipset, but that card was fucked up as far as support went in the first place.