- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
HOWEVER...thanks to our good friends at the FCC...
The FCC has mandated that all cable boxes *MUST* have their firewire ports enabled.
What does that mean for us end users?
Well, if you connect the firewire port on any Verizon box to a computer, and install some hacked drivers, you can capture shows directly from your computer.
If you already bought an external storage drive and found out that it was useless due to Verizon's policies, you are NOT screwed!
If anyone would like to find out more information about this, and download the drivers and capture program, go to this website:
http://home.comcast.net/~exdeus/stbfirewire/
I have the newer 7216 box, and even though it is not listed as being compatible on that site, it works perfectly.
The only problem is that some shows cannot be captured due to 5C copy protection...it basically encrypts the firewire stream on certain shows depending on what area you are in.
The format outputted by the firewire port is MPEG-2 I believe. It's good enough, and yes, it is in HD.
1.) Buy a firewire cable
2.) Connect back of STB to your laptop / desktop's firewire port (You may have to purchase a firewire card if you have an older computer)
3.) When windows says it's found a new device, follow the instructions on that website I linked you to to point to the right drivers.
4.) Turn the channel to whatever show you want captured
5.) Open the CapDVHS program, and press record 🙂
If it's not encrypted, there will be stream info, and it should be able to get played back fine.
Keep in mind, if you are recording HD content, it fills up space FAST! Get an external hard drive.
I recommend esata..it's faster than usb or firewire, and they seem to be more reliable.
Hopefully no one will delete this post, because none of this is illegal, and people have the right to actually use the equipment they pay for how they want to, within the law, regardless of what features the service provider has enabled or disabled.
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
I reloaded my system with Vista 32-bit and this driver now works great 🙂 Here's a link that has more instructions on how to use the capture program
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
Very interesting. I don't really save a lot of the shows I record, but this would be great for HD movies. An external drive is the best bet since I doubt older computers could transfer data fast enough for HD content. A nice 500GB or big TB drive should be plenty of storage space, unless you record everything.
The best option for HD right now is downloading content and streaming it through an xbox 360 or ps3, if you're computer is fast enough to stream HD content. Mainly because you can download content that won't be available on tv for a year or 2. Personally I use an upconverting dvd player w/ hdmi, this makes DVD quality movies look very nice in HD. Even good quality divx/xvid movies are 10x better than the SD channels I have to watch currently.
Once somebody makes a true digital media player capable of playing .flv files via streaming data, HDtv owners will be in heaven. I believe only 1 is capable of it right now, but the quality is subpar. In about 10 years cable and sattelite providers will have another competitor, internet TV providers. Data transfer is getting fast enough now that streaming compressed data over the internet to a media center is a viable option. But like I said, someone still needs to make a media player capable of decompressing HD data and outputting it through an hdmi cable.