How to bring life back into your Crippled Verizon DVR
surgey
Enthusiast - Level 2
Well, since Verizon DVR's come preshipped with all of the storage ports disabled, and the internal drive gets full of HD recorded shows in about a week, I decided to investigate what exactly can be done to get around this.  It's obvious they don't care about their customers with this issue, because as I have found on google, people have been complaining about this for years.  I can find posts that date back to 2006 with previous generation motorola boxes that also have every storage port purposely disabled. 

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!
All you have to do is plug that storage into the computer and use the DVHS Capture program and save shows to there.

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.
 I have heard that some areas do not use any 5C encryption on any channel at all, so you should be free to record whatever content you want directly to your computer's storage.

The format outputted by the firewire port is MPEG-2 I believe.  It's good enough, and yes, it is in HD.
 How to do this briefly:

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 the content is encrypted, the information section will be blank, and when you try to play back the video, it won't play.
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.
Message Edited by surgey on 10-25-2008 01:02 PM
Message Edited by surgey on 10-25-2008 01:08 PM
Re: How to bring life back into your Crippled Verizon DVR
NJHDTVfan
Enthusiast - Level 2
Thanks for this great post! I can't seem to get the Vista drivers installed. I have Vista x64 Ultimate edition. Is there an x64 driver available anywhere? My STB is a QIP6416-2.
Message Edited by NJHDTVfan on 10-30-2008 03:50 PM
0 Likes
Re: How to bring life back into your Crippled Verizon DVR
NJHDTVfan
Enthusiast - Level 2

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

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

0 Likes
Re: How to bring life back into your Crippled Verizon DVR
Donkey97
Newbie

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.

0 Likes