Thread: Pulling video off of a DVR

Originally Posted by Red GTi VR6

There's got to be a way to do this!

I have a friend who has his TiVO set-up to do it, but we don't have TiVO, just 2 DVRs...

does anyone have any ideas?

I have seen advanced video cards that allow you to plug in A/V cables and you can record and edit video feeds with the software. This would work the same way with DVR. Just run your A/V cables into your pc, so that your pc monitor now becomes your TV and use the software that came with the video card to record video off DVR. You can then change the file format, save it, upload it, send it, burn it to a cd...or anything else you would do with a video file.

hrmmm- that MIGHT work - but I'd have to get one hell of a long AV cable...lol

Does the DVR have USB or firewire? Lots of people are hacking the cable and sat DVR boxes to pull the video off. I don't know how though.

you have any more info about exactly what type of DVR's they are and what service you use them with (DirectTV / Comcast / etc...)

most of the company specific DVR's are handled differently. a little more info might lead to an answer.

comcast

http://broadband.motorola.com/dvr/dct6412.asp

it's got the USB ports on em (front and rear)...

Originally Posted by Red GTi VR6

hrmmm- that MIGHT work - but I'd have to get one hell of a long AV cable...lol

http://www.cablesforless.com/index.a...S&Category=421

50 ft. RCA x3 = $20
75 ft. RCA x3 = $25
100 ft. RCA x3 = $30


I have the 50 ft, and have been very impressed with the quality. I use it from a computer to my kids' room so they can watch their movies. I have ripped their movies to iso, and use daemon tools so that they don't touch the original DVDs any more.

Note: These cables have separate shields, not shared. This helps cut down on crosstalk a lot.

Oh - I don't have to worry about actually GETTING one....My fiance works at Electrograph (www.electrograph.com) - the nations largest distributer of Plasma and LCD tvs....they also get peripherals (sp?)..all at less than what it would cost someone who works for a retailer...

I think that I'll just have to move the computer closer to a TV...but first I need a better video card and in order to run a better video card I need a faster processor and in order to upgrade the processor I need to upgrade the mobo, then my old memory won't work...blah blah blah

I guess I'll just have to start saving as this is the only way that makes an sense!

LOL
There is no end to upgrading.

I've heard of people getting into that Motorola box through firewire, but on some they don't have it or the USB enabled so it's not a sure thing you can do anything. Recording directly to the PC is much easier.

Originally Posted by Red GTi VR6

Oh - I don't have to worry about actually GETTING one....My fiance works at Electrograph (www.electrograph.com) - the nations largest distributer of Plasma and LCD tvs....they also get peripherals (sp?)..all at less than what it would cost someone who works for a retailer...

I think that I'll just have to move the computer closer to a TV...but first I need a better video card and in order to run a better video card I need a faster processor and in order to upgrade the processor I need to upgrade the mobo, then my old memory won't work...blah blah blah

I guess I'll just have to start saving as this is the only way that makes an sense!

Ah, yes, electrograph. I used to buy monitors from their Atlanta office, IIRC. By the way, I've got an Nvidia personal cinema AGP card running on the compuer that is hooked up to my kids' TV. It's only an Athlon XP 1700+ w/ 512MB RAM. Of course, the XP 3000+ with 1GB RAM runs it better, but mainly the benefit is only in the rendering/encoding time. I have the same card in both systems. I have all the iso's on one pc, and mount them across GbE. We can watch 2 movies in 2 rooms at the same time off the same hard drive with no problem.