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View Full Version : Announcement: HD cable box firewire video capture CLI tool


synthesizerpatel
09-03-2008, 02:29 PM
Hi, just wanted to post here to let people know that I've completed and made available a CLI tool that will allow for HD/SD video capture from cable boxes such as the Motorola DCT-6200.

It's based on AVCVideoCap.app from the FireWire SDK but instead of having a big UI it's a simple command line utility suitable for using within scripts or as the backend for a DVR/PVR system. It dumps out MPEG Transport Stream files (.ts) which can be played with Plex, VLC , XBMC, Mplayer.

It's pretty simple to use, it's called "clover" and takes the following command line options:

-o <filename>
-d <duration in minutes>
-v <verbose>
-c <channel to switch to before recording>

So, if you wanted to record channel 67 for one hour and dump it into a file named 'pbs.ts', you'd run clover like this:

clover -d 60 -c 67 -o pbs.ts

WARNING:

This software is extremely beta, I make no claims as to its fitness for anything beyond experimenting. It works good for me, but I haven't extensively tested it.

I have posted the Xcode project / source-code on my website, you can read more about it there: http://www.remix.net/wiki/Clover

Hope someone finds this useful!

-Nathan Ramella (Synthesizer Patel)