Archive for June, 2009

How to record live or previously recorded TV from a Motorola QIP6416-2 set-top box

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I have two needs: one, to record an episode of a certain TV show next week in high quality that is well-suited to burning to a DVD, and two, to keep my mind occupied to avoid dwelling on my current personal problems. In pursuit of satisfying those needs, I started reading up on how easy it would be to just pull the video from my DVR, which is a Motorola QIP6416-2 from Verizon FiOS. It has a ton of USB and FireWire ports, so I thought it wouldn’t be very difficult.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, the internet is full of bogus blog entries, misinformation, forum threads that are hundreds of pages long and impossible to parse in a single sitting, and the few bits of relevant info you may find hasn’t been updated in years. I was finally able to get rid of the cruft and put together a simple process for recording HD video over FireWire that’s straightforward and doesn’t require any extra hardware or software.

For this to work, you need:

  • A compatible STB. Listing compatible STBs here is beyond the scope of this entry. If in doubt, go up to step 3 and make sure your STB shows up in the list.
  • A 6-circuit FireWire cable. Hint: it’s the bigger kind of FireWire cable.
  • Something running OS X. From what I’ve read, anything newer than 10.2 will do. I did this on 10.5.7.
  • The Apple FireWire SDK. I used v26 for this. You can download it here. You’ll have to register first, but it’s free, so…

Once you’ve got all that set up and ready to go, proceed with the following steps:

  1. Connect the firewire cable from one of the ports on the back of the STB to your computer.
  2. Just to double check, go to the Apple Menu, then About this Mac, then More Info, then look under Hardware -> FireWire, and make sure your STB is in the list.
  3. Open AVCBrowser. It’s part of the FireWire SDK, and is easily found via Spotlight.
  4. Click Motorola QIP-6416-2 in the AVC Browser window.
  5. Click Open Device Control Panel.
  6. Click Open Device.
  7. Click the Panel tab, then click Show Viewer, which will open VLC.
  8. Use your STB remote to either select a channel, or browse and play your DVR contents.
  9. Make note of the udp address in the title bar of the VLC stream that opens.
  10. In VLC, go to File -> Open Network.
  11. Type the udp address you noted earlier into the Media Resource Locator field. This whole process might not be the best way to do this. I’m not sure. Either way, this works.
  12. Check the Streaming/Saving box, then click Settings.
  13. Check “Display stream locally” and select a destination with the “Browse” button next to File. Note: pick a drive that has quite a bit of storage space available. I’ve read that this video can take up around 9 gigs per hour.
  14. You can transcode here if you wish. I didn’t bother.
  15. Click OK, then OK again. It should reopen the stream from your STB and begin recording.

That should do it. You can change the video file name from the default “vlc-output.ts” if you like. Use the .mpg file extension. As far as I can tell, this technique will record the video at whatever resolution the channel is broadcasting in, so some will be 720p and some will be 1080i. And yes, it works with the movie channels. I didn’t try it with any On Demand content.

I’d also like to mention that I tried a few other oft-recommended apps, namely VirtualDVHS and FireRecord, and neither worked worth a damn. VirtualDVHS picked up the STB fine, but I couldn’t get it to actually record anything. FireRecord 0.5h picked up the STB and pretended to record, and I liked the scheduling aspects quite a bit, but the video format was either corrupt or I screwed up while recording. I couldn’t get it to play in VLC or Quicktime, even after renaming to .mpg. I also couldn’t get MPEG Streamclip to open it for conversion. I just assume I screwed up somehow while recording.

I hope someone finds this useful. I read in a lot of places that it wasn’t possible to pull video from these things. It seems to be true that you can’t just download a file from the STB’s hard drive, but this method is almost as good.

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Don’t get fancy with your paintbrush when you reminisce

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I’m trying not to fill this new incarnation of my blog with whiny personal existential rants, but…

Jenn and I have broken up. It was a very hard thing for me to do, made much harder by the way she handled it, but it had to be done. Things had grown toxic between us. We were both at fault for that; her, unable to control her emotions, exploding at me in tears and anger over every little thing, and me, unable to bear even the slightest hint of conflict, to the point that I anticipated arguments and fights in even the most benign circumstances.

For the past few weeks, as things have gotten worse with her moving home to Annapolis and preparing to move to Kansas, I’ve been increasingly unable to ignore the obvious path this relationship was taking. Once she was in Kansas, and during the weeks immediately preceding her move, the amount of stress and anxiety she’d be feeling would be extremely high, which would lead to more and more fights. The frequency with which she would hit me with guilt trips over not being able to come see her as often as she’d like, while unintentional, would crush me. We’d both be miserable. She’d resent me for not doing more, and I’d resent her for expecting me to do too much. We’d grow to hate each other, and I can’t bear the thought of that.

It became clear to me that if I was going to salvage any relationship at all with her, it had to end before it got to that point. I can’t bear the thought of losing her completely. I still love her very much, but love isn’t the only thing you need to keep a relationship going, especially a long distance one.

Right now, she hates me for doing this to her. She thinks it’s a mistake. I hate myself for causing her this pain, and I sometimes think it would just be easier to take it back and go back to pretending that everything is fine. But I know that will only make things better temporarily. I have to keep reminding myself that this is better in the long run. I have to bear the burden in this, yet again, for making things work. I just wish she could see it…

Perhaps, in a few years, we’ll meet up again, and she’ll have grown up a bit, figured herself out a little, have some clue about the things that make her tick. Perhaps I’ll have grown more patient. Perhaps I’ll develop a desire to have someone be completely dependent on me for their happiness and well-being. Perhaps then we can try again. Right now, though, I can’t even talk to her about our issues without her falling apart and shutting down, and I can’t be in a situation like that. I have to be able to discuss things with the person I am with. It can’t work otherwise.

Between this, the encounters with my grandparents, and things going on at work… this has been a horrible week, and I’m inclined to just avoid human contact as much as possible for the next few days so I can grieve in peace.

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