Old news for most, but this years American Inline Hockey League finals will be held at BladeRunners in sunny Harmarville, PA on Memorial Day weekend. It will be side by side with the 2nd annual Penguins Breakout tournament. Last years Breakout was a phenominal success, with teams coming in from NY, VA, OH, PA, and MI to compete in it. This year will be adding an Adult-Rec division and possible an 8U division.
The website for Breakout should be going live in a few days. Help spread the word to make this event even larger!
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Checklist
Introduction
On April 1, 2004, the FCC mandated that on request, cable companies would provide their customers a set top box (STB) with a FireWire port on request. I decided to test that theory with Comcast and got a pretty nice box in the Motorola DCX-3200. Did a bit of Googling to see how to do it on OS X and there is no easy explanation. The funny part about that is, it pretty much can’t be easier. The only real snag that I’ve found is that the channel-changing portion does not work for me. I’m guessing that it could be fixed using AppleScript tuning, which is a bit more complicated than I care to get into. The DCX-3200 guide can easily be set to change channels at a certain time; I just hook it up to a TV quickly to accomplish it.
Step 1
Install FireRecord and VLC Media Player. FireRecord is the software that is the “DVR” on the Mac. VLC is what plays back the recorded files.
Step 2
Hook up the cable box to the Mac using the FireWire cable. This step is pretty much plugging in the plug that fits. You might need to disconnect all of the other cables on the back of the box for the FireWire to work, I know I could not have both HDMI and FireWire connected at the same time on mine.
Step 3
FireRecord has a pretty straightforward interface. Pretty much you can start recording immediately (⌘-Shift-N) or you can schedule an event (⌘-N). New Immediate Event starts recording whatever channel the STB is on. I generally use this, because I have an HD-DVR in the living room. I pretty much only use the FireWire port if I want to archive something or share it online. When you use FireRecord, it creates an m2t file. An m2t file is just a different wrapper around an MPEG-2 file.
Step 4
Open the created m2t file in VLC. Seriously, it is that easy. You don’t even have to wait until it is done recording. It can be used just like a normal DVR.
Steps 5+
Coming Soon, this part will be on how to archive the shows to a much smaller format (DivX) for archival purposes or for uploading clips online to sites like YouTube and DailyMotion (Remember to respect Copyright laws with that)
