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yay for TV on my powerbook (again)

I had some issues with the previous version of iRecord so I haven’t messed around with TV on my mac in a little while.

Last night I decided enough was enough, and I endeavored to get it working once again. Why let a lovely 23 inch Apple cinema display go to waste?

It seems the software formerly known as iRecord is now FireRecord. This is a nice little piece of software for scheduling recordings from a firewire video device, in this case a Motorola DCH-3200 cable box which I get free from work. I had some issues searching for iRecord initially since some other company stole the name, but once I searched on Ammesset Software I was set.

I previously had a DCT-6400 but that died, and iRecord didn’t play nicely with the fancy new DCH-3200. With the updated software release all the issues seem to be resolved , and I recorded The Daily Show and Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia as a test. Everything recorded without issue as I slept, so now I look forward to more TV watching and recording.

Recording over firewire isn’t the most elegant solution since it seems the only software to support this is FireRecord and VirtualDVHS, which is included in the Apple firewire SDK. I like the fact that this solution is free for me, but I would rather have more fully featured software than simple channel changing and scheduled recordings. At some point I want to get an HDHomerun dual tuner device, which works with Elgato’s EyeTV.

Now that I’ve recorded the show, I used the trusty MPEG Streamclip software to pull out the commercials and rip the video into an iphone friendly file format. I decided  to do this on a MacBook at work since it would probably take at least 8 hours to rip on my feeble old 12 inch PowerBook. It may be portable and good to use for surfing the web and other easy tasks, but ripping video into h.264 is not its strong suit.

I can once again watch TV (except for premium channels) on my computer. Yay. All I need now is a computer capable of ripping video in a reasonable amount of time and I will be in an amazing video wonderland!

Tags: Iphone, Powerbook, television

pwnage 2.1

One day after Apple released the 2.1 version of its iphone software, the awesome iphone dev team released the Pwnage Tool version 2.1. Sunday evening I downloaded the new update over bittorrent and installed it. I opted for the expert mode install because I am l337 and I don’t like the stock boot and restore mode images the tool installs. I also opted to not install Installer, since I hardly use it and the software seems to crash. Cydia is great for me, and I haven’t seen any Installer only apps that I was in dire need of using. I opted to pre-install Winterboard and a couple additional repositories since I would have to get them sooner or later anyway.

It probably took around 20 minutes for my lowly 12 inch powerbook to build the updated IPSW bundle, and then it was off to the races. I did a backup of the phone, then I forced the phone into restore mode to restore using the pwned IPSW. I find for some reason that iTunes doesn’t like to connect to my phone after doing the software restore, so I unplugged the phone while it did the baseband check after the upgrade. I restarted iTunes as the phone restarted, and then I plugged in the phone to restore from my previous backup.

I haven’t evaluated all the claims made in the release notes of the fix but the phone seems more responsive. They keyboard sucks a lot less than it has with the other 2.x releases. The only bad thing I’ve encountered is that Snapture won’t load. I tried using BossPrefs to fix the user permissions since that has done the trick before, but I was not so lucky this time. I’m going to see if I can manually clean out all the files and do a fresh install to see if that will remedy anything.

I saw yesterday that there is a new app to create an installation list of your Cydia apps so you don’t have to manually install them all after renewing the software. I should have used it, since it’s becoming a bit of a drag to manually install all the awesome software each time you upgrade the iPhone’s software.

All in all the upgrade process was easy, I’m still waiting for an update that stops Java from making my work computer totally unuseable for 5 minutes while it loads.

Tags: Apple, Iphone, Powerbook