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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