HD TV to Mac

[user10495]

Hello everyone,

I have a question regarding capturing from a
HD recorder to PC with a Canopus ADVC 110.

HD recorder: Panasonic DVD recorder with HD (DMR-EZ28)

Mac: Macbook pro OSX 10.5

4TB HDD: WD - My Book Essential

Soon to buy, Canopus ADVC 110

I have a couple hundred hours worth of videos
I want to save to my Mac on my HD recorder.
The DVD burning function is broken on my HD recorder.
And I want to save 400$ by buying a Canopus ADVC 110
to directly save videos from the HD recorder to PC.
I decided to change recording and the preservation of the video to MAC from DVD at this opportunity.

Q1

Anyone know if this is possible at all?

Q2

Can I record movie directly from CABLE TV (Comcast) through "Canopus ADVC 110" ?

Q3

If MAC has a method to save movie from CABLE TV (Comcast) by timer recording, please tell me.

Any help, would help.
Thank you for the support and consideration.

[user10495]

help I posted twice, anyone know how to get rid of the other!

[user10495]

ok I reported the other post!

[jman98]

Some of the older cable boxes that Comcast used had firewire drivers that did allow you to record directly from the Comcast cable box to a Mac. However I know that Comcast has been trying to replace those boxes and their newer ones don't allow firewire output. There's a list here if you want to see if your Comcast cable box might be able to be used this way.

http://home.comcast.net/~exdeus/stbfirewire/

I don't have any Conopus devices so I can't speak to whether or not you can use them as you wish. But I can tell you that the general procedure to record from a DVD recorder hard disk or a DVR is the same. You have to play back the video on the DVD recorder or DVR and send the output to your capture device. It must be recorded in real time, so one hour of video takes one hour to record. If you are going to record directly from cable then it would be best to just send the output directly to the capture device and not go through the DVD recorder first.

I don't keep up with external disk drives, but for best results be sure that your WD drive has its own power supply. WD and Seagate are both infamous for putting drives in enclosures that lack power supplies and sometimes the USB connector can't really provide enough power for the disk drive to work.

[DB83]

There is another issue that only a Mac user can answer.

You will require a program that can 'capture' the dv stream generated by the ADVC in to the computer. Under Windows we use WinDV but I have no idea what mac users would use.

[usually_quiet]

I deleted my earlier post. I misunderstood the question.

[usually_quiet]

An ADVC 110 will work with a Mac for saving recordings from an HDD DVD recorder with a broken optical drive. I had to look it up because I don't use a Mac, but the ADVC 110 works with iMovie or FinalCut.

To replace the DVD recorder entirely for recording TV from a Comcast box, you would possibly be better off with an H.264 capture device that can record in high definition. There are some that will work with a Mac using EyeTV (Elgato Game Capture HD) or HDPVRCapture (Hauppage HD-PVR 2). There is also a good stand-alone device, the AVerMedia Game Capture HD II that can record to an external NTFS-formatted hard drive, so the PC's OS dosen't matter. ...but the AVerMedia Game Capture HD II only has one timer, which means it won't work for automatically recording TV multiple shows airing at different times.

[Edit] Scratch HDPVRCapture and EyeTV as options given the version of OS X used on the OP's Mac. The latest version or HDPVRCapture requires OSX 10.8.5 or above. EyeTV 3 requires OS X 10.6.8 or later.