Watch and record Directv

[mikepenn]

Is there any way to watch and record Directv on a mac?

[Spoffo]

You'll definitely need a DirecTv dish and tuner, but if you then had some kind of video input card in the Mac you could feed the video from the tuner into it. Recording it is going to require enormous amounts of disk space unless you have some way of doing on-the-fly compression. That normally reuires dedicated hardware, as in a stand-alone DVD recorder, but maybe there's a solution out there.

[AntnyMD]

If the DirecTV tuner has a working Firewire output, you can record direct streams without additional compression. This is, however, unlikely.

As alternatives, you can employ a converters (analog to DV, or analog to MPEG). The most recommended are Canopus for DV, and ADS Instant USB to DVD (or something like that) for MPEG.

[Mark V]

I do it this way.

I record the show on my Digital Video Recorder that also burns DVD's.

I burn a DVD off of the Digital Video Recorder.

I watch the DVD in my Mac.

I dont see any other way of doing this and why would you want to do this on a Mac anyway?

[omnpotnt]

I use Alchemy DVR, which utilized a TV Tuner card that you can just pop into a slot on your powermac...it comes with a recording utililty, much like a Tivo that you can even sync with your iCal. It's a great little program...but somewhat cpu intensive from what i've read. I have twin 2.7's and 700gb of hard drive space, but have never noticed any slow down's in whatever I'm doing while it's recording.