Capture using cable box and firewire

[nyconcepts]

I work for Comcast Cable. We just turned on the firewire out puts on the HD boxes. I just want to know if I buy a firewire card could I capture the video feed coming from the box? Would that be the best way for me, cause I do get the boxes for free. I think a firewire card would coast a lot less then a capture card, right? But does the sound go through the firewire?

[griff30]

Yes sound and video do go through firewire at 25mb/s top so its fast too.
Windows XP can record in uncompressed DV or its proprietary codec.
I would use uncompressed and then use any DV codec to play with it in VDUB.
Question for you,
You want to sell one of those HDTV settop cable boxes? Charter in our area forces you to rent them for $10 extra a month.

[hms]

I have Comcast at home and I am interested in this:
What kind of video stream is provided through the firewire?
Analogue or perhaps the pure digital video stream?

[griff30]

DV is an AVI pure digital stream. However to mess around with it without using a proprietary codec like WMV you will need to find panasonics DV codec (everywhere on the net) to use the DV stream in VirtualDub or any other converter.

[hms]

I am surprised!
The cable video itself is an mpeg2 stream.
A DV video would be a re-encode of the original mpeg2 stream.
Such a stream would fill up the HD very, very quickly.

[nyconcepts]

Sorry I cant sell you a box lol, a comcast box would only work on a comcast line. And the firewire out put should put out Dig and analog, 2-99 is still analog untill 2006 when the FCC makes us go all Dig. No one that I know has tried the firewire yet but I will soon. I found a card for .99 + 10.00 for shipping on ebay but im not sure if it will work. I can by the same card at the store for 17.oo but does it matter who makes the card? http://www.nanosys1.com/fire-by-pci-323.html

[rishardc]

I have cablevision myself, and yes you can capture it to a pc. Over at AVS there is a massive thread about doing just this. Comcast I believe uses a motorolla box right? That box needs a certain firmware to work properly based on what a lot of people are seeing.

The long thread is here.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=309877&perpage=20&pagenumber=1

[nyconcepts]

Yes your right I think the last firmware update was the one that turned on our firewire port. We now have some problems with the sound on the analog chs so we should be getting another firmware update. Our motorolla 6200 and 5100 box is at 7.07 for firmware.

But I dont know about the firewire card. I dont want to pay a lot. will a 20$ card work ok for me? And is the whole thing just in the kind of software you use? I got on called pinco or something like that, for got the name of it.

[rishardc]

The thread I linked to describes the software involved. Also I believe the firmware that people finally got the software working with is 7.10. The firmware when it was activated was 7.07, but they coudln't get it working with the pc till 7.10 from what I gather.

[litz]

On Windows XP, you will be unable to do this until you get the 7.10 Mot. 6200 update.

But the Macintosh firewire capping works flawlessly out of the box with the more common 7.07 firmware.

Capture is to a mpeg2 transport stream file with a .m2t extension.

Warning though -- the HD streams have some VERY weird ordering in them ... the sequence headers FOLLOW the frames they are supposed to precede. This doesn't seem to mess up playback, but it makes any kind of editting darned near impossible.

- litz