Getting an HDTV signal (from my DVR) onto my mac

[pooky]

So here's the issue. I have a DVR (made by Motorola) through my cable company. The thing has two firewire ports and an ethernet port on the back, in addition to all of the other typical ports and such. I would like to be able to bring video from it to my mac to record DVDs and such. Does anyone have any experience with this?

What I've tried so far:
Hooking it up to the network in my house does apparently nothing. Plugging it into the computer via a firewire port does not let me access the hard drive on the DVR, but it does show up as a device under the system profiler. This makes me wonder if it is trying to stream video to the computer, as I know that those ports can be used to send an HDTV signal to an HDTV. Is there software that would let me bring this signal onto the mac?

 

[Cooknn]

You won't be able to access the HD in the DVR AFAIK, and any streaming that you do to your Mac will most likely be 5C encrypted unless you bring it in OTA (Over the Air) which you're not since you said you were on cable. Bottom line, there's not much you can do, but if you want to experiment with the bleeding edge you could read through this thread on the AVS Forums. Or you could buy EyeTV200 from Elagato Systems.

I captured this with Virtual DVHS over Firewire and played it back with VLC.

 

[AppleAce]

So here's the issue. I have a DVR (made by Motorola) through my cable company. The thing has two firewire ports and an ethernet port on the back, in addition to all of the other typical ports and such. I would like to be able to bring video from it to my mac to record DVDs and such. Does anyone have any experience with this?

What I've tried so far:
Hooking it up to the network in my house does apparently nothing. Plugging it into the computer via a firewire port does not let me access the hard drive on the DVR, but it does show up as a device under the system profiler. This makes me wonder if it is trying to stream video to the computer, as I know that those ports can be used to send an HDTV signal to an HDTV. Is there software that would let me bring this signal onto the mac?

I don't have any experience with this personally, but I have heard of people removing the drive from their Tivo box, mounting it up on their computer, and then somehow extracting the video files from it. Don't know anything firsthand though.

 

[pooky]

Thanks, both of you. I'll see what I can get it to do with a little more fiddling.