Download
You can download the current version of Clover here: clover-0.1.tar.gz
News
No news in a while! I need to get the lead out!
Project Details
- Description
A CLI utility for capturing video via firewire from digital cable boxes for OSX. Clover will output standard definition or high-definition MPEG-TS (transport-stream) formatted files to disk which you can then view using most modern video players such as mplayer, vlc, and xbmc.
- OS Requirement
- Apple OSX 10.4 or higher. Might work with PPC, although I've only tested it on Intel.
- Compatible Cable Boxes
Motorola DCT-6200 is the only cable box I've tested on, but any digital cable box should work. If you are successful using Clover on some other type, let me know!
- The Name
Clover is named after our dog CloverTheDogAndNotASoftwareProject
Usage
Clover is a CLI utility meaning you must execute it from a 'Terminal'. If you're unfamiliar with Terminal, Clover probably isn't going to be much use to you. If you're a CLI wiz, you'll be right at home. It's dead simple.
If your cable box is turned off, Clover will turn it on for you before attempting to record. Otherwise, here's your options as far as command line flags:
- -d <NUMBER_OF_MINUTES>
- duration to record
- -o <FILENAME>
- output filename
- -c [<NUMERIC_CHANNEL>]
- numeric channel to change to on startup. If you omit this flag it will simply record on whatever channel the cablebox is already on.
- -v
- verbosity, will show you lots of debugging messages. If omitted, Clover is very quiet.
- example
- If you wanted to record channel 702 (HD NBC in my market), for 60 minutes and output into a file named '~/myvideo.ts' you would run clover with the following arguments.
clover -d 60 -c 702 -o ~/myvideo.ts
Background
I got interested in this project a few years ago when I learned that by law in the United States digital cable providers must give customers a firewire port on their digital cable box.
There's a provision in the FCC cable television laws that covers OTA (over-the-air) content, that is, any content that is broadcast via local television stations is legally required to be unencrypted for firewire decoding.
As it turns out, a lot of stations don't bother to turn on the encryption or 'only-live' bits in their streams so you can actually get a fair amount of content. You can't record HBO or On-Demand pay-content in my experience, but I've had people report different experiences.
Nicest of all, Clover will happily capture HD content for you even on wimpy systems like my first gen Mac Mini.
See Also
ComSkip for OSX - A automated CLI commercial editing utility
mpgtx mpeg toolkit - CLI tools for mpeg manipulation
ccextractor - CLI tool for extracting closed-captions from MPEG-TS streams.
ffmpeg - CLI video transcoding utility
AtomicParsley - CLI MPEG-4 metadata editor
liba52 - Free ATSC A/52 stream decoder
mpeg4ip - MPEG4 container builder utility
lame - MP3 library
FAAD2 and FAAC - AAC and AAD2 libraries
GPAC Project on Advanced Content - x264 dependency for mpeg4 output
XVID Codec (source) - The popular xvid codec.
Compiling libxvid for OSX - I found this useful, after configure I replaced my platform.inc with his and it would compile.
ffmpeg - like babelizer for video.
dvbsnoop - Neat program for analyzing DVB, sadly Linux only. Instead I'm going to be using...
hachoir - The coolest python package with the worst name.
5C DTCP 5C DTCP is the encryption mechanism used for MPEG-TS streams.