« A couple of things | Main | TiVo Desktop 2.4 Beta released »

Slingbox recording on a mac

Last night I had a dilemma: a friend in Germany missed a segment of the Oscars featuring a friend of ours (long story) winning an award. I had it on my Series 3 TiVo, but there was no way to get it off, thanks to TiVo not allowing show downloads.

That's when I remembered my Slingbox.  In researching how to record a slingbox stream, I could only find this old product for the PC, but it only worked with the original Slingbox with the old firmware. Turns out the Slingmedia folks started encrypting the streams so people couldn't dump the video to their computers.

I knew there had to be a way though, given that the video was playing on my computer and a computer is a pretty flexible tool. And that's when it hit me: why not try a simple screen capture utility? On my mac, the excellent (but horribly named) Snapz Pro X offers motion capture of anything on your desktop, along with the audio. I launched my slingplayer, started a high bitrate Snapz Pro X capture, saved that to my drive (700Mb file!), converted to compressed quicktime (10Mb file), then uploaded to youtube.

Here's the result, which I sent to my friend in Germany, and he got to see the less than 2 minutes of the Oscar show that really mattered to him. This method isn't useful for long captures, since the filesize of the video capture get really big really fast, but for grabbing a minute or two here to demonstrate a point or share a moment, it works great.

by Matt Haughey February 26, 2007 in Hacks

Comments

interesting. it's always fun to come up with solutions like this.

one thing i used to do a lot: when I would record something on my Tivo, but needed a clip of it on my Mac, I'd use the analog out on the Tivo and the analog-in on my Plextor ConvertX DVR. Instant mpeg4 clip, easily resized to iPod dimensions, quicktime, etc, thanks to the GREAT eyeTV software.

Nowadays, I am done with Tivo, and (due to some trade-offs) the ConvertX is hooked up to my Windows PC, where I use BeyondTV on the software side. This leaves me with a Rube Goldberg-like process that is akin in complexity to yours. BeyondTV is really slick, but it lacks an integrated editor, so I have to use a crappy Intervideo DVD (MPEG2) editing program, which is pure torture. (It's as if designed by East German bureaucrats who once saw iMovie through a cloudy window.)

After I edit it, I take the output and run it through the always handy Videora iPod Converter to get it down to an uploadable size.

Having been banned from YouTube for doing this sort of thing too many times, last night instead of YouTube, I used my webhost's new built-in media tool to convert the file to embeddable Flash, and then dropped it on my site. The whole thing takes way too long (mostly due to bad GUI, not actual performance issues). The day when I get back to a Mac-only environment can't come soon enough.

Posted by: adm at Feb 26, 2007 2:42:26 PM

Sounds like you need Clip & Sling:
http://us.slingmedia.com/object/io_1168395718976.html

Posted by: Grant at Feb 28, 2007 12:43:43 PM

Not sure what you're using for compression, but a great tool for Mac is VisualHub from Techspansion. They've done a great job of really simplifying the process for most common web formats (including .swf and .flv) and portable devices (iPod, PSP).

http://techspansion.com/

Snapz Pro is a great tool when there's no other way to get the footage, that's for sure.

Posted by: andrew at Mar 25, 2007 6:36:54 PM

Post a Comment

Name:

Email Address: (required, not shown)

Remember personal info?

Comments:

(html not allowed)