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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

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