Beeker Studios

This "project" is not for the feint of heart, but once it's setup it's pretty simple to operate. Proceed with caution... you may become addicted to recording more tv shows than you can watch, or have space for. This addiction is known as tivoitis.

Why are you even doing this? Hulu ROXORS! Cable SUXORS!

Hulu and Cable suxors actually, the video quality on Hulu's service is at or less than youtube quality 480p video. I can record between dvd quality 480i to 720p to 1080i resolution video at 10mbits. That's far more resolution, and data. I can also actually SKIP or not even see commericals, or see commercials I DO want to see. I do motion graphics and media design for a living. I admit I watch commercials, if for nothing more than to learn what is wrong with society. ;) I also admit sometimes I miss a show and I have to resort to watching Hulu, or other means... uhhuhhmmm. The other annoying thing is that Hulu and those other means, take time to post the shows. Sometimes my wife and I just want to watch something an hour later than it aired, or minutes for that matter. With recording you don't have to wait, you can watch immediately.

Cable is expensive I admit it, but I signed up for a cable service with no introductory offer, so my fee's have remained the same since day 1, and they haven't increased. I paid a little more to get going, but in the end I am paying for less over time. I also didn't have a cable bill prior to this for like 2 years, so I am fine with having a little bit of one now.

What's the benefit over Tivo or a PVR from my cable provider?

Tivo service costs $12.95/month at a total of $155.40 for a year. My cable provider's DVR service costs about the same. They call it a "rental fee". Also they charge for a CableCard for tivo, and if you need 2, they charge double. I do pay a little more for an HD cable box, but from what I remember it's $6/month (ya that's half the price, so it's not FREE, but with the tivo I'm not factoring in the initial cost of the box either). I am sure I could pickup an old cable box with the same capabilities, but am pretty pleased with the size and capabilities of this cable box (which btw, is a Pace RNG110). The DVR from my cable provider is probably the best deal, no initial investment and at about the same monthly cost as the tivo it's relatively the same cost. With the cable provider box, one can also watch on demand content, much like I can with my STB, which you can't do with the Tivo. The only issue I have with that box, is that I have heard nothing but bad things about the cable providers DVR's. They are also closed systems. So if I wanted to convert a video to an ipod format and bring it with me, well then I am SOL. This is possible with the Tivo, but it's quite a bit of work to accomplish. My HTPC however is far more versatile, it's not just a DVR/PVR. It's a full on multimedia machine, and it's like a swiss army knife for a media addict like me.

Drawbacks

• I can't "pause" live tv
• I can't start watching a show already in progress
• Initial investment into an HTPC is not "cheap" (I am using a previous gen mac mini, gma 950 gpu)
• the setup of the system is not straight forward

You're going to need some hardware:

• An always on Mac (yes a mac!) used as an HTPC, connected via firewire to a supported STB
• A Set Top Cable Box (preferably HD) capable of outputting video via firewire, and accepting channel change requests via firewire as well
• An iPhone or a remote computer, since the scheduling happens remotely, no calendaring is done on the HTPC, you can technically use iCal on your HTPC, but my scripts parse the google ical ICS, so it might differ slightly to what iCal uses as it's container

There are a number of components to this that require separate attention. Here's the process you need to go through to get things working:

• Test Firewire STB Recording using clover
• Configure iPhone for Activesync via Gmail/Google Calendar (you need gmail/calendar account as well)
• Acquire and Configure Titan TV account (it's free and optional)
• Configure a desktop calendar application (Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird) to work with Google ActiveSync
• Install and configure glue script (PHP) to trigger recordings
• How to schedule recordings remotely with your mobile, or desktop

Test Firewire STB Recording using clover

The first part of all of this, is probably the most difficult, but easiest as well (if that makes sense...). You need to test if you can record video using your cable STB, and a firewire cable using clover (Update: Looks like Nathan's site is down right now, so you can download my modified version of the utility here, which still works for other STB's, and the Pace RNG 110). Clover is a command line utility that will send channel change commands to your STB, and then initiate a recording of the current channel and output to an mpeg ts file. It sounds complicated, but if you've even dabbled in the Terminal a little bit, this is not difficult.

Once the utility is installed test it, by opening terminal and typing the following:

clover -c 703 -d 1 -o my_recording.ts


If you're using the Pace RNG110, the clover utility will NOT work, for changing channels. I had to "hack" the utility, since the writer of clover provided the source code, which is basically an augmentation of the firewire SDK code. You can get the Pace RNG110 compatible script here:
http://www.beekerstudios.com/mind/firewiresdk-complete-stb-channel-chang... (this page also discusses using a webpage to send channel change commands over firewire, and also start immediate recordings)

703 in the above example is to change the channel to 703, 1 is the duration of recording and my_recording.ts is the output file. With that said, if you can playback the my_recording.ts file at the least in VLC, you are good to go.

Now from this point it may seem like you could just role your own scheduling system, and you can, but my method I have to say makes it pretty future proof, and simple. Read on...

Configure iPhone for Activesync via Gmail/Google Calendar

Simply put, follow this How to: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=1...
The added benefit of doing this is that your iPhone will also have push e-mails enabled. Please realize you need iPhone OS 3.0 or higher, which on the day of writing this entry, I am not sure why you wouldn't have that.

After you've configured sync, you might be wondering why your calendars aren't showing up. That's because you haven't told google what calendars you want to sync. You can do this by going to http://m.google.com/sync on your iPhone and logging in, and selecting which calendars you want to sync.

In my case I have a calendar called "TV Shows to Record". You need to create this calendar in Google Calendars, and then add it to your iPhone, not the other way around. The data lives in the cloud, and syncs both read and write to your iphone. You make a change on your iPhone and it appears in the google calendar in your web browser (and in your calendar if you have that setup). Likewise if you make a change in your desktop calendar client (ical, sunbird, win calendar), it syncs with the google calendar, as well as your iphone. Now I am sure you can get really nitpicky and try and fool all of these to break, but as long as you give them a respectable amount of time, you will be fine. I haven't had any issues with this. I can input a date into the calendar on my desktop, and within a minute, or sometimes less it shows up on my iphone. It's quick!

If you have a mobile phone that plays nice with google calendars, like an android phone, this will also work for you. I am just using the iPhone as an example, since that's what I use. There should be no real difference in how the DVR script functions, because it interacts with google calendar, not your mobile phone.

Acquire and Configure Titan TV account

When scheduling via your iPhone, you kind of have to know what channel, and what is being recorded, and when. For the channels you watch frequently that's probably not a huge issue, but sometimes I forget what channel FX is on, or when a TV show starts and ends. So for that, 2 fold I use Titan TV. It's a horrible website, it's ugly, clunky and not user friendly. Let me just get that out of the way. The only 3 useful features of this site, are the fact that it's relatively accurate with it's data, it has a horrible iphone formatted version of it's site (which I really have to say is really, really horrible, but it works in a pinch), and they give you an ics download link for every tv show on the calendar.

The last one is kind of the bread and butter for why I use the service. My only gripe is that, I can't copy the calendar link or connect it up with google calendar somehow, so that I could directly input events via the iPhone. This calendar download feature is mainly useful for the desktop calendar client, which is where I do a majority of the scheduling for the TV recording. I do it from my computer while at work, or while sitting on the couch working on my laptop. I don't touch my HTPC.

The configure part of Titan TV is just so that it keeps you logged in, on the iphone you will probably have to login more often than on your desktop (but again this is probably where you will use it most). Also you want to select the proper channel lineup, so that you are seeing the proper schedule for your cable service.

Configure a desktop calendar application (Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird) to work with Google ActiveSync

First things first, you DON'T need any software. I know there are a lot of utilities out there, but I am running OS X leopard 10.5.8 and iCal has this built-in.

You basically need to follow this:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#...

As you can see you can also use mozilla sunbird, which is cross platform, and if you have a mac at home, and a PC at work, you can still schedule your "DVR" remotely.

Install and configure glue script (PHP) to trigger recordings

If you aren't running MAMP already, go here: http://www.beekerstudios.com/mind/introducing-htpc-launchboard-iphone-we... and follow the first few steps of how to get MAMP up and running on your mac. If you feel inclined, you might also look at running my HTPC launchboard web app, which will let you start/stop/hide/show apps on your mac remotely via your mobile device, or computer.

DOWNLOAD THIS PHP SCRIPT

Open the script with your favorite text editor, and modify the variables in the first part of the script.

Your google_ical_url, can be found by going to http://www.google.com/calendar. Clicking "Settings, below "My Calendars". Click on your "TV Shows to Record" calendar, and at the bottom of the page you will see a section called "Private Address". If you are really concerned with people having access to this link, you could probably come up with some other method to "automatically" download the proper ICS file for this calendar, and then have my script parse the file locally. That would work, but I am not terribly concerned, and feel this private address is "secure enough" for me.

Right click the ICAL link and "Copy Link", and paste it between the single parentheses for the google_ical_url variable.

Set the suser, and spass to the currently logged in username and password. If you have issues with this, you may need to modify the script to workaround permissions issues without entering these bits of into.

The $tws variable, determines a window of recording time, to start before and trail past the actual set recording time. So if the show starts at 8pm, and ends at 9pm, it will actually start recording at 7:58pm, and end at 9:02pm if you set this variable to "2".

You will also need to schedule this script (via cron) to run every 2-5 minutes, depending on how odd your show times are. Mine are typically on the hour, so I don't have too much problem with this. There are tons of tutorials, on how to setup a cronjob in OS X, if it's really a problem for you, please comment below, and I will point you in the right direction.

The script will also send you an e-mail, when a recording has started.

How to schedule recordings remotely with your mobile, or desktop

On the Desktop

1. Go to http://www.titantv.com
2. Find the show you want to record and click on it
3. Click calendar
4. Your iCal client should startup, if it wasn't already, and you will prompted with what calendar you want to load the ICS file into, choose the calendar that your "TV Shows to Record" are located, in my case it's called just that.
5. Verify that the correct info is in the event (not necessary, but just illustrating for this tutorial) You should notice, that the final bit of info is the "channel". This is what the clover utility uses to change the channel. The rest of the info, aside from the date/time is what I consider fluff. Nice to know, but not necessary. If the info is there, the script will use this info to name the file correctly. Otherwise it will just give the output file a default name, channel, and timestamp.
6. The event should be synced to your calendar, and when the show is on, your recording should start

On your mobile

1. If you do not know what channel your show is on, go to http://www.titantv.com and find out
2. Once you know that, you open your calendar app
3. Click on the day of the show, select the time range, and also select the proper "TV Shows to Record" calendar.
4. In the notes section, enter the channel number, in my example that's 702 (fox). If you want to enter other info, like the name of the show, or the episode name, follow the format displayed in the ical event above, which is basically as follows:
   
Name of Show
Name of episode
channel number (in the above example it also shows the call numbers for the channel, but this isn't necessary, as the gluescript will just use the last variable of this line to change channels).

5. The event should be synced to your calendar, and when the show is on, your recording should start

I realize this is a little more manual, but in a pinch it works, and I tend to use the desktop more, and if I really forget I don't find the nuisance, of having to know the time and channel of a show that bad.

Side note: the format of the info on the mobile/webpage, is unfortunately different than the ical event format. So you can't just cut and paste it into your calendar app. I am trying to figure out a method to send the titantv info to google calendar in some way, via a bookmarklet, or some other method. Right now I haven't figured that out. The eventual solution, would be that titan tv provides this google calendar integration, or someone develops a mashup site, or an iphone app, that does just this.