DVR to hard drive on Motorola DCH3416

If your Mac has a FireWire connection, you can hook that to the DVR and use the Apple FireWire SDK to record to your hard drive.

Warning: The Motorola DCX boxes are known to have some serious problems with using FireWire to record shows to the hard drive. The older Motorola DCT and DCH cable boxes are 100 times more reliable at doing it.

You'll need to buy a FireWire cable with a 6-pin FireWire IEEE-1394a connector on one end. The other end of the cable will depend on what connector (if any) your Mac has.

If your Mac doesn't have FireWire, you could always buy an add-in card for ~$35 to $50.

^ Post a picture of the Mac FireWire port. That way I can give you better guidance.

The cable box does not have a FireWire port on the front...that 's a USB port and it can't be used for recording.

The FireWire port(s) can be found on the back of the cable box. The older DCT and DCH cable boxes have 2 of them, while the newer DCX cable boxes have only 1. They should be labeled IEEE1394

Yes, but there are awful bugs with the DCX boxes that prevent most people from doing it. The DCT and DCH boxes can do it. (a few people have claimed that their cable companies have pushed software updates to their DCX boxes that have solved the problem, but I've seen zero evidence of it and there are still tons of people complaining about the bug).

The bottom line is that if you have a DCT or DCH Motorola DVR, you will be able to FireWire-transfer the recording later. If you have a DCX Motorola DVR, you will likely NOT be able to FireWire-transfer the recording later (due to long-standing unresolved firmware bugs that plague the DCX boxes).

BTW, the cable you need should be ordered on the Internet, otherwise you'll pay waaayy too much. (Best Buy charges something like $30-$40 for FireWire cables).

Sweet! Do NOT allow your cable company to swap it out for one of the new DCX's! They suck. And you can open up your DCH and toss in a 1 TB hard drive, thus eliminating any advantage that the DCX boxes have (granted, it's a little more involved than just sticking a blank 1 TB hard drive in it, but I have a step-by-step guide that shows exactly how to do it).

Yes, you can hook a SD VCR or DVD Recorder to it. It'll look like sh1t (SD always does), but it'll work.

You should perform the 1 TB hard drive swap...It'd make recording the Olympics waaayy easier.

Read my guide

It does not involve an external drive. It involves you having (or buying) a 1 TB hard drive and then following my directions to get it properly formatted for use in the cable box.

You need one computer (nothing fancy...I used an 8 year old machine) with a CD-RW or DVD-RW drive (you need to burn a free bootable Linux Live CD). You also need a USB thumbdrive of any size (only about 700 KB is needed).
It's rather easy stuff.

Cox can't handle large hard drives, but there's nothing preventing you from hooking FireWire to your computer and recording in HD.

You just need a Mac (and download the Apple FireWire SDK), or a 32-bit Windows PC (64-bit Windows won't work) and my FireWire Driver MSI Package.

The challenge is that 160 GB is not a lot of room for HD...and the Olympics are long! You'd need to really be on top of off-loading it via FireWire in order to not run out of space.

If you can post a picture of the FireWire port, I'll be able to identify it.

My guess is that you could use a FireWire 400 cable 4-pin to 6-pin. I'm pretty sure that FireWire 400 cables can plug into FireWire 800 (but it runs at the lower speed). Cable boxes only run at the lower FireWire 400 speed.

Sometimes those cables are called IEEE1394a 4-pin to 6-pin cables.
(the "a" means it runs at the FireWire 400 speed...if it was "b", it would mean FireWire 800 and wouldn't fit the cable box).

I know that the connector for the cable box is the larger 6-pin connector (it looks similar to USB), what I don't know is what your laptop has. But, being a laptop, I would think it would use the smaller 4-pin connector (which also saves battery life, as it is unpowered). And all of my Windows laptops use the 4-pin FireWire connector (not that most laptops even have FireWire...I only have 2 that do).

You want to get the cable either from Fry's Electronics or on the Internet. Best Buy charges way too much for them.

Okay, your laptop has FireWire 800, also known as FireWire b or IEEE1394b. The nice thing about FireWire 800 is that there is only one size for the plug (FireWire 400 comes in 6-pin and 4-pin varieties).

So you need a FireWire 800 1394b 9-pin to FireWire 400 1394a 6-pin cable:
http://www.cablestogo.com/product_list.asp?cat_id=611

I'm not sure what the best price would be, as this is not a hugely common cable...But I'll bet that it would cost a fair bit more at Best Buy. I paid nearly $40 for a FireWire 400 1394a 6-pin to FireWire 400 1394a 4-pin cable a year ago (I really needed it that same day, so it was worth it).

More info about FireWire can be found here.

Nah, that's a bunch of crap. They don't even bother trying to protect analog or SD content. The worst that they sometimes try is something called SOC (Selective Output Control), whereby the Component Video outputs are disabled whenever HDMI is in use.

If you're okay with SD quality, hooking up a DVD Recorder will work perfectly fine.

Olympics - does anyone have the Olympics recorded on their PC from DVR? this is exactly why i'm doing this.. but I only have 4 programs recorded (mostly swimming)


Would anyone be willing to send an sd memory card or dvd of them I'll pay. After I looked around to realize no one sold the games on dvd this is the only option, help!

Hi, I have the same issues. So I would connect one end to the cable box and the other to my computer, but how exactly do I transfer my recorded shows to my hard drive?

Thanks in advance for any help.

And please feel free to respond at williamian@me.com.

If you have the Motorola DCH3416, you should buy a FireWire cable (also known as a IEEE1394 cable) to connect from your PC or Mac to your cable box.

One thing we don't know is if your computer has FireWire currently. You should post a picture of the outputs so that I can identify them. If you do have FireWire, you need to determine the type and size of the the FireWire connector on your machine. Laptops typically have either the 4-pin IEEE1394a connector or the IEEE1394b connector. Your cable box has the 6-pin IEEE1394a connector (all Motorola cable boxes have the IEEE1394a connector.)
It's likely that you'll need a "4-pin IEEE1394a to 6-pin IEEE1394a" cable, but we'll determine that when you get back to use with more info. It is also very possible that you have no FireWire on your computer at all, in which case you'll need to buy a FireWire card.

Once you get squared away on the FireWire stuff, you'll want to download my Windows Installer .MSI installation package which simply bundles together the needed drivers and software to capture HDTV. You can download it from here, but it only works on 32-bit editions of Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8; The drivers can not work on 64-bit Windows (64-bit drivers don't exist for capturing HDTV and nobody is working on creating any.) This installation includes a freeware software product "CapDVHS", which allows you to capture HDTV. It's pretty easy to work with and my install includes some documentation.

If you use a Mac, you simply need to download and install the Apple FireWire SDK, which includes an app that captures HDTV.