Howto: Burn HDTV to DVD
by gnudutch - Feb 2006

You love your HDTV. But you can never seem to catch your favorite shows when they air. Either that or your fancy new PVR is constantly 100% full. Wouldn't it be great if you could burn your HDTV shows to DVD? Well you can! As long as your gear is Firewire capable and you own a Macintosh computer.


Hardware required:
  • HDTV tuner box with Firewire output
  • Macintosh with Firewire port
  • Firewire cable

Software required:


The procedure:

First, capture the video over Firewire.
  • Download and install all the required software.
  • Plug your cable box into your computer using a Firewire cable.
  • Start AVC Browser Enhanced. Choose your tuner box from the list, and click "Open Device Controller".
  • Set the Output Plug "Channel" to 63, then Click the "Connect" button.
  • Start playing your HDTV program on the tuner box. You can do this live, or from a PVR recording.
  • Click the "Record" button in AVC Browser Enhanced.
    The "Mbps" and "seconds" fields should show activity. If not, recheck everything, start over.
  • Click the "Stop" button to stop recording.

Next, convert it to DVD.
  • Start ffmpegX. The "Summary" tab should be open.
  • Drag your video file into the "From" field.
  • The "From" field should fill in with "MPEG-TS". If it says "Unrecognized" your show is probably encrypted.
  • Change the "To" field to "DVD ffmpeg".
    (You can actually choose from dozens of export options including VCD, DivX, PSP, iPod ...)
  • Click the "Video" tab.
  • You can adjust the "Bitrate calculator" values to your choosing (file size vs quality).
  • Change the "Autosize" field to DVD 16:9 to accommodate 16:9 HDTV correctly.
  • Click the "Encode" button.
  • Wait very patiently. . . .

    Sample times:

    iMac G3 600mhz, 256mb RAM:

    • 1 hour of 480i analog @ 9 Mbps: 6 hours transcoding time.
    • 1 hour of 480p digital @ 3 Mbps: 6 hours transcoding time.
    • 1 hour of 1080i HDTV @ 15 Mbps: 10 hours transcoding time.

Now burn it to disc.

  • If you followed this recipe, you will have generated a VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS folder.
  • All you need now is a program like Toast to burn this directly to a DVD disc.

If you do not have a DVD authoring program you can create a .dmg disk image with ffmpegX then use Disk Utility (included with Mac OS X) to burn that to disk.

  • Click the "Tools" tab in ffmpegX.
  • Click the "img" subtab.
  • Click the "Browse" button and navigate to your VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS folders.
  • Click the "Choose" button.
  • Click the "Go" button.
  • Patience is a virtue. . . .
     
  • Start "Disk Utility" (in Applications -> Utilities)
  • Click the "Burn" button.
  • Navigate to your .dmg file, and click the "Choose" button.

Enjoy your DVD :)


Furthur reading

This is not the first guide of its kind. Here are similar articles you may find useful.

  • Jun 2003: AVS Forum - A long forum discussion describing HDTV firewire capture for the first time
  • Aug 2003: AVS Forum - Furthur discussion
  • Apr 2004: macosxhints - One of the first easy-to-follow guides
  • Aug 2004: macteens - Scheduling recordings with iCal events
  • Apr 2005: Poor Man's Tivo - Mainly about BitTorrent TV shows, but also has a discussion about transcoding formats.
  • Jul 2005: iRecord - a free app for Tiger that schedules recordings across multiple firewire devices (wow!)
  • Aug 2005: uncompiled.com - A "bare minimum" capture approach, Tiger required.