Andrew Kantor's Place: YouTube help wanted

YouTube help wanted

Published 9/26/06

I have DirecTV and a TiVo-brand DVR supplied by them. Is there a reasonably simple way to get a video clip from said TiVo onto my PC?

I see so many people posting clips from television to YouTube, I figure there must be an easy way to do it — I just can’t seem to find it.

I don’t know the model number off-hand, but that’s easy enough to find out. There is a USB port, though.

Thanks for any help!

The Fray

2 responses (add yours)

Benjamin says:

Andrew,

I do what you’re referring to fairly often, but it’s not “simple”. I have a card installed in my PC from Pinnacle System (now a division of Avid) which I use to import analog video (from my old camcorder) into my PC so I can edit home movies. I bought a long component audio/video cable and connected it to my Tivo (where it wants to connect to a VCR) and hooked the other end to the card on my PC. I start up the software as if I’m capturing video from a camcorder, then tell Tivo to save a program to VCR and viola! everything transfers. It goes at “real time” and there is some inherent quality loss because of all of the digital/analog/digital conversions, but it gets the job done.

Hope that helps and good luck!
Ben

September 26th, 2006 at 4:56 PM

gnomic says:

Some DVRs connect via an ethernet connection. If you have the ability to ship video to another DVR, you can find an open source utility that will let you transfer the video to a PC. Then you need a utility that will convert it to a format used by the PC (Mpeg, AVI, WMA, etc).

What model DVR do you have? I’ll do the research and get back to you (and tell you where to find everything. I’m at work at the moment and the filters won’t let me find the sites that I need to search.

September 27th, 2006 at 10:06 AM