I'd guess that you'll get 30-40 hours on a 250GB drive. Therefore your storage is limited only by your supply of HDD's. The easiest way to get the most storage is to use external firewire hard drives preferably in an enclosure where you can easily swap hard drives as needed. HDTV requires up to 9GB/hr for 19.3Mbit/sec broadcasts but the compression that most providers now use yield storage requirements somewhat less. Adequate hard drive space for recording.Built-in firewire on the Mac or a firewire PCI card.MacOS X 10.3 Panther operating system (or 10.2 Jaguar with updated firewire components).(Note: The Blue and White G3 appears to have a problem with this setup) As a guideline, any G3 or better should work and you might even get away with something older in the 7300-9600 model range. I'm using a 6 year old beige G3 266MHz that can be bought used for about $100. In fact, any Mac with internal firewire should be fine. There is a misconception that you need a fast new Mac for this. Below you'll find the requirements and and some instructions for getting started recording HDTV with a Mac. For the moment the Mac is the best choice for the task. Some have also reported some success recording with Linux but it is far from plug and play. The beta is also incidentally closed if your interested. As for as alternatives, there is a beta product called Firebus for Win XP but it is extremely buggy and the development status is unclear. With a properly setup system you can record and playback cable and OTA HDTV with no loss in picture quality or sound. MacOS X is currently the only viable solution for recording HDTV via firewire using an emulated D-VHS deck. Referenced links are provided at the end of this post. Any comments or corrections are appreciated. This document is by no means complete and I'll update it as needed. There are some other somewhat fragmented threads that discuss this but I thought others would benefit from a consolidated "HOW-TO" especially considering the timing of the new FCC mandate requiring cable providers to offer firewire to customers effective 4/1/03. ![]() This topic is intended as a starting point for anyone that wants to record HDTV on the Mac. How-To: Guide to MacOS X firewire HDTV recording
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