Easy to set up went right from the satellite receiver into the camcorder with the RCA came with the camcorder. Then a 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable to the powerbook and fire up HackTV and I was watching TV on the mac.

Recording was trickier - I seem to have to limit it to 15 frames per second for it to work without dropping frames. Anyone else have this problem? If I don't limit the frame rate I only get about 5 frames per second. 24 frames per second gave me a lot of dropped frames too.

So, I used 16khz uncompressed audio (mpeg-4 doesn't seem to be an option) and mpeg 4 compressed video on the high quality setting. The result a very nice looking video. I recorded an hour show and it took about 3 gb of disk space.

I would be great to find the sweet spot in compression of audio and video for say a good quality 1 hour show at 700mb to fit on a VCD. Any suggestions on finding the sweet spot or spots?

Other issues:

• no scheduling is impratical I may have to brush up on applescript or perl skills to add this but I hope someone else does - it may be a while before I have time


• Mac can't communicate with the receiver to change the channel (or can it)?


• Non-tech issue: my TV equipment is not close to my mac. I have to rearrange the furniture and/or recable to do this practically

Great article had fun trying it