Firewire recording from the Cable box to the Mini

Over the past couple days I have been testing the AVCbroswer and AVCvideocap apps provided in the the Apple FirewireSDK. Once I figured out the quirks of how the program interacts with the cable box, operation was pretty simple. The big thing was figuring out which channels are marked Copy Freely by FIOS and which channels are marked Copy Once.

The copy freely channels can be viewed in AVCbrowser through VLC and recorded with AVCvideocap and played back in VLC. When you tune in to a channel that is copy once, the video freezes or stays black. When you try to record a copy once channel with AVCvideocap it creates a files that cause VLC to show an error. The purpose of copy once is to tell 5C compliant devices (e.g. HDDVRs from Verizon) that they are allowed to copy the program once and that's it. Unfortunately, there are no apps for the Mac that are 5C compliant. I ran into an app for windows called Power DVD that supposedly has the proper compliance to be able to playback copy once programming. I am not sure if it will only playback on disc or if it will play a computer file. I have sent an email to Cyberlink to find out.

Now regarding which channels are copy freely on FIOS. Here's the list and it's not pretty:

Channels 1 - 49: copy freely
All Digital Channels: copy once.

HD Channels:
802 - PBS - Copy Freely
803 - WSBK - Copy Once
804 - CBS - Copy Once
805 - ABC - Copy Once
806 - CW - Copy Freely
807 - NBC - Copy Freely
808 - FOX - Copy Once
825 - TNT - Copy Once
826 - ESPN - Copy Once
827 - ESPN2 - Copy Once
828 - NFL Network - Copy Once
829 - NESN - Copy Freely
830 - Comcast SportsNet - Copy Freely
833 - HDNET - Copy Once
834 - HDNET Movies - Copy Once
835 - UHD - Copy Once
836 - HD Theater - Copy Once
837 - Wealth - Copy Once
838 - National Geographic - Copy Freely
839 - MTVHD - Copy Freely
840 - FOODHD - Copy Freely
841 - HGTV - Copy Freely
842 - A&E - Copy Once
845 - Lifetime - Copy Freely
846 - Discovery HD - Copy Freely.

So out of 25 HD channels only 11 are copy freely. The thing that is really not cool is that CBS and ABC are copy once. From everything I've read, local network stations are suppose to be copy freely. I am going to email customer service and see if I can get some info regarding this. On an unrelated note, I am also going to drop a note on the XBMC forum to see if there are any plans to support .mt2 files.