In Seat­tle, Com­cast has been mov­ing most of the chan­nels from unen­crypted QAM to encrypted QAM. That means that things I used to be able to record with my EyeTV and HD Home­run setup no longer work. I’ve heard rumors that you could install the Apple firewire SDK and record using the FireWire out­put of your cable box, but that seemed like a lot of work, and not very well supported.

Enter Fir­eRe­cord. It makes it much sim­pler, but with caveats. To use it…

1. Plug a firewire cable between your Mac (I use an older, slow Intel Mac Mini hooked into a QNAP Nas for stor­age) and your cable box. This is designed for most stan­dard cable boxes — the Fir­eRe­cord site has more infor­ma­tion on sup­ported boxes.
2. Down­load and install FireRecord.
3. Run the pro­gram, pick a chan­nel and set the start and end time.
4. Once the record­ing is done, you have a large file with a .m2t exten­sion.  You need to mas­sage it before it very usable.
5. Down­load MPEG Stream­clip. There are other solu­tions for the Mac, but they cost quite a bit more. I’ve not found a free solution.
6. You need to install the QuickTimeMPEG2.component, which you have to pur­chase from Apple (~ $20/US.) When I ran the install pro­gram it said that I needed to install Rosetta for the pro­gram to run. Rather than do that, you can drill down into the pack­age and find the file. It lives in the pack­age as Archive.pax.gz. If you copy that file to your desk­top, you can uncom­press it by dou­ble click­ing the file. Once you’ve got the result­ing QuickTimeMPEG2.component file, just copy it to /System/Library/QuickTime (you’ll need to authen­ti­cate before copy­ing it over.)
7. Now you can use MPEG Stream­clip to export the video to other formats.

That’s it. It’s crazy easy.

There are caveats

1. You don’t get a guide. You need to know what chan­nel and what time your pro­gram is.
2. You can’t watch any­thing else while record­ing. The firewire port spits out what’s on your tele­vi­sion. The flip side is that any­thing you can watch on TV you can record, even pre­mium chan­nels (not tested yet.)
3. The result­ing file is only tagged with the file name you gave it (i.e. Discover.m2t.) No fancy file tag­ging like you get with EyeTV, but a pass through MetaX can fix that.
4. (NEW) Appar­ently you can’t turn off your cable box or your Mac will have trou­ble find­ing the device when you power it back on.