I just moved and this time decided to opt for the DVR option with Comcast Cable. Now, I believe the DVR is a Motorola DCT 6412 Dual-Tuner HDTV. When the cable got installed I noticed that the box has a whole bunch of ports and functionality that the service provider has the ability to “enable” I suppose. My guess is that all that stuff is disabled, but I honestly haven’t tried anything yet.
The box has an ethernet port, a bunch of USB ports, a smart card reader and an ir jack for what I think is an IrDA port. I got the PDF manual for it on the web, but it was no help.
Now for my general question:
What, if any, ways do I have to a) control the DCT 6412 with a PC b) get and put video data onto it’s internal harddrive via USB or Ethernet? Did Comcast actively disable these features or do they just not support them or advertise them?
a) You can’t. The ports are for future expansion only, and will only work once your cable company has “turned on” those options at your local head-end. My TWC box has Firewire (which actually works) and USB (which doesn’t). Hundreds of people at the Yahoo! Explorer 8000\8300 group have tried all kinds of tweaks, but nothing has come of it yet.
b) If the Moto boxes are like the Scientific Atlanta ones (and I have every reason to believe that they would be in this regard), all stored programs are encrypted by a key that’s particular to that one machine. So even if you could pull the video off the box, you wouldn’t be able to play it on your PC or another DVR box. Some cable companies opt for Atlanta’s own “in-house” DVR software, called SARA, and people tat have those DVRs are able to connect external SATA drives to their DVRs via SATA-II cable, but they are unable to “move” the drive to another machine. The “new” machine sees a different key and simply reformats the drive with a new key. This wasn’t your question, but the inverse is also true - you cannot move data to the DVR without having both the encryption key as well as the metadata the OS needs to list the file in your DVR guide.
I don’t have an answer to your question, but I have been able to add a thirty-second commercial skip to this DVR using instructions easily available on the internet. I’d heard about the usefulness of this feature from Tivo fanatics for years, and I have to agree that it makes it much more pleasant to watch recorded programs.
I’ve had some success getting video off my 6412 by following these instructions. The only gotcha I’ve found is that some things recorded from the HD channels can only be copied once, or not at all.
Go to avsforum for the best info. I won’t link directly to that MB since doing so is frowned on here. Lots of good info and plenty of knowledgeable people to answer your questions. Search thru the threads first, and you’ll probably find most of what you need to know.
I’ll second this. I found the link I posted through the AVS forum, and there are several stickies there that contain links to 6412 threads. It’s a lot of up-front work to get it working, but once you get it set up, it’s fairly easy to offload recordings.