1. The Apple FireWire SDK for OSX (version 26 as of this writing), a quick and easy install – FREE.
2. VLC Viewer to view the stream and transcode it to another more usable format (such as MPEG-4) if you want – FREE.
3. A FireWire 400 cable to connect your Mac to the DVR – NOT FREE, but I had one lying around.

And here are some other things you may need:

1. HandBrake (which you should have anyway, regardless of  your platform – it’s great for ripping movies from DVD to mpeg-4 – FREE.
2. IMovie HD – I had to use this to ultimately clip out just the part of the newscast that I wanted – comes with your Mac.

First, connect the FireWire cable to your Mac (I had both the Mac and DVR powered up, others talked about powering then down first). Fire up AVCVideoCap.app in the FireWire SDK at /Developer/FireWireSDK26/Applications and get it set and ready to record, but don’t start the recording yet. From your DVR, bring up the previously recorded program, and if you can, rewind to a minute or so before where you want to transfer, then pause the DVR. Now plug the FireWire cable into your DVR, and the program should start back up on your TV. Now start recording in AVCVideoCap, which will apparently “pause” the playback on your TV. Hit the play button on your DVR remote, which will “unpause” the playback on the DVR and output both video and audio to the .m2t filestream in AVCVideoCap. Note that when you hit play, it will not unpause what you see, just what gets output, so your TV is essentially unwatchable while transferring the video.

AVCVideoCap captures the video from the DVR to a .m2t filestream, which is basically MPEG-2. Out of the box QuickTime and IMovie don’t like m2t streams, but VLC Player does. VLC will play the m2t and you can export to mp4 (MPEG-4), which pretty much any video player will like. However, I had lots of problems in VLC just trying to go directly from the m2t stream to a mp4 – the video and audio were all jacked up when I tried that direct export in VLC. I read somewhere to try HandBrake, but it also did not like my m2t stream. After many attempts at different exports, this worked in VLC:

• Video codec: H.264 / Bitrate: 2048
• Audio codec:  MPEG Audio / Bitrate 192
• Encapsulation format: MPEG TS (.ts)

This gave me a .ts stream which HandBrake would now open and convert to a mp4, which I imported into IMovie HD and clipped out just the news story I wanted. I exported from IMovie at Full Quality to mp4, and got a fairly good quality mp4 that I could then upload to YouTube or put on my Ipod. Now, this raises the question, especially with my wife, of “Is all that work, really worth it?” Maybe not. But it got to the point where I knew this could be done and just had to figure it out. Plus I have this little gem now:

Yes, there are still 365 days in a year.