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.

101 Reykjavik
25th Hour
28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
300
310 To Yuma
400 Blows
47 Ronin
7 Samurai
7 Up
A Home at the End of the World
American Gangster
American Splendor
An Inconvenient Truth
Angels & Demons
Be Kind Rewind
Becoming Jane
Bee Movie
Being There
Black Narcissus
Blade Runner – The Final Cut
Blades Of Glory
Bonnie and Clyde
Borat – Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Breaking Away
Breathless
Burn After Reading
Bus 174
Casino Royale
Charlie Wilsons War
Children of Men
Cinderella Man
City of Ember
Cloverfield
Conan The Barbarian
Coraline
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Dark City
Death Proof
Death at a Funeral
District 9
Dog Day Afternoon
Eagle vs Shark
Eight and a Half
Emperors New Groove
Enlightenment Guaranteed
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Excalibur
Fahrenheit 451
Fanny & Alexander
Favela Rising
Frida
Godzilla, King of the Monsters
Gran Torino
Grey Gardens
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Shearer – Now You See It
Help
Hot Fuzz
House of Sand
Howls Moving Castle
Hulk
I Am Legend
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
Idiocracy
Ikiru (To Live)
In Bruges
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Intermission
Into The Wild
Iron Man
Jet Li’s Fearless
Jindabyne
Juno
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Knocked Up
Koyaanisqatsi
Kung Fu
La Dolce Vita
La Strada
Lars And The Real Girl
Layer Cake
Little Children
Little Miss Sunshine
Logan’s Run
March of the Penguins
Match Point
Michael Clayton
Minority Report
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
Mr And Mrs Smith
Munich
Nacho Libre
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Night Of The Hunter
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Nights of Cabiria
No Country for Old Men
Overlord
Pans Labyrinth
Persepolis
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Pink Floyd The Wall
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Quantum of Solace
Race to Witch Mountain
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rashomon
Ratatouille
Religulous
Repo Man
Rocky
Rush Hour 3
Sexy Beast
Shaun of the Dead
Shopgirl
Sid & Nancy
Sideways
Sita Sings The Blues
Slumdog Millionaire
Some Like It Hot
Spartan
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Stardust
Step Brothers
Sunshine Cleaning
Superbad
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Syriana
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Thank You for Smoking
The Beales of Grey Gardens
The Beast With A Billion Backs
The Big Lebowski
The Bucket List
The Constant Gardener
The Corporation
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
The Da Vinci Code
The Darjeeling Limited
The Day of the Jackal
The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain
The Fall
The Fast Runner
The Fifth Element
The Forbidden Kingdom
The Godfather
The Godfather: Part II
The Godfather: Part III
The Incredible Hulk
The Italian Job
The Last Days of Disco
The Last Man on Earth
The Life Aquatic
The Lookout
The Night Of The Iguana
The Omega Man
The Planet of Storms
The Proposition
The Rage of Placid Lake
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Simpsons Movie
The Tale of Despereaux
The Triplets of Belleville
The Wicker Man
The Wrestler
There Will Be Blood
Tokyo Drifter
Transformers
Tropic Thunder
Tulpan
Two English Girls
Tyson
V for Vendetta
Vengeance Is Mine
WALL-E
Waiting for Guffman
Waitress
Walk The Line
Waltz with Bashir
Watchmen
When the Levees Broke
Wild at Heart
Worlds Fastest Indian
Zack and Miri
Zoolander

I use TextWrangler for all my limited coding needs. You should (emphasis on should) be able to do this for any other editor you want. This is what I had to do.

Edit /Applications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/Info.plist. Towards the top you’ll see a bunch of file extensions. I added vbs to the list.

<string>text</string>
<string>txt</string>
<string>vbs</string>
<string>wml</string>
<string>WML</string>


In the same file, but before the very last</dict>
</plist>
Add

<key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
<array>
<string>public.text</string>
<string>public.plain-text</string>
</array>
<key>UTTypeDescription</key>
<string>Microsoft Visual Basic</string>
<key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
<string>com.macromates.textmate</string>
<key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
<dict>
<key>com.apple.ostype</key>
<string>TEXT</string>
<key>public.filename-extension</key>
<array>
<string>vbs</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</array>

And then

touch /Applications/TextWrangler.app

Lot’s of flights for a few days of ocean front living. It was nice while we were there – warm-ish and very sunny.

The Windows clients will need to be configured to point to the Domain Controllers (DC’s.) If you’ve never installed any non-Microsoft utilities, you should be OK by just making sure Windows Time is running. However, if it is not running, or something has broken time, these are steps that will help you fix your problems.

Let’s check to see if Windows Time is running

sc query w32time

You should get a result such as

SERVICE_NAME: w32time
TYPE               : 20  WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS
STATE              : 4  RUNNING (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)
WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)
SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)
CHECKPOINT         : 0x0
WAIT_HINT          : 0x0

If you don’t, start services.msc and start the service and set it to Automatic

Now let’s make sure that the server is setup correctly. Check to see if the domain server is our time server. Note the “:” is part of the command.

C:\WINDOWS>nltest /dsgetdc:

Look for the flag “TIMESERV.” This indicates that the Domain Controller is our Time Server.

DC: \\myDomainController.domain.com
Address: \\10.1.99.19
Dom Guid: 9db0908b-8f45-499f-9c20-49905773f553
Dom Name: domain.com
Forest Name: domain.com
Dc Site Name: Default-First-Site-Name
Our Site Name: Default-First-Site-Name
Flags: PDC DS LDAP KDC TIMESERV GTIMESERV WRITABLE DNS_DC DNS_DOMAIN DNS_FOREST CLOSE_SITE
The command completed successfully

Check that the client has the correct information

w32tm /dumpreg /subkey:parameters

The only thing to look for is a Type of NT5DS. That’s the protocol we use to speak to the the Domain Controller. Any other setting is wrong.

Value Name      Value Type          Value Data
-------------------------------------------------
 
ServiceMain     REG_SZ              SvchostEntry_W32Time
ServiceDll      REG_EXPAND_SZ       C:\WINDOWS\system32\w32time.dll
NtpServer       REG_SZ              time.windows.com,0x1
Type            REG_SZ              NT5DS

To sync the server with the domain controller.

w32tm /resync /rediscover

You should now be getting in sync. You can see your offset shrinking if you type

w32tm /stripchart /computer:myDomainController /samples:5 /dataonly