Help Request Regarding Data Collection

By Trip Ericson on Friday, July 1 2011, 10:46 - Site Updates - Permalink

I hate to post an open request like this, but I'm desperately looking for two pieces of software and I can't find what I'm looking for. Perhaps someone out there reading knows of what I'm looking for and can point me in the right direction.

I'm looking for a utility on Windows and on OS X (thus, two pieces of software) that allows for the capture of complete transport streams from television stations. The HDHomeRun has a utility that will do this on Windows, OSX, and Linux; and TSReader Standard will do the trick on Windows, but I'm looking for free utilities (not TSReader Standard) to perform these functions on ordinary USB or PCI receivers (not HDHomeRun). I thought that WatchHDTV might do it which would at least take care of the Windows side, but investigating showed that it saves in the DVR-MS format, rather than the TS format that I need, unless I overlooked a setting somewhere.

Please either comment or e-mail with your thoughts. I am very anxious to get to capturing. =)

UPDATE (2:29PM ET): With many thanks to dmatch on AVS Forum, I now have software to perform this task on Windows. I just need similar software for OSX and I'll be set. =)

Comments

1. On Friday, July 1 2011, 22:44 by Doug Smith

If you know the device name of your tuner, you might try <B>dd if=/dev/tuner of=/home/tericson/capture.ts bs=1k count=50</B>.

/dev/tuner is the device name of the tuner, of course, and /home/tericson/capture.ts is the file you want the TS capture in. bs=1k means to copy in blocks of 1k bytes, and count=50 means to copy only 50 blocks. (creating a 50k TS file)

Not 100% sure it'll work but it may be worth trying.

2. On Wednesday, July 6 2011, 20:55 by ThoraX695

Did you get any leads on Mac software yet?

3. On Wednesday, July 6 2011, 21:34 by Trip Ericson

Unfortunately, no. I'm pretty sure there is no standard tool for OSX unless there's something really obscure that I haven't found.

4. On Friday, July 15 2011, 23:32 by Jim D

So what's the solution? Inquiring minds want to know (or is it Enquiring minds, were I in Philly...)

5. On Saturday, July 16 2011, 12:02 by Trip Ericson

Oh, sorry. I guess I should have posted that. dmatch linked me to some software called "EPG Collector."

http://epgcollector.sourceforge.net

However, the current version contained a bug that prevented it from working with OTA unless there was a satellite receiver also hooked up. So there's a modified version of it available on the RabbitEars server.

http://www.rabbitears.info/ts/EPGC_...