Argh, I can’t believe this has gotten so hard. We just want to record a video segment on the local news. Here are the steps:
- If you have a DVR from Comcast or someone, this is pretty simple. Just hit record.
- But what if you have cut the cord and are using over the air. That actually works pretty well with HD HomeRun Scribe DUO and a $30 OTA antenna. Just stick the thing outside your window and you can start recording, but what if you don’t get the right channel. Here in Seattle, we get channels 4, 7 (flaky depending on how we orient the antenna), and 13, but not channel 5. HD HomeRun also makes it easy with something called the DUO which actually has a 1TB hard drive in the box so that you can record things and it is a tiny box. It says there’s a way to transfer recordings off of the device, but now how to do it.
- But Techhive has a guide, so you just need to go to my.homerun.com and then find the device and then there is a graphical application that gets you to the web interface on the device then click on Recorded Files.
- And you can use MCEBuddy to remove the commercials which is a pay application but seem to work pretty well.
The other way to do it:
- The second thing to try is to record a video from the Mac. It turns out that the built-in screenshot application lets you record video but not audio.
- There is a utility called blackhole which is supposed to make this easy but I followed the instructions to create a new midi device and this worked once on MacOS Big Sur and then audio went into a literal blackhole. Rogue Amoeba, the makes of Hijack, also have something called Loopback that does this, but I’m not sure it is worth $100.
- In the end, the best way seems to be that old fashioned way. I just took a video with my cell phone of the screen. Yes, I was completely defeated.
