Sky+ recording > laptop

[smellyfeet]

Anyone know of a way to get a recorded program off my Sky+ onto my MacBook?

It is unlikely to be possible - the reason is piracy of movies since it would make it very easy for anything broadcast on Sky to be shared worldwide with others. Same for Sporting events (which Sky pays millions for and charges that +50% for), and just 'run of the mill' TV shows.

I bet it is all encrypted and the box will have some chips to decode the material. If it is clever it may be linked to your viewing card, so if that expires, any shows you recorded can no longer be watched.

Tying it to your card would also block you installing a fresh hard drive and giving a full drive to a friend for them to watch films even if they have no movie channels on their Sky subscription.

Agree with NetworkGuy that a direct transfer of the digital recording is probably not possible.

However, I have done this before by playing the programme out to another recording device. There are probably more specialised forums to get help from, but this is what I did.

I plugged an adapter like this into one of the SCART sockets on my SKY box.

I fed the outputs into my DV video camera which needed to be set to record DV-IN. I played the programme and recorded it onto a DV tape.

I then captured the DV recording via firewire onto my laptop.

The quality was superb. Sounds tricky, but it was not too bad. I was v determined not to lose a TV programme that my daughter had appeared in!

you can do with an elgato Eyetv for the Mac. is a usb dongle that takes the s-vhs output from the sky+ box and imports to the Mac. there are various different products on their website, some also have tv tuners in them too.

v easy to use (much better than the pc equivalents), but just be aware that this is not High definition (even when you output from a sky HD+ box) - that is v tricky!