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Friday, August 30, 2019

CFB Cord Cutting DVR Guide

To view this entire guide as a PDF file, click here.

Obsessed college football fans, like myself, can now cut the cord and watch almost all the college football possible while saving boatloads of money that used to be going to your local cable company or DirecTV/Dish Network.  However, one of the biggest challenges about the various streaming services that exist out there is DVR service or being able to rewatch your favorite games as much as you want for as long as you want.  Unfortunately, the DVR’s that most services off (sometimes requiring an extra fee), only save games for a limited period of time and/or impose limits on the number of hours of programming you can record.  That is why I created this guide, to allow you the degenerate college football fan to record/dvr/save/download as much college football as you want.  So please read below for the various options that exist to record/save/download/dvr college football (and other sports) games.

DISCLAIMER: This work was put together using data from various sources.  As such, if you come across something that is inaccurate, please feel free to reach out to me to correct it via email realcordcutters@outlook.com or Twitter: @RealCordCutters or by leaving a comment below.  My goal is to make a comprehensive and accurate guide that can help people quickly & easily decide how to watch as much college football as they want for the cheapest possible method.  Unlike other cord cutting websites, we welcome and encourage reader feedback, both positive and negative.  For updates, please look for the ► sign (alt + 16 to type it) with a date following it; these indicate changes, additions, corrections, etc.

This guide will be broken down into three main sections.  First, I’ll talk about the various options that exist for recording OTA antenna channels.  Next, I’ll talk about the options that exist for recording the various college football cable channels from a streaming service that you subscribe to.  Finally, I’ll talk about how to download/save games that air on ESPN channels using some free software.

RECORDING OTA CHANNELS
Do you currently use an antenna to receive CBS, ABC, FOX, NBC, Stadium or other channels?  Congratulations, you’re getting the highest quality signal possible for free, minus any antenna related costs.  Local channel broadcasts on cable/satellite & streaming services are often compressed in order to save bandwidth so OTA signals generally look much better.  There are a multitude of ways to record games that air on OTA channels ranging from cheap & basic to expensive & detailed.  I’m going to give a basic summary of the different kinds of devices that are available below but please do further research by looking at excellent guides like this and this, if you are interested in purchasing one.

*OTA converter boxes connected directly to a TV – These are devices that take your antenna cable as an input and then connect to your TV using an HDMI cable.  Some of these require external storage (like a USB drive or external hard drive) to record programs while others come with internal storage.  Several examples are listed below.
            -Cheap digital converter boxes with VCR like menus: Ex. Mediasonic Homeworx HW180STB, iview 3500STBII
            -Channel Master Stream+ & DVR+
            -AirTV Player (white version)
            -Tivo Bolt & Roamio

*TV Tuner cards – These are either internal or external (USB) devices that connect from an antenna cable (input) to a computer (output) and record OTA programs from your antenna onto your computer’s hard drive.  You can then watch these recordings on your computer or other media streaming devices (Roku, Fire TV, etc.)
            -Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD, HVR-955Q, quadHD, HVR-1265, HVR-1150

*WIFI/Ethernet Streaming Devices – These devices take your antenna cable as an input but then convert the channel signal to a digital one and stream that signal over WIFI or ethernet.  Thus, you must watch using software, such as Plex or Channels or the manufacturer’s proprietary software, in order to view the channels.  These devices do record (usually to a computer or external storage connected to the device) but the recording is done via internet.  Thus, the quality will be dependent upon the strength of your internet service, unlike the first two options which are recording directly from the antenna signal to a hard drive.
            -Tablo DUAL LITE, QUAD, DUAL 64 GB, 4-Tuner
            -HDHomeRun CONNECT & Extend
            -Fire TV Recast
            -Air TV (black version)


RECORDING STREAMING SERVICE CABLE CHANNELS
The main way to record channels offered through a streaming service is to use capture software which will record the audio & video from your computer screen into a video file.  Basically, you will open a browser window on a computer and navigate to the website which is playing the event you wish to record.  This could be the website of the service you subscribe to, for example YouTube TV’s website, or it could also be the specific channels website, such as watchespn.com for events airing on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, etc.  Then once the video of the event is playing, you will open the capture software, resize the window to make it match the window size of the video and then hit the record button to start the recording of your file.  Note that while some programs do come with scheduler programs where you can enter a specific day/time to open a web browser to a specific address, most of the time you will need to manually start and/or stop the recording.  Below are some options of capture software that you can use to record college football games from any streaming channel.





DOWNLOADING/SAVING ESPN GAMES
The great thing about games broadcast on ESPN channels is that most (but not all) are available for replay on ESPN’s website (see here).  Even better, you can save and download these games using some free software like Streamlink and then convert them to *.mkv files using FFMPEG, allowing you to watch them forever.  The process is a little bit tricky but once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s really quite painless.  Below is a brief summary of the process, assuming that you’ve installed all the necessary programs.

1) Prep a notepad file with the template link that you will paste some info into
2) Open a command prompt window and navigate to the directory where streamlink is installed
3) Go to the WatchESPN website and find the event you wish to download/save
4) Start the event playing and grab the URL associated with the video playlist file that is playing
5) Paste that URL into the notepad template link; then copy & paste that entire link into the command prompt to start the download process
6) Once the download has completed, convert the .ts file to a .mkv file using FFMPEG
7) Watch the .mkv file using VLC Player or your favorite video player

Ok, now here is the exact process in detailed steps including a video at the end which will show a demonstration of the actual process happening from start to finish.

1.  First, download and install the following programs:  Streamlink & FFMPEG. 
You can download Streamlink from here -> https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/releases/tag/1.2.0
You can download FFMPEG from here -> https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
*Make a note of the directory where you installed the Streamlink.exe file as you will need it later.  It will most likely be C:\Program Files (x86)\Streamlink\bin

2. Next, create a notepad .txt file and paste the following line into it
streamlink "hlsvariant://<HERE>" 720p --hls-segment-threads 5 -o myfile.ts
This is the command that you will run which will download/save the .ts file from ESPN. 
*720p is the highest available quality
*myfile.ts is the name of the .ts (Transport Stream) file that will be saved to your hard drive.  You can specify the specific location to save the file by putting parameters in front of the file name (ex. c:\myfile.ts); not including any parameters will save it to the same directory where the Streamlink.exe file is located.
*<HERE> will represent the URL for the specific event you wish to download/save; we’ll replace it with a long link later

Also, paste the following into it on a separate line.  This will be used later to create a .mkv file from the .ts file you download.
ffmpeg -i "c:\program files (x86)\streamlink\bin\myfile.ts" -codec copy myfile.mkv
*c:\program files (x86)\streamlink\bin\ represents the directory where the .ts files is saved after downloading
*Note that in the example above it will create the .mkv file in this same directory but you can also add parameters to create it in a different directory.

3.  Open a command prompt by doing one of the following
*Click Start, start typing command prompt and select it
*Click Start, type Run & hit enter, type cmd and hit enter

4.  Navigate in the command prompt to the directory where streamlink.exe is located.  For me that is C:\Program Files (x86)\Streamlink\bin. 
*Type cd.. (and hit enter) to move back one directory and repeat this until you’re at C:\>
*Type cd <FOLDER NAME\FOLDER NAME\FOLDER NAME> (and hit enter) to move forward to that new directory
*Example: Type “cd program files (x86)\streamlink\bin” (no quotes) to move into that directory which is where streamlink.exe is located on my computer

5.  Open up a browser window and navigate to the specific event you want to download/save.  Before you click on the event, open up the Network Tools (in the browser) which will show the specific URL you need to paste into the Notepad file once the file starts playing.
*Firefox – Settings button (3 lines) -> Web Developer -> Network
*Chrome – Settings button (3 dots) -> More Tools -> Developer Tools, Network Tab
(Note:  Sometimes it is helpful to filter by entering .m3u8 in the Filter box in Chrome to hide all of the other files you don’t need)

6.  Click on the link for the event and have it start playing.  Watch the Network window for a m3u8 link with the domain (address) of content.uplynk.com/event/.  You will see some other URL’s with m3u8 links that are not the correct link with domains like content-ausc1.uplynk.com.  Copy this URL and paste it into the Notepad .txt file replacing <HERE>
*Firefox -> right-click on link & Copy -> Copy URL
*Chrome -> right-click on link & Copy -> Copy link address

7.  After you do that, copy the entire string that begins with streamlink and then go to the command prompt window.  Paste that entire string in the command prompt and hit enter.  You should then see “Found matching plug stream for URL…..” followed by a list of “Available streams:  270p (worst), 360p, ….720p (best)” followed by “Opening stream: 720p”  followed by “Written XX.X MB (Xs @ XX.X MB/s)”
*Note that this sequence needs to be done fairly quickly as the .m3u8 URL will disappear after a few seconds, but the event must be playing for the streamlink download to start.  You have ~5 seconds or so to copy the URL, paste it into the .txt file, copy the streamlink command and then paste that into the command prompt

8.  Once it is finished, then next step is to run FFMPEG to turn the .ts file you downloaded into a watchable .mkv file.  I usually copy the file to c:\ (the root directory of my hard drive) just to make the commands easier to work with.  Next, navigate to the directly where FFMPEG is installed by using the same cd.. and cd <FOLDER NAME> commands listed above in step 4.  Once you are there copy the following from the notepad .txt file and paste it in the command prompt.  Be sure to change the directory where the file is located (if you saved/moved it to a different spot) and/or the name of the file and/or the location for the .mkv file output if you want.
ffmpeg -i "c:\program files (x86)\streamlink\bin\myfile.ts" -codec copy myfile.mkv


9.   Once that is done, you now have a .mkv file which will hopefully include the entire event, minus commercials.  You can now watch this in VLC or other media players or convert it to an mp4 using Handbrake.

The video below shows an example of how to download/save a game from ESPN’s website (the direct link is here). 
Please note the following things:
*I wasn’t quick enough to grab the correct URL after the video loaded before it disappeared; thus, I had to refresh the page to get it
*I cut out some of the time where it was downloading just to make the video shorter
*When playing the video, I intentionally jumped around in it just to show that the entire game was downloaded


SOURCES & REFERENCES:
Tech Hive OTA DVR Guide July 2019 (advanced) - https://www.techhive.com/article/3173175/best-dvr-for-cord-cutters.html

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