This post explains my setup for recording over-the-air (OTA) TV programs via Verizon FIOS TV.
Even though the solution is pretty obvious, it took me a while to figure it out, mostly for figuring out what won’t work.
It boils down to hooking up a DVR (or equivalent) directly to the FIOS TV coax cable, eliminating the FIOS set-top box. (That is, hook the DVR (or equivalent) to the coax that feeds into the Verizon set-top box.)
Duh. Or maybe, huh. Depending on whether you knew you could do that, or not.
In my case, I didn’t know you could do that. If nothing else, this will help you avoid going down the same rabbit holes I went down.
Edit: In the end, we got two different devices to work as DVRs for OTA TV channels provided via Verizon FIOS. One was TV tuner for Windows computers by Hauppauge (Amazon reference), $80. That was a little glitchy, so we also got a stand-alone Homeworx tuner/DRV via Amazon, $35. That has the klunkiest interface of any device I’ve bought this century. But it does, in fact, work, in the sense of letting me record a chosen OTA TV program straight off Verizon FIOS.
Summary
Source: Home Depot (it’s in the cable installation section, not the digital TV section).
Here’s the task: I want to record a half-hour over-the-air TV program. And I want to store that recording on my computer.
I get iffy over-the-air reception for the TV station in question. So Verizon TV is my only source of a reliable signal, unless I want to start thinking about a big outdoor TV antenna.
To increase the difficulty factor, the program I want to record is only ever going to be broadcast once. Ever. So there’s a big penalty for screwing this up. I really want some way to record this that’s bulletproof.
I don’t want to use the paid DVR option under Verizon FIOS TV, both for the high cost and for the difficulty in moving any recordings off the Verizon-supplied DVR.
Here’s a solution: Bypass the Verizon set-top box. Connect a TV tuner/recorder device of your choice (e.g., a DVR) directly to the coaxial (coax) cable that runs from the router to your set-top box. Use a coax splitter (pictured above) so that you can have both your DVR and your FIOS TV set-top-box attached to the cable simultaneously.
This is basically the same as hooking up a DVR to an over-the-air (OTA) antenna. You just swap the Verizon TV cable for the antenna cable. And tell your DVR to look for cable TV frequencies, not over-the-air TV frequencies. The advantage is that Verizon TV service provides a vastly more reliable signal than the typical OTA antenna.
This works in Northern Virginia. To test your local service provider, unhook the coax cable feeding into your set-top box and attach it to the coax input on your modern TV. Scan for TV channels, making sure to use the cable setting, not the antenna setting, for the scan. (Or, if your equipment uses cryptic labels such as QAM vs. ATSC, if you get no channels with one, try the other.)
It seems like you ought to be able to hook up the HDMI output of the set-top box to something and record the output. In all likelihood, that won’t work, due to the HDCP copy-protection standard embedded in the set-top box. Anything that claims to allow you to do that is dicey, at best.
In my case, I opted for a Windows PC TV tuner, instead of a stand-alone DVR. That’s laid out in a section below.
Background and details
I want to record an over-the-air TV program. This show will only ever be broadcast once, so I need a bulletproof way to record it. And I want the results to be “portable”, not locked up inside some vendor’s proprietary system.
Twenty years ago, achieving that was a no-brainer: Use a VCR (video cassette recorder). Hook it up to an antenna, pop in a tape, tune to the relevant channel, and hit “record”. One cable, a few button presses, and no software.
In the modern era, how hard could this be? With digital this and fiber-optic that, it has to be a snap now, right? Just buy a DVR instead of a VCR, hook up a “digital antenna” instead of your old rabbit ears, and you’re good go.
Better yet, Verizon pipes TV right into my house. (For a fee.) That’s got to make this even easier.
Right?
First rabbit hole to sidestep: Can you use the set-top box?
Consensus is, no.
I started off with the assumption that I ought to be able to record the output of the Verizon set-top box. It pipes a signal over to the TV on an HDMI cable. How hard would it be to find something I could plug that HDMI cable into, that would record the resulting video?
Plus, what I’m after is over-the-air TV. It remains legal to record over-the-air broadcasts for personal use. So it’s not as if I were trying to pirate copyrighted material for profit. Nevertheless …
Nope. Pretty sure there’s no legit way to make that work.
In the years since VCRs and analog TV, industry anti-piracy efforts have gotten a whole lot better. Any situation in which the industry can prevent you from seeing or copying something, they will. As a result, a whole lot of solutions that look like they should work, won’t.
Verizon’s set-top-box does me no good because of HDCP. That’s the acronym for the industry encryption standard for copyright-protected content. By and large, what comes out of the Verizon set-top box is HDCP-encrypted data. And, as I understand it, that box will not work with any device that is not HDCP certified. Without going into detail, the entire point of HDCP is to stop you from making copies of the content. So, anything that could record the content, and let you move that recording to another setting, is not going to qualify.
There are a handful of devices that kind-of, sort-of hint that they can get around that (described in a later section). But in legit retail channels, nobody just plainly says “this will break HDCP so you can copy protected content”. I suspect that most of the products that hint at that actually can’t do it, they’re just trying to get people interested in piracy to buy their product.
Basically, after looking it over, I just didn’t want to try going down that route. No general-purpose mainstream DVR will break the copy protection. And I don’t need a device capable of pirating copyright-protected material.
Second rabbit hole to sidestep: Buy a TV antenna
If you can’t record the signal from the Verizon set-top box, then, at the end of the day, the only guaranteed way to do this is more-or-less exactly as it was in the VCR era: Capture the over-the-air signal with an antenna (or equivalent), feed it to a DVR (or equivalent).
Interestingly, while you have the right to record anything that is broadcast, for your personal use, cable TV providers have the right to encrypt that those over-the-air broadcasts (with HDCP) when they supply them to you. They were granted that right by the FCC in 2012. So even if you only want to record over-the-air broadcasts, you may or may not be able to do that via your cable TV provider.
Using an antenna is a technically inferior way to record a TV show, owing to the potential for the over-the-air signal to fade. If the signal is good, the video quality is excellent. Unfortunately, in my case, the station I want to record has always been marginal in my location. Lot of potential for pixelation and drop-outs due to weak signal.
I tried a cheap (flat, square) TV antenna, purchased locally, and got mediocre results. Sometimes OK, sometimes not OK reception.
Fine, just buy a better antenna. Right?
Third rabbit-hole to sidestep: Amazon for TV antennas, a novel review scam.
After buying a cheap-but-inadequate TV antenna locally, I started looking on Amazon to see what I could buy. As is my habit, I sorted the list to see which antennas got the best reviews. And almost got sucked in by a pretty high-quality review scam.
After looking at several Amazon listings, I concluded that TV antennas are one of those markets that are scam-prone. It’s not merely for all the outrageous, untested, and un-provable claims. And that antennas are a perfect place to scam people, because you can’t tell if your poor reception is due to the antenna, or to your particular situation. But in addition, it was clear that many manufacturers just made up fanciful-looking plastic cases, to house basic antennas, and marked up the resulting product many-fold.
But the killer, for me, was a novel fake-review scam, one that I had never seen before. This scam combines a handful of extremely well-written reviews in English, all of which included pictures (with no duplicates) so that you could tell they were genuine. Followed by thousands of similarly glowing international reviews written in various foreign languages. With a result that you might see both (e.g.) 98% 5-star ratings, and the first reviews you looked at were clearly written by individuals.
It was only when I thought to click the “translate all to English” button that I could see that the thousands of international reviews were for books. Novels. Best guess, the seller paid a handful of native speakers of English to write good-quality fake reviews, then the somehow got a huge number of foreign-language book reviews to be counted under their product.
The upshot is that there are a whole lot of TV antennas, on Amazon that look like incredible deals. They have thousands of reviews, with 90% or better five-star reviews, including several well-written ones with pictures to illustrate. But virtually all the reviews are foreign-language reviews for novels.
If I’d only seen that once, I’d have figured that was one crooked seller. But this appears to be the norm for this market segment.
A D-I-Y rabbit hole to avoid: Just make a decent antenna.
In theory, it’s relatively easy to build a much higher-gain TV antenna, and even to tune it so that it efficiently captures the TV station of interest. There are plans all over the internet, the physics of most are quite sound (e.g., various bow-tie antennas, or improved versions thereof), and they work.
I can recall making one years ago, a bow-tie-style antenna. And I can also recall that the same channel that’s marginal now, with my store-bought flat antenna, was marginal decades ago, with my home-made bow tie antenna.
So, after doing the research on improved antenna plans, I gave that a pass. Not that it’s hard, but it’s a bit of work, and I didn’t want to end up with a better-but-still-inadequate antenna.
Breakthrough.
The breakthrough insight was provided by this YouTube posting. The term-of-art that you need to look for is “using FIOS TV without a cable box”. Or some combination of those words.
OK, then. Just by chance, this guy a) is located in my area and b) showed the TV channel that I was interested in recording. So, if a plain-vanilla TV can tune that in, off the Verizon coax cable, then any DVR can do the same thing.
The upshot is that I can use the coax cable feeding the Verizon set-top box just like an old-fashioned TV cable. Apparently, it has the feeds from all my local TV channels and then some.
Unencrypted, no less. Even though Verizon has the right to encrypt those, as of 2012.
So now I’m good-to-go. I don’t need to try to bypass the HDCP of the set-top box. I don’t need a TV antenna. I just need to hook the Verizon coax cable directly to some sort of tuner/recorder.
Eight hours and $100 later …
There are at least three ways to start with a TV signal, from antenna or cable, and end up with a video file on your computer.
OTA DVR. That is, an over-the-air digital video recorder. This concept is absolutely identical to the old antenna+VCR approach. Like the VCR, the OTA DVR contains a TV tuner and a recording medium. Tablo (Amazon reference) is $100, requires no subscription, and lets you output the files to a USB hard drive. There’s also Tivo, and numerous no-names. I didn’t find any mainstream, name-brand solution that was clearly better than Tablo. You control it via an app on your phone.
TV Tuner plus PC/laptop computer. Absolutely identical to the OTA DVR concept, just use your laptop to replace the DVR. For use with a laptop, this typically consists of TV tuner in the form of a USB stick a bit bigger than a thumb drive, plus “software” (an archaic term meaning app). There’s coax input on one and and USB 2 output on the other. Download the manufacturer’s software to run the tuner and to record TV broadcasts. Here, Hauppauge (Amazon reference) seems to be the quality leader, for $80, no subscription required. You control this via software on your Windows computer. (This Hauppauge model runs on Windows 8 and later, and on 32-bit Windows 7).
TV Tuner plus USB hard drive. At the bottom end of the price scale, you can buy a box that is essentially a self-contained TV tuner with a USB port for attaching your own USB hard drive. These pass the signal through to your TV, and you do all your programming on the TV screen, using the remote. By reputation, the software is clunky and the hardware is marginal, but these do work. Amazon has many such devices for around $30 (e.g., Amazon’s overall pick for this category). But you need to have a spare USB 2 or 3 hard drive.
Edit: As a backup, I threw $35 at this Homeworx tuner/DRV via Amazon, to which I added a USB 3 drive and an HDMI cable that I already owned. It works, in the sense that it can tune in cable channels, and I was able to record the OTA program of interest to me. The interface and remote are almost unbelievably klunky. And you have to feed the HDMI output of the tuner, to the TV, to be able to see what you’re doing. But it does, in fact, work as a DVR for the un-encrypted channels provided by Verizon FIOS.
(That’s despite the fact that the description of this device, from the manufacturer, says you have to use it with an antenna. I’m pretty sure that’s to discourage complaints from people who don’t understand that it can’t fully replace the FIOS set-top box. That is, it won’t show you the encrypted channels provided by FIOS. But it will let you use the FIOS cable as input, and it will tune in the cable TV frequencies.)
At the end of the day, we went with TV tuner plus laptop.
To implement any of these permanently, you also need a coax cable splitter (pictured earlier) and a couple of pieces of coax cable. Take the coax cable off our Verizon set top box, attach the splitter, then run coax from the splitter outputs to the set top box and the DVR (equivalent).
The option we chose both records the video, and stores it directly in the laptop’s hard drive. Since that’s where we wanted the file to end up anyway, this seemed like the best solution, for us. I’m guessing that most people would opt either for the stand-alone DVR with internal storage, or for one of the cheapo systems that require you to plug in your own USB hard drive.
Edit: The combination of the software and my wife’s Windows 11 laptop works flawlessly — when it works. Which is only sometimes. Which is why I bought the $35 stand-alone tuner/recorder discussed above which, whatever its shortcomings, when you hit “record”, it records.
Addendum: Various things that seem like they ought to work … but didn’t.
HDMI splitter fed by Verizon set-top box
There were a few “HDMI splitter” devices on Amazon that some individuals claimed would allow you to strip or bypass the HDCP. This would include the HDCP imposed by the Verizon set-top box. The basic idea is that the splitter itself would “handshake” with the Verizon box, assure Verizon that the splitter was HDCP-compliant, and then blithely pass an unencrypetd signal out one of its HDMI outputs.
These clearly should not work — at least, not legally. If they did, then you seemingly would be able to pirate any content that you could get over Verizon, for a minimal hardware cost. At the end of the day, the product descriptions were cagey enough, and the concept seemed improbable enough, that I wasn’t willing to gamble $60 on one of those, on the off chance that they would give me an unencrypted HDMI output, which I could then find some way to record.
Stream Verizon TV to PC, and use screen recorder
I have an excellent screen recorder (Movavi), and for this purpose, that would probably produce an adequate recording. So, if we could just stream Verizon TV to a laptop, we could record the program using a screen recorder.
Tried it, and for whatever reason, Verizon only shows content for some of the local channels. If I’d wanted to watch Family Feud, no problem. But as far as I can tell, the program in question can only be watched via the set-top box.
So this approach works for some over-the-air content, but not for the content that I need to record
Broadcaster websites plus screen recorder — nope.
One more method that seemed plausible enough was to go to the broadcaster’s website. They do, in fact, send out live content over the internet. But only of the content that they themselves produce (e.g., local news). As with Verizon, the content we want is blocked on the broadcaster’s website.
Summary
The only surprise here is that you can use the Verizon coax cable that feeds your set-top box to feed a stand-alone DVR (or equivalent). That humble coax cable carries all the OTA TV channels in your area, plus other stuff. And Verizon doesn’t encrypt them with HDCP, even though it has had the right to do so since 2012. I can only assume that it still has users who prefer to watch local TV over the cable, skipping the set-top box.
The good news is that if you have Verizon FIOS TV, you don’t have to rely on an antenna (and your local TV reception) to record over-the-air (OTA) TV shows.
Verizon, despite its fancy fiber-optic network, still puts those OTA channels onto the coax in your home. More or less the same way that cable providers did decades ago.
Bottom line is that all you need is a DVR, to record perfect copies of any of the OTA TV channels that Verizon carries.
Extras for old farts: FIOS TV is an oxymoron.
I’ve had FIOS service for a long, long time. I bought it for my business, as I recall, sometime late last century.
I’ve always found FIOS-the-acronyn to be a bit odd. But that’s only because I bought it so long ago, I can recall what FIOS actually stands for. Or stood for.
Originally, the only thing FIOS gave you was internet service. No content. Which, even then, was kind of weird. But, as Verizon had only recently been a phone company (Bell Atlantic), maybe they weren’t set up to be content providers.
In any case, their marketers decided to make lemonade from that particular lemon, so they proudly offered Verizon’s Fiber-optic Internet-Only Service (FIOS). Internet only, no content.
Now, FIOS is weird, in that they skipped the O in optic. (I guess communicability trumped logic there.) And weird, in that they focused on what they didn’t provide. Internet-only. What they actually provide is fiber-optic internet service. Why they decided to change FOIS to FIOS, I have no clue. Maybe the trademark was already taken.
Anyway, internet-only. No content. Says it right in the name.
So, FIOS TV is an oxymoron. It’s internet-only service … that provides TV content.
