Overall, I'm very happy with the ease of use with Beyond TV 4.61 tuner software. What it lacks however is a native feature for a virtual tuner through a firewire port. I have managed to record television in High Definition manually using Video LAN's VLC Player.

First you need a 6pin to 6pin firewire cable connected from the left port of the STB (viewed from the front. Note that some DCT's have been reported to stream the signal from the other port.)

If your port is active, you will see 3 or 4 newly detected devices. When prompted by windows to install drivers, hit cancel on everything.

Download firewire.zip and unzip it to a directory. Power off the cable box, reboot. Power on the cable box.

When asked to install drivers for the detected hardware, manually install drivers for the Tuner, and the Panel device by pointing the driver installation to the directory where you unzipped firewire.zip. On the one or two unknown devices, choose cancel.

Now go into your device manager, and disable the one or two unknown devices so they don't bother you every time you boot. All you need is support for your tuner device and the panel device.

Open the VLC Player. Choose File => open capture device. Next to video device name, click refresh. Your tuner should now be in the list. Select it. With your STB remote, tune the STB to an unencrypted channel (no 5C)... in Canada, CTV or CBC.

Hit play. You should see video over firewire from your STB!

If nothing is playing on any channel, you likely have a problem or your cable company is 5c'ing the content. For Shaw Cable in BC, Canada, this is not the case

Create a shortcut to the VLC executable and set the parameters of the target attribute to:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" "dshow:// :dshow-vdev="Motorola AV/C Tuner Device" :dshow-adev="" :dshow-size="" :no-dshow-config "

The device name is listed in the Customize drop list when you open VLC Player, select File > Open Capture Device > DirectShow tab. Click the "Refresh List" button next to Video Device name and select your device from the list.

To record, I use that same dialog box and tick the Stream/Save checkbox. Open the Settings panel and tick "File" and next to that "Dump Raw Output". Now it will create a file using any encapsulation method you chose (I use MPEG PS). Next step: get BTV to do this for me!