I think we have to focus on the (digital) outputs of your TV /cable box as there’s no analog / TV / cable receiving option available.
a) USB port at your TV
This may be the easiest option. Do you have any external drive of some suitable size you can connect to your USB port? The smart TV’s I know didn’t just accept some “USB-stick” for recording but insisted in some “compatible” hardware. I can’t tell. Here it workes on a Pansonic with a Transcend TS1TSJ25D3 (1TB external HDD). It wouldn’t accept anything less. Try whatever drives you can find / borrow. Check the menu of your TV. It might support recording. This might be the easiest way. It’ll be hard to direct you through these menues, though.
b) Ethernet port
It’s at the cable box, right? There might be a chance it can provide a upnp server and other devices should be able to receive it’s stream. But to check this you’d have to get into the GUI of that cable box to see what you can do.
Testing some of the options showed one opportunity. I plugged a usb stick directly into the tv. The tv recognized it and, using some of the tv’s smart menu options, played the content of the usb stick. I could find no option to go the other way: record to the stick.
Next, I loaded up the Samsung Smart TV app on my cellphone. It would find the tv only intermittently. When it did find it, an option for video showed up. Clicking on it crashes the app. The app is old and not updated or currently supported. It must have been on my phone a long time.
Finally, I tried the xfinity options. For economy’s sake, our community system is basic and none of the advanced things xfinity can do are available. I did, however, put an xfinity app on my cellphone. I found a way to download the recordings to my phone but life interrupted and I had to cancel the download after a few percent went to the phone. I will try again later. One aspect of doing the download is that it takes the recording off the cable box so you can’t watch it there. It appears that you can restore a recording to the box by removing it from the phone. I am concerned that the program will be too big for the phone. Otherwise, this would be the solution since I can network my phone. load the recording into linux and use editing software to break it into parts. The program hasn’t “aired” yet. So, this all prep work.
A year or model might be helpful. With my smart TV, pressing the ‘REC’ button on the remote is sufficient to record whatever is currently being viewed (as long as USB storage is present of course). Alternatively, I can press the ‘GUIDE’ button, scroll to some future program of interest and select ‘Schedule Recording’ from there.
Pressing record while the program is on does not record on the usb stick.
I downloaded the xfinity app to my phone and was able to download the recording from the dvr to my cellphone. But the app doesn’t work properly. My plan was to cast the video from the phone to my pc and use one of the screen capture programs to record to pc and edit it there. The app says it cannot cast the file. The file doesn’t play on the phone either. The progress bar moves but all that shows is a color pattern; no actual video or audio. I cannot locate this very large file on the cellphone to simply move it. So, I wonder if it really is on the phone or is merely a link to xfinity.
Any error message? Does the USB device show up as a device (or source depending on Samsung model/year) when connected to a storage device? Do you get a ‘Schedule Recording’ option presented when examining the TV guide? (I can only relate to options that I see with my 2016 Samsung Smart TV located in NZ.)
User has to prepare USB drive. Samsung TV formats it with XFS and adds some keys.
To write video you need drive with sufficient write speed.
IMHO the easiest way is to record live performance by yourself with smartphone or photo camera, without usage of broadcasting.
Or get record directly from TV camera which will be used during broadcast.
My experience shows that my HD TV supports FAT16 and FAT32. More recent models support exFAT. Nothing is mentioned about XFS.
To write video you need drive with sufficient write speed.
Most recent USB sticks are more than capable. Nothing more is required. I’ve used several that I had lying around without issue.
IMHO the easiest way is to record live performance by yourself with smartphone or photo camera, without usage of broadcasting.
Or get record directly from TV camera which will be used during broadcast.
Yes, that is a pragmatic option, along with a suitable mount to support it.
For the current performance, I was given a link to Youtube. I tried using vokoscreen to record the sections I wanted to share with my neighbors. It seemed to work but the audio did not record (which is important for a singing performance!) Vokoscreen says it works only with pulseaudio. My install has pipewire-pulseaudio. Installing pulseaudio requires uninstalling pipewire. I can do this unless there is another screen recorder I can use.
On the other issue, recording directly from the TV, I find no way to get the screen driven to the usb drive for transferring the recording to the pc.
This is what I ended up doing. Actually, I didn’t download it. I did a screen capture on the relevant parts. I tried using OBS-studio but I couldn’t figure out the screen capture. I don’t know the scientific term, but I got that “mirror effect” where the screen is copied over and over to infinity, like taking a picture while standing between two mirrors. It also was difficult to start the recording. Vokoscreen does not recognize pipewire-pulseaudio, so I got no audio when I recorded with that.
I ended up using simplescreenrecorder. It’s not fancy but it did the job. I made the video full screen and used a key combo to begin the recording. The resulting clips were large. One was too large to email. I saved the clips as mp4. I have played them on different devices with no trouble but one recipient has no audio. Did the full screen aspect make the file larger? Should I try to record the clips as a window instead of full screen? Recording full screen eliminates the clutter around a youtube video.
Your best option is to use youtube-dl, as malcolm suggested. You get the best possible version available from youtube, without recording eventual playback glitches on your screen.
About recording to USB, you can’t. Part of the agreement of manufacturers and content right owners is that you can’t record from a smart TV (or Bluray) to something that can be copied. The USB port is there only for media playback, sometimes only as a service port. Some devices allow you to record to an internal drive, but you can’t copy it, only play it back on the very same device.
Again, anything that allow you to record a DRM’d stream, removing the DRM in the process, is illegal (think dvdcss). Some computer magazine authors say it is a gray area, but not really.
Sort, that is just nonsense. I do it all the time with my smart TV (with FTA programs). What might be true is that different jurisdictions may constrain what is allowed in certain countries.
So you can record FTA programs, OK, they are probably not DRM’d as I believe I mentioned in one of the posts above. But AFAIK you can’t record a DRM’d one, like a cable channel. Or can you? And not to an internal drive in your TV, but to an external stick you can transfer to a computer and watch the recording.
I did download the file from youtube. I copied small sections using simplescreenrecorder. I saved the resulting files as mp4. One neighbor gets no audio; others get full version of the performance. I suspect it has to do with her cellphone, not the recording. What other format would you suggest I save the recordings in?