I have a lot of DVR’d stuff now. All my favorite shows, and a lot of movies I had wanted for a long time. But apparently I only have 1% storage limit left.
Considering how much stuff I was able to put on it, that doesn’t bother me too much.
But is there anyway I could recover all the stuff on the DVR? This might sound wild. But I was hoping the satellite company could convert them over to DVD’s or something. I might also get a new box. The present one is kind of old.
It might be possible to transfer files onto a computer for external storage (I recall that Tivo had “Tivo Desktop” software, though I’m not sure if they still support it; I don’t know if there’s anything of the sort for whatever satellite company box you have).
Do you know what format the shows are saved as? I bet it isn’t MP4, that’d be too convenient. Or AVI or WMV… it’s probably something obscure and protected.
I just googled, and there are lots of solutions to transferring or backing up your DVR to a computer, hard drive or thumb drive.
Yeah, if it’s a DVR from your satellite provider, there’s no way, legally or practically. The recordings are likely encrypted on disk, and you’d have to open the box to get access to the hard drive anyway.
The only thing I can think of is similar to ripping vinyl to MP3, where you would actually have to play the recordings and capture the output to some kind of external device.
We had our cable company owned equipment replaced a few years ago and had a bunch of stuff recorded on the DVR that we didn’t want to lose. I asked the service tech if there was any way to keep or transfer those recordings and he said nope.
Some of the boxes have this capability but usually not supported by the cable company, and perhaps not available at all on the newest boxes. I used to want to have that kind of feature but everything I recorded in the past and lost with cable box upgrades has become more available anyway. There’s very little to record that isn’t online, on demand, or streaming.
This happened to me about 6 months ago. The DVR had to be replaced by the cable company and I lost everything on there. I was also told there was no way to retrieve what was on the box. Besides losing my shows, I also had to try to remember what all I had set up to record automatically and redo that (on my TiVo it’s called One Pass). To this day as new seasons of different shows start, I’m still coming across shows that I have to set up again.
OK. I just assumed that if the output from the cable box is an HDMI cable that goes into the TV, then you could just plug the HDMI cable into a computer and save the output to a hard drive. Obviously you’d need some software to capture the video input (like Audacity for audio input) but I figured it was doable this way.
I wish there had been an answer. I have lots of stuff I don’t want to lose.
To make it worse, my DVR has taken to erasing things at random. TV shows or movies just “POOF” out of existence as if they were never there. I’m only at 64% full, so it isn’t a space issue.
They make video capture components for this purpose but I don’t keep up with this stuff anymore so can’t tell you how well that works out. Depending on your DVR you may be able to run out all your stored videos at once, but on mine you would have to set up and run individual recordings, although you could set everything under one title to play if you had recorded a series.
Once upon a time many of these machines were recording on a Unix formatted disk you could just copy from, although by voiding your warranty or cable contract, but likely nobody was checking. Some of the boxes even had a dump mode where you could play the entire contents out one of the video ports. But turns out most cable companies didn’t want flexible and versatile boxes in their customer’s hands.
I’ve had cases where I really wanted to save media of some sort. Felt like I HAD to, that my years of stockpiling it would be wasted if I lost it.
A couple of instances of losing stuff (the biggest? Getting rid of our VCR… all those chunky VHS tapes lost, like tears in the rain…) and I realized that I’m getting along without all that stuff just fine.
Interestingly, I could easily stream or get complete series on DVD of Star Trek and Red Dwarf and MST3k and Wonder Years and almost all the shows I’d recorded… but I haven’t.
It once occurred to me that if the Comcast DVR failed, I’d lose that information (the list of shows automatically set to record) so I backed up the info to my computer, by displaying the list on the screen and writing down the names of the shows (but deleting those that were no longer airing new episodes).
Our DVR, which was sold to us by our cable provider around 2005, is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD. It has functionality for taking a show stored in the DVR and copying it to a VCR. (This was probably an option each cable provider chose to activate or not.) The show is played back at normal speed on a dedicated composite output (not HD!), and you simply hit RECORD on the VCR that as if it were from a live broadcast.
I had connected a DVD recorder instead of a VCR, and generated a few hundred DVDs over the years. It worked, but it was not HD, and it took an hour (plus overhead) to back up one hour of video, and typically I needed to set an alarm to remember to press STOP at the end. Eventually my DVD recorder died.
An alternative would have been to transfer everything to a computer by connecting a video digitizer with analog input.
Eventually, we dropped cable service… which caused the DVR to stop working immediately. It turns on just enough to tell us we don’t have a cable subscription. So now we can’t view or back up the content that’s still in the DVR.
HDMI uses HDCP, which is designed to prevent this very thing. The device on the other end of the HDMI cable has to support HDCP, which means it’s been licensed to, among other things, not record or store the content in any way.
If the DVR protects its output HDMI stream with HDCP, you would have to find a recorder device that is authorized to decode the encrypted HDMI stream, and I don’t think those exist (and if they were, they would be outrageously expensive to “compensate” for the “piracy” they could enable).
I won’t discuss hypothetical methods to bypass HDCP because of the board’s rule against discussing bypassing copy protection technology.
I’ve had several DVRs crash over the years. Each one had over 100 hours of material that I didn’t want to delete, and each time I was told that there was no way to recover or transfer it. My current DVR has lasted longer than any of its predecessors, so I know it’s just a matter of time before it happens again.
