Recording Sport/TV to external drive - download

Recording Sport/TV to external drive - download

Author
Discussion

Kiwi79

Original Poster:

911 posts

241 months

Wednesday 2nd October
quotequote all
Is there anyway to record TV to an external drive so it can be downloaded. It seems with something like TIVO the recordings are in effect "locked" inside the box so if you replace your TIVO box or if it develops a fault all the recordings are toast. Example a few years ago our TIVO box just randomly wiped everything!

In the olden days we just banged a VHS in, hit record and hoped the family didn't tape the simpsons over it.

I would quite like to record some sports and potentially be able to watch it on different devices years later.

Evercross

6,318 posts

71 months

Wednesday 2nd October
quotequote all
Many STBs with hard drives have DLNA capability...

DLNA.

This means that if it is connected to your home WiFi network you should be able to access the transport stream (video) files on the drive and play them back/copy them to other devices.

If you have a PC on your network with UPnP enabled it should detect the STB's hard drive as a network drive and you should just be able to just copy the files across.

Unfortunately, if the files were taken from an encrypted source (such as pay satellite or cable TV) then the transport streams will also be encrypted and will only play back through the device they were recorded on assuming they still have a current decryption subscription (smart card or similar).