How To Rip video off sony hdd recorders with a PC

dstivens

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Not sure if this has been done before but i couldnt find any information anyway so thought id post how i did it.

IF you take the hard drive out of your recorder (mines a hxd870) you can plug it into your computer with a sata cable. The filesystem is unknown as far as im aware so it will not be shown as a drive on the system. However we dont need it to be in this case.

If you get a bit of software called 'HXD Hex Editor' from 'http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/' you can open the drive and view the content in hex. I suggest you make sure when you open it you do so with read only so you dont mess anything up. To open the drive just go to 'Extras' then 'Open Disk..' You will have to work out some how which disk is which.

After you open the hard drive you want to 'Save' the whole disk to you PC. Now this might be a problem if you not got much space or if you upgraded the hard drive previously. to save just do a 'File' 'Save As' to somewhere on a drive with enough free space.

Once that is done which might take a while. Might took about a hour and 15 mins for a 160gig drive. You can now go get a program called 'Extractor', this bit of software will look though your hex dump and extract *.mpg files. You can find the software at 'http://www.volny.cz/nova-software/' Once installed you might have to change the language by going into options and looking around till you find out where it is to change it. You want to set your files to scan to the file you just dumped and set a extracted files folder. make sure you only select the file type to search as *.mpg this will save you time. then hit start.

After a while you will see the scanning box fill up with *.mpg files. Once the scan has finished you can then highlight the files you want and click on extract.

You will then have all the video off that drive on your PC that you can watch at any time.

I dont think this is the best way to do this however. im sure there must be some software which will just scan directly off the disk instead of copying it to your PC first. IF you know of any software which does this please tell me.

I think this method will work for any number of other HDD recorders from differnet brands if you so need. As long as you know the format of the Video files which it records in and the extractor supports it you should be ok. IF you dont know the format i guess you can just scan for all the video formats and see what comes up, thats what i did.

I have only posted this for infmational purposes and i dont suggest you use this to take copy protected material off the tv and distribute it else where. Either way im not responsable

Enjoy :)
 
Personally, I wouldn't advise trying to remove the HDD from a DVD Rec.
 
I tried this process myself - I have a sony rdrhxd860 160gb drive with about 100 titles on it (10gb free). The process worked up until the use of the extractor software - it found a total of (wait for it) 189,516 mpg files (all of a few kb each). After extracting the 1st couple of megs worth sequentially (40 files or so) I attempted to play them individually and also by joining them - no such luck, they are not recognised by any mpg filters on my various audio player apps. Did I miss something ? - been through all the settings in extractor (btw, the HxD hex editor software reports the filesystem type as 'HDD filesystem' - proprietary to sony i guess). Screen dumps attached. Any help from here onwards gratefully received..
 

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Hi all, I tried this method from a Sony DVD/HDD Recorder, but there were a few things that were a little odd.

1) It took about 10 hours to scan for the MPG files - That seems a long while to me!

2) When I open one of the files in the list by double clicking on it, it plays in Media Player, but when I extract them all, it just extracts three different files, and produces multiple copies of those same three files. How is it that I can watch the video by clicking Open in extractor, but not after I have extracted it?

Thanks for the method, and if anyone has any advice it would be appreciated.
 
I suspect if only someone knew a capable programmer with good knowledge of hard drive filesystems they could come up with a pc program to read these hard drives. From what I understand its a linux filesystem altered to be hard to read but not actually encrypted in anyway.
 
Can TestDisk read the disc? It's normally used for recovery, but can read any format of disc, and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux etc. You may be able to direct access files on a PC the SATA drive is connected too, and then copy to another disc... It's terrific and free software.

Also if it's just a Linux file-system and just open, you could run a free Linux OS (Ubuntu etc.) from a USB stick or CD (boot the PC to it) then try and access the drive like that, might work better than via Windows.
 
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Hi all, thanks for the responses - wasn't expecting anything that quick!

Anyway, with regard to my problem of only being able to get 3 files which were then duplicated, I managed to get around it by just going through the list (all be it about 150 items!) and double clicking on each to open. Doing so makes the program extract the file and save it to it's temporary files folder (for me, it was C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Temp\Extractor.tmp) So I just opened this up, and copied the files out of there.

Strangely enough, they were all in a random order, and every file was either 1.7MB, 60MB or 831MB. Really quite odd! Could this be the Drives' way of segmenting files, like that which is done on DVD's?

Also I will try converse's suggestion - thanks for the ideas guys

dave
 
@dstivens

Thanks for this! Looking for ages for a program to get the video off my Funai HDD and now I've got one - Extractor.
The only downside is the extracted video is in 1GB chunks but thats probably how they were recorded and no biggie to split them up.

:thumbsup: :clap:

Edit...
When trying to extract the video it always extracted the first 1gb segment, had to open the files and then go to the extrator.temp folder and copy them over before they got deleted.
 
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test disc is very very limited and will only read the current format as to whats on the HDD as it's really meant for file recovery. Haven't played with much but as far as I can see...it won't work...please......prove me wrong :) as for using hex...it works and works well. The only drawback is saving hex factor. Lots of reasons for this and to explain I would need to go into heavy mathematics which would be over most average users heads....including mine. I tried it out on two machines. One supercharged domestic PC running XP 64 bit service pack 2 pro and the other my $30,000 server running unix cross patched with the above ( yes it can be done but damned hard and extremely limited but I don't play games etc, for program writing only )

BOTH........... took roughly the same amount of time to do so power and cpu time isn't really a factor in this case.

I looked into this as my dvd recorder rom is stuffed..reads ok but the laser is worn to the point that it doesn't have the intensity to burn anymore, will read and continue to read until the mechanics wear out. For a cheap old LG RH397D which is now about 5 years old...it lasted pretty well and it did a lot of burning.
 
sorry for my english, I tried to do all, the hex dump ok, but the Extractor program extract a hundred of thousand files *.mpg with a size of about 500 KB. and de windows media player show nothing at all.

Anyone can help me? :lease:

Thanks for your posts.
 
There is a method to extract the vob files and structures from the disk

Tested with a Sony RDR HXD 560

A) Place Sony Harddrive into a USB cradle and connect to your computer.
B) Image the entire harddrive using a program like winimage. (Make sure you have enough space to hold the image of your drive)

C) Purchase the registered version of ISOBuster. I have version 2.5 but the newer 3.0 should do. Open the Harddrive image file in this.
The program will then scan the entire image file reconstructing the data from IFO and VOBs it finds.

D) From the IFO section export to a folder the program you want (they be listed by recording name)
 
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Hi, the extractor software in the link above is missing. Anyone got a working link or an alternative software?'

Thanks
 
hi, trying to do this with linux. I have a linux PC which i've mounted the sony disk in. I've used dd to write the entire disk to a file, then on a windows laptop used extractor to read in the disk and try extracting.

the extracting program doesn't seem to get anywhere, seems to do around 1 gig, then hangs. also doesn't seem to find anything, in reports it says 120 mpg false alarms.

Anyone if DD will work with this? ie there is no incompatibility in the format that dd has outputted in comparison what the hex editor program would?

note, I cannot attach the drive to a windows box.
 

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