[Fundoctor]

Dear AVR

First post! I would like to be able to remotely record educational TV programmes for use in teaching. Therefore I need a way of saving/recording onto transportable media such as CD/DVD/Card. Would also like to have HD (though recording to HD not such a priority for teaching work).

As I see market, there is no HD FreeSat recorder that records to DVD at present but something very expensive may be coming.

Given that I only have ~£300 is there a reliable and fool-proof way of getting stuff off systems like the Humax Foxsat and onto DVD/CD? I'm not hopeful!

Thanks in anticipation

Fundoctor

[Stiggy]

A PC with a DVB-S card would be easy. You could put that together with your £300 budget.

[grahamlthompson]

Originally Posted by Fundoctor

Dear AVR

First post! I would like to be able to remotely record educational TV programmes for use in teaching. Therefore I need a way of saving/recording onto transportable media such as CD/DVD/Card. Would also like to have HD (though recording to HD not such a priority for teaching work).

As I see market, there is no HD FreeSat recorder that records to DVD at present but something very expensive may be coming.

Given that I only have ~£300 is there a reliable and fool-proof way of getting stuff off systems like the Humax Foxsat and onto DVD/CD? I'm not hopeful!

Thanks in anticipation

Fundoctor

For SD files A Foxsat-hdr can transfer mpeg2 transmission stream files (.ts) to a usb drive. A PC with the free vlc player can play these files so a laptop connected to a projector should work fine. You can also quite easily convert the .ts files to .mpg and burn content to DVD. For HD material you need a generic fta sat box which will produce non protected H264 mpeg4 files. These can be burnt to a standard DVD using AVCHD format (A dual layer blank will hold about 1.75hrs of ITV HD). To play these back you will need a blu-ray player that accepts AVCHD or a powerfull enough PC.

[Fundoctor]

Graham and Stiggy

Thanks for your help. Graham am right in thinking that the Humax HD FreeSat has a USB port that allows you to attach a regular computer external HHD? Do you know if this is a straightforward way of doing it - like is such file transfer supported from the Humax UI and does it work well?

KRs

Fundoctor

[grahamlthompson]

Originally Posted by Fundoctor

Graham and Stiggy

Thanks for your help. Graham am right in thinking that the Humax HD FreeSat has a USB port that allows you to attach a regular computer external HHD? Do you know if this is a straightforward way of doing it - like is such file transfer supported from the Humax UI and does it work well?

KRs

Fundoctor

Provided you mean the pvr (Foxsat-HDR), yes it works really well, you need a standard usb drive formatted FAT32 (not ntfs) for SD (Max file size 4Gb) which for your needs is unlikely to be a problem. (Bigger files require a Linux file system - EXT3). You get 3 files, the one you want has a .ts extention. The non recording box (HD) does not have USB file transfers. On the freeview platform a Topfield 5800 has similar capabilities, except you need to connect a Pc rather than a usb drive which means you can use ntfs drives.

[grahamlthompson]

Originally Posted by Dog

I hope the OP does not mind me jumping into his thread but I would like to ask you a few questions Graham. I had already sussed that I would need to format my external HDD with a Linux partition to get over the 4G Fat 32 limit and had opted for Ext3 just as you suggest.

Using a "Gparted" boot disk I formatted an external 2.5" HDD (USB powered) with Ext3 , it's a nice solution for me as it will also format a disk with different file partitions so I was able to split the external HDD 50:50 with Ext3:NTFS, which then made the HDD readable by both the Foxsat HDR and a Samsung B650 TV through their respective USB ports. Both the Foxsat and the Samsung (and my PC) will read FAT32 but the 4 GB limitation keeps rearing its ugly head, so it has to be Ext3 for the Foxsat and NTFS for the TV.

Anyway, I had no problems copying a HD prog (Reggie Perrin) from the Foxsat's HDD to the external HDD's EXT3 partition but there was no way that my Vista PC wanted to look at a Linux partition let alone work with any data on that partition, is there a freeware fix available?

The Foxsat HDR is quite happy to try and play HD Reggie Perrin directly back from the external HDD but the USB data transfer rate does not seem up to the job and the picture and sound are badly degraded, is there a fix?

When trying to copy Reggie Perrin back from the external HDD onto the Foxsat I seem to be coming up against copy protection and the original recording on the Foxsat now seems to be copy protected, is there a work around?

Cheers Graham, looking forward to your informed replies.

It's only recently that it's been possible to archive HD to the USB drive. I believe it's one shot only but not tried it out. You can't play encrypted from the usb as it's believed the decryption overhead is too much for the USB. The copy is still encrypted so you can't do anything with it other than putting it back on the hdr HDD. It wont even work if you try and copy it back to another hdr's HDD. There is a work around although it's not very convenient. Switch to non-freesat mode turn to sby and back on after about 10-15sec. Manually recording BBC HD (press red record, press a second time to set duration). This produces a non encrypted freely copyable (playable on a PC if it's got enough grunt) and these will happily play from USB. Although you can get drivers to read EXT3 partitions under windows all the ones I have tried require that the partition be properly unloaded under Linux first. The usb does not properly dismount a EXT3 partition, requiring a linux pc to unmount the drive first. For the few times I need to do this I simply boot my laptop into linux using a slax boot CD and use that to transfer files from EXT3 to NTFS.

Slax: get slax

Hope this helps

Graham

[grahamlthompson]

Originally Posted by Dog

Yes that worked exactly as you said. Cheers

Looks like I'll have to use linux to take it any further though. I take it that the same would apply to ITV HD, Is there a way of tuning into ITV HD manually rather than going via the red button on the EPG?

Not on a freesat box. It's possible on some generic fta boxes (and sky HD boxes with the new epg), some can add the necessary non standard parameters to tune it as a normal channel