BT Youview box.

[Bigsay]

The hard drive on my youview box failed.  Does anyone know what the format the files stored in the box are?  Also if I managed to remove the discs from the hard drive and put them in another hard drive and put them into a caddy would they they work on a tv?  There are several files of my sons tv appearance which we have lost.  Thanks

[NigelB72]

I'd suggest that you do a search on Google because the answers are out there but if the recordings are of a HD broadcast, they'll be fully copy protected by DRM and you won't be able to move them or play them back on any other devices. 

[TimCurtis]

@Bigsay 

As @NigelB72  has mentioned if they are HD then there's nothing that can be done.

However, for SD recordings it's possible to extract files fairly simply by mounting the HDD in a caddy and booting a PC/Laptop in Unix/Linux and copy the files off and then convert them to a standard mkv/mp4 format for playback.

[Bigsay]

Thanks.  Could this be done in Windows?

[NigelB72]

@Bigsay it's standard Youview encryption. The best way for you to find out who to do it is to do a search through Google/YouTube etc and you'll find people have done walkthroughs 

[TimCurtis]

@Bigsay 

I've done it from a Windows PC but booted with a standalone Linux distribution, Ubuntu I think.

The only thing to watch for is that the file names under Linux/Unix are often invalid for a Windows PC so they need renaming while in Linux/Unix removing the invalid characters.

This is what I've saved for myself as a reminder:-

Only SD recordings can be copied off.

It's quite a while since I did this so you might have to adapt what I'm writing to suit the reality of now.

I used a Windows PC but booted it using a standalone Ubuntu linux system.

Once connect the HDD from the YV box & I think mount it. You could connect the HDD directly to the PC usig one of the sata & power connections or use usb HDD external caddy.

You're looking for the biggest partition & will find the programme files in there.

You need the large .ts files and copy them to a spare device. You'll need to rename them in Ubuntu as the file names are incompatible to Windows and whilst it can see them it can't do much with them.

Once you copied & renamed them boot back into Windows and I suggest they'll need to be converted to a format your player - whatever that might be - can play.

I used Vidcoder to do the conversion creating a profile that roughly matches the file size of the existing file. You'll not need to convert the audio so that part of the profile can be set to pass thru'.

From then it just a matter of playing them.

I'm pretty sure that covers the basics that I did. If you get stuck PM me & I'll do my best to help.

Hope that helps.