Saving dvd recorder stuff

dmz · Post by **dmz** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 4:17 am

My dvd recorder I use for the tv recently broke down with the dvd side of things not working. I could record and play stuff on the hard drive - just cant burn it to dvd. It was under warranty so i sent it in. I have been told that they will be replacing it with a newer model. Why they cant fix the dvd is beyond me. Anyway, i had alot of good stuff on the hard drive of my broken recorder so i asked for that back which they agreed. I want to transfer the stuff on the dvd recorder hard drive into videostudio. What are my options? The dvd recorder has a video out, component out, and rf out. I figure i have to plug that into a capture card of some sort. I dont want to insert a new internal card in my desktop. Is there an external card? or could i get a capture card for my laptop? Anything else I could do?

phd · Post by **phd** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 4:49 am

Your options would probably depend on the make and model.

I was researching Panasonic DVD recorders and it had been mentioned plugging in a new hard drive would reformat it automatically. There was some mention of a tricky method of pulling a power pin to prevent it from happening. It all sounded rather dangerous. Others may have more info once you post the basics on the recorder.

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 3:59 pm

There are many analogue capture units. The cheaper ones connect ot the pc by usb, look at pinnacle, the better ones by firewire, look at canopus advc range.

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 11:48 pm

Don't forget though, the digital video, recorded by the recorder, is transferred as analog video and would have to be re digitized at point of capture. Does your box even have a firewire port?

You would be left to use the analog output of the recorder and recapture that with a device like a DV-Cam with AV through port or an analog capture card.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 12:52 am

This might sound naive, but my understanding is that the HDD in a DVD recorder is a standard HDD such as is also used in a computer... Would it not be possible to simply extract the HDD and connect it to a computer? Mind you, I have no idea what formatting such a HDD might have before being inserted into a DVD Recorder...

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 1:18 am

Good thinking Ken. I have no personal experience with DVD/HDD recorders but have started to look into this in an attempt to move away from VHS tape recorders. I used to have two but one failed recently and I'm reluctant to replace this with another tape recorder.

It is my understanding (could be wrong though) that the HDD from a recorder cannot be read by a Windows PC directly. You can use the HDD in a PC by formatting it to a Win file system but you cannot get the data already on it.

I have been told that many recorders use a UNIX file system on the internal HDD and chances are that, with a UNIX based machine, you could be able to read the information on such a disk. There are no guarantees though.

phd · Post by **phd** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 1:24 am

It's generally a standard hard drive, but files may be archived in an unusual format.

A lot of DVD recorders are using a Linux OS. Videos may be recorded in a proprietary format. The files and the hard drive may be encrypted.

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 3:15 am

If you are good with computers I would take the drive out and mount it in a computer or even an external usb adapter box. Don't run windows at all with that drive because if it's partitioned for Linux windows may/may not alter it's parameters. You could easily loose everything, windows does not like some linux partitions, depends on the enumeration sequence the bios assigns to your harddisks along with the windows OS. As soon as you boot up windows may very well attempt to repair the drive, after windows finishes with it you might as well use it as a paper weight.

Before installing the drive download burn the most recent version of Knoppix.
Knoppix is a Live CD/DVD version of Linux that runs strictly from the CD or DVD. You boot from this Knoppix CD/DVD and run Linux.

If the drive in your recorder is formatted for linux it could be EXT2/EXT3 or ReiserFS, depends, but Knoppix will read it & mount the drive.
Probably an external usb adapter box would be the better choice. After bootting your system to Knoppix and the desktop is active you could then plug the usb drive in and Knoppix should mount it if it can.
With knoppix you can read/write to FAT32 or NTFS drives. Just be careful though to write only to a data NTFS partition and not a NTFS partition that contains the boot Windows OS.

http://www.knoppix.org/

http://www.knoppix.net/

dmz · Post by **dmz** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 7:20 am

Thank you all. You are most kind. It seems an analogue capture card connected by firewire is the way to go. Can i go via the component out of the dvd recorder or do i have to use the video out? I think sometimes what comes out of a dvd recorder is somehow copy protected and cannot be captured? Maybe thats only true with the component out?
I dont want to try adding the hard drive manually to my pc. The format is unknown and I could lose the data if im not careful.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 7:42 am

Good thinking -- except that analogue capture devices that can capture DV via Firewire connections tend to be at the very high end price-wise of the market ($300 or more). And it would be rather silly -- at least in my opinion -- to go that route just for saving your data from one hard disk. Unless you have a hug collection of analogue video from the old days that you want to convert...

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 2:58 pm

What comes out of the dvd recorder is not copy protected in anyway.

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 4:03 am

OK, buy another dvd recorder, put it next to you existing recorder, the rest is self explanatory.

Although dvd recorders don't seem to have copy protection make sure you don't have the internal video protect feature turned on for the videos. I did have something strange happen when importing or creating a dvd from a dvd-ram disk that they panasonic had the file mark as protected. I always assumed it was so you couldn't delete it by mistake, which is also true.
That's another long story. I did have to remove that protection though.

dmz · Post by **dmz** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 8:53 am

Well they will be giving me a brand new recorder as part of the warranty and I was wondering whether I could plug one into the other and do hard drive to hard drive. I dont remember the internal video protection feature but ill have a good look in the manual.

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:49 am

I doubt that you will be able to transfer from one HDD to another. It's more like using an analog output on one and an analog input (if such a thing exists) on the other.

Unless it's irreplaceable video on the old drive, I wouldn't bother.