New boxes coming, any way to move the recordings over

Irish Steve

OK, been "persuaded" that upgrading the old SD Sky plus boxes to HD (get F1 in the deal, which is good) is worthwhile, just wondering if there's any way to migrate the stuff we've got saved on the old boxes over to the new ones, the old plus boxes are the earlier versions. no network or anything fancy like that, not even close.

I suspect that the only way to do it will be to play the recordings, and have a PVR or similar connected to the TV or SCART to capture in real time, but I don't know if that's going to work or not.

Anyone got any other options they can suggest?

Thanks

sonofenoch

Take the HD out and try it in a PC.....did it with an dvd recorder and transferred my recordings, can it be done with Sky recordings is another question

JDxtra

Very tricky as the files are encrypted. May not even be possible when the boxes are different types.

icdg

Irish Steve wrote: »

I suspect that the only way to do it will be to play the recordings, and have a PVR or similar connected to the TV or SCART to capture in real time, but I don't know if that's going to work or not.

That's the only way to do it. Anything else involves either voiding the warranty on your Sky Digibox (if you physically removed the hard drive) or breaking VideoGuard (which hasn't been done).

gtg60

Yes, it can be done but it's not handy and it's not free.

You will need to access the hard drives in both boxes, taking apart your current boxes should be handy enough (assuming you have the correct Security Torx bits) but the new boxes are a total pain.

Once you have access to the hard drives you will need a PC with spare hard drive slots or a pair of caddy's to connect the drives to the PC, finally you will need to purchase software called ExPVR, it costs £20 and more info is available from here:
http://www.ph-mb.com/products/expvr/about

With that program you will be able to copy (and in your case convert) the recordings over to the drive of the new box, put everything back together and then you'll have all your old programmes on your new box.

Bonus is that any FTA recordings that are on the drive you can extract and play on any capable device.

whomitconcerns

but is that program actually needed. Would a straigtforward diskcopy/xcopy not work, as its the individual files that are encrypted not the disk?

gtg60

whomitconcerns wrote: »

but is that program actually needed. Would a straigtforward diskcopy/xcopy not work, as its the individual files that are encrypted not the disk?

Yes, it IS needed for many reasons especially the fact that the old OpenTV recordings will not work on the Darwin boxes.

Irish Steve

I'm aware of the ExPVR program, I used to use the predecessor from another author every so often, as one of the SD boxes has a 750 Gb disc in it, and I had to use that program to format it initially.

I'm reluctant to open the new boxes while they're under warranty, hence the reason I was looking for alternatives that would avoid having to go deep into the new boxes.

Thanks

Steve

irishgeo

dont you get to keep the old box?

Irish Steve

Yes, I will still have the old boxes, but unless Sky have changed the system. it will no longer have a card in it, as the card will get moved to the new box, and paired with it, so the old box will lose access to the recorded programs, and become effectively a free to air box with the UK channel line up, and without any other functionality (as far as I know).

One of the old SD boxes has a 750 Gb disc in it, with a lot of archived programs that I don't want to lose. I can get them off onto another drive with a copy+ program that recognises the format, but that won't allow me to play them back, in order to do that, they will need to be on the disc of the working box, which I'm reluctant to open while it's still under warranty.

gtg60

Irish Steve wrote: »

I'm reluctant to open while it's still under warranty.

I wouldn't worry about that if I were you, I don't even think they have warranty stickers any more and even if they did an engineer won't even bother looking for it on a service call.

Irish Steve

OK, fair enough, if there's no warranty stickers, I'm not going to be too worried, plenty of experience with getting in and out of kit of this nature without leaving marks behind afterwards.

Will see what arrives next week, should be easy enough to drop the copies over from previous copy+ experience, depending of course on the box firmware revision, it will be sensible to check that it's going to work with the latest version before I go down that road.

kbell

Also op, the new boxes are without rf modulators, so if you're using your existing boxes to distribute around the house, you'll need to get io links (the modulators basically) that connect externally and perform the same function.

Irish Steve

Thanks, I was aware of the IO link/magic eye issue, and thanks to E-Bay, its already sorted, they are on the way to me and should arrive before the boxes. Needed 2, as both boxes have TV's hanging off them in other rooms, my son hit the same issue earlier in the year when he got a good deal for HD.

Could even be lucky and be able to get the Sound system to work with the remotes, managed to get a very good deal out of Powercity on a Blue Ray surround sound system, and apparently, there is a code to make it work with a sky remote, which will be good. Might mean having 2 remotes in that room, as we don't always use the surround sound, so one for the TV, and one for the Blue Ray, or a 4 in one from Argos, that's for another day.

Cheers

Morrisseeee

A word of caution to the OP and also a Q for ye : I used ExPVR recently and managed to lose all my recordings on a SkyHD box. As my PC was powering up, my 3yr old son distracted me and the PC started to do a check-disk on the hard-drive.

I stopped it but when I booted it up, the files are showing up both in ExPVR & in the Sky planner but ExPVR won't let me do anything with them and the Sky box just plays a blue screen.

I'm thinking the recordings are still there but just not addressable (or some such) and I'm just wondering if anyone knows a trick or a bit of magic to get them back :o
I did do a planner rebuild but to no avail.

Irish Steve

If you have a suitable spare disc, it might be worth formatting it in the Sky box, and then doing some investigation of the boot sectors, I suspect that windows has made changes to the boot information that's now confusing things.

I've not used the ExPVR software, but I do know that the similar program (Copy+) used on the older boxes, there were some utilities that could be used to repair the MBR and other cylinder 0 information, but I'm not sure if there are similar utilities for ExPVR.

Irish Steve

OK, quick update, based on a very short period of time with the new boxes.

First, full kudos to Sierra for a switched on engineer who knew exactly what he was doing, and why, the install of the 2 boxes went very well indeed, and we fixed a couple of things that hadn't been working before, like an Akura set that wouldn't respond to the remote, but does now.

The boxes are not running the version 10 software yet, they upgraded to version 9 as part of the set up, and the engineer checked the signal strength and quality before he left, which did need some surgery on local trees on our boundary to bring the signal strength back up to acceptable levels, but all in all, so far, I'm very pleased with the day.

I was aware of the IO link issue, so we got a couple before the boxes arrived, which avoided any issues with the second sets not working.

It will be interesting to see when the boxes update to version 10, and what difference that makes. I need to investigate the manual channel search and manual record options, as they are new to me compared to the old boxes.

According to the engineer, we can swap the cards back to the old boxes to get the recordings off on to alternative media, needs a call to Sky to make it happen, but not a problem apparently. I will find out once I've got a suitable recording device to capture on to.

Vic_08

Irish Steve wrote: »

OK, quick update, based on a very short period of time with the new boxes.

First, full kudos to Sierra for a switched on engineer who knew exactly what he was doing, and why, the install of the 2 boxes went very well indeed, and we fixed a couple of things that hadn't been working before, like an Akura set that wouldn't respond to the remote, but does now.

The boxes are not running the version 10 software yet, they upgraded to version 9 as part of the set up, and the engineer checked the signal strength and quality before he left, which did need some surgery on local trees on our boundary to bring the signal strength back up to acceptable levels, but all in all, so far, I'm very pleased with the day.

I was aware of the IO link issue, so we got a couple before the boxes arrived, which avoided any issues with the second sets not working.

It will be interesting to see when the boxes update to version 10, and what difference that makes. I need to investigate the manual channel search and manual record options, as they are new to me compared to the old boxes.

According to the engineer, we can swap the cards back to the old boxes to get the recordings off on to alternative media, needs a call to Sky to make it happen, but not a problem apparently. I will find out once I've got a suitable recording device to capture on to.

A few things.

The engineer was wrong, there is no need to call sky to access your old SD sky+ recordings (except possibly for premium sky movies/sports channels), they are viewable with the same card used to record with even when it is paired with the new box. I just tried it on my old SD box 2 years after upgrading and all the recordings will play (I didn't have premium channels so they may be the exception) It does need to be the same card used in the box for the recordings (I had a hell of a job convincing the engineer I needed my original card to be transferred to the reconditioned multiroom HD box not the new 2TB box that I did not want to be puling apart).

I highly recommend ExPVR, used it myself when I switched to HD and after a number of issues which were fixed by the program creator (he was just developing the pre-darwin transfer at the time) I ended up combining 3 SD and a few weeks worth of new HD recordings onto a new 2TB disk.

It has worked perfectly ever since, the only bug I have is that the mobile sky+ app which loads the planner contents when phone and box are connected through the wifi router does not read the box correctly for some reason. My other unmolested sky+ does not have this issue so it is probably down to either the transfer or disk size upgrade.

The remote record function on the app still works so it is not a big deal and this bug may well be something fixed by later versions of ExPVR.

I understand your reluctance to crack open the new box, if you want to leave it for a while you can always combine the old and new disk contents, either to a new disk or as an image file on your PC to then be written to the original sky+ HD disk.

The new boxes require much more dismantling to get the HDD out than the older ones that had the disk in a shell sitting on top of the main board. However it is possible to just take off the plastic shell, the top of the metal case inside and the cooling fan to get access to the SATA connectors. Then using the guts of a suitable HDD caddy you can connect to the disk with it still in place, without having to pull the guts of the box apart. Perfect f you don't need to replace the HDD.

Most important of all as the previous poster found out is before hooking up any sky+ disk to a PC is to make sure anything set to automatically write to HDDs is turned off.