Transferring Sky+ recordings to PC?

kazzer

Is this possible? If so is it easy to do or are the recordings protected?

RangeR

AS far as I know, kazzar, the recordings on the Sky+ box are the direct sat feed, not decrypted. End result, playing back the program is the same as watching it live. You need your card in the box. The recordings won't work on any non sky device. I don't even think that your PC would be able to read the hard disk as It's not Fat, Fat32 or NTFS.

stephene

I just use a DVD Recorder (Sumvision SV-1001) along with the "Copy" function on the Sky+ box to send a recording out the VCR scart and record it on a DVD+RW, I can then read it in the PC and do pretty much what I want with it.

Setting the DVD Recorder to a high quality, eg. 2 hours per disc, I get very good results - almost identical to the original recording.

Macrovision might be a problem with Box Office recordings, but I don't do Box Office, so it doesn't bother me.


Stephen.

RangeR

Very good point, Stephane. Nice one.

Zapho

And if that doesn't work, or you don't have a dvd recorder, get yourself a connector that lets you plug a composite lead into your usb or firewire port. They cost around €100, but you'll get a pecfect image on your computer and just record it from there.

watty

The recordings are raw feed _AND_ additionally encrypted so even the FTA can't be read off.
AFAIK it _IS_ a version of FAT, but the additional encryption plus the oringinal encryption which needs NDS cam and _VALID_ Sky card for the channel makes reading the files pointless.

watty

Zapho wrote:

And if that doesn't work, or you don't have a dvd recorder, get yourself a connector that lets you plug a composite lead into your usb or firewire port. They cost around €100, but you'll get a pecfect image on your computer and just record it from there.

Actually I found they ONLY way to get decent analog/composite/s-video etc recordings on PC is to use either a DV bridge or digital CAMcorder that has Analog in and DV out (Really a DV bridge).

Everything elese I tried either drops frames or has nasty artifacts or reduced 1/4 frame resolution.

The PCI sat card records MPEG from sat just like Sky+ and then I use PVAstrumento to scan the file fixing dropped frames, errors etc (Lighting strikes, crow on LNB etc?).

Of course the PC sat card only does FTA, though I think a real sky card may for with the right CAM. My sat card does take a real CAM socket, but it is expensive and probabily Rupert would make it not work the day I buy it. So I watch the Sky encrypted live or S-VHS recorded and record only FTA on PC.

kazzer

So do people recommend Sky+, is it worth it? Im getting multiroom, and cant decide whether to go for Sky+ for recording stuff or a dvd recorder. Sky+ seems so much more convenient.

Whats the quality of the recordings like, is it comparable to DVD?

pH

I've got sky+ and I think it's great, really does change the way you watch TV. Just find interesting things on the planner, hit R and then series link.

Yes it occasionally messes up, but overall it's very good.

If you're paying enough to Sky to get the sky+ charge waived then it's a no brainer! go for it, is it worth paying 15 a month for? Not so sure.

watty

kazzer wrote:

So do people recommend Sky+, is it worth it? Im getting multiroom, and cant decide whether to go for Sky+ for recording stuff or a dvd recorder. Sky+ seems so much more convenient.

Whats the quality of the recordings like, is it comparable to DVD?

It depends what you mean by DVD.

The Sky+ and PCI sat cards record the actual transmitted signal. Playback is IDENTICAL quality to live watching.

DVD recorders from analog source ALWAYS degrade the picture, and sometimes more than a SW MPEG encoder (which can take 12 hours to encode a film at highest quality so obviously can't be real time recording).

DVD pressed discs can use highest qaulity encoding from a master and achieve higher than PAL analog quality or Satellite MPEG transmission. Some of course are poorly encoded from poor sources and are not much better than SVHS, or even VHS.

Not all satellite MPEG is same resolution or quality, DVB intended for PAL viewing is 576 vertical and for NTSC viewing 480 pixels vertical. Horizontal DVD is usually 704 or 720. Satlellite can be 540 (SVCD quality) to 720 pixels horizontal and even 1/4 resolution, which is VCD quality and can be 1/2 the VHS quality which is always 525 or 625 horizonal lines (vertical resolution), whatever about the horizontal resolution.

Note "lines resolution" is not directly related to pixels. A SQUARE screen of 800 x 800 pixels would only be "400 lines resolution".

DV format is not MPEG but a kind of Motiion Jpeg, so can be better or worse than MPEG as used on Satellite or DVD. Typically DV format is about 5:1 compression so with a twice 720 x 576 resolution CCD antialised to 720 x 576, the quality will be 3 or 4 time better than MPEG2 or MPEG4 at the SAME resolution.

Note that if your camera or fiilm scanner nor slide scanner is exactly the final DVD or DVB or MPEG resolution you get aliasing artifacts and sometime moire patterns that do not occur with a purely analog TV system. So the very highest quality DVD transfer from film or Camera starts at TWICE the final resolution, which is HIGHER resolution than 1080 format, and anti-alias DSP resamples the captured signal to final resolution before MPEG or DV encoding.

Such true HD source on regular PAL screens looks stunning, so there is some value of a HD decoder for 1080 that resamples using anti-aliasing to 768 x 576 analog RGB to drive a RGB scart.

kazzer

Thanks watty, thats very comprehensive.