Pulling recorded video from BT Vision box

Started by naywa01, 19. May 2010, 02:02

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Hi all,

Couldn't find this anywhere else on this forum and as it looked such a helpful place, thought I would contribute as a newbie (so apologies if this has already been addressed).

I also wasn't sure wether to put this in hardware or software, so 'others' seemed appropriate :-) Anyway I simply wanted to pull off recordings from my BT box without having to a 1:1 recording etc. So ended up pulling out the drive and hooking it up to my PC (BTW mine is an older silver box with an IDE drive in).

Anyway it turns out the FTA (DVB-T) stuff that is stored as .slc files are simply a bunch of unencrypted MPEG files and changing extension to MPG allows them to be played right off the bat in Windows Media Player (or anything else you care to mention).

The only (slight) downside is that they are all 1GB segments (with a lot of 'padding' it would appear), so the programs are not all in one nice contiguous file. There is what I think is an index file (dvr.mrt), but I haven't started digging around in this yet, but it might help with stringing together segements when using a joiner tool.



Further to my post above: After some further mucking about it appears that Windows Media Player seems the most stable for playback of these files (VLC player gives a garbled screen).

Also the individual 1GB files are interleaved chunks of recorded video, in other words instead of being just segments of programs in some kind of sequential order, playing back the raw file gives you slices of various programs almost at random. For example I had content from at least three different recordings/channels/dates all in the same file.

I'm guessing that the 64MB dvr.mrt file retrieved from the same partition acts as some kind of index that is referenced on playback, telling the system which files to look in. I'm sure someone here could delve into this indexing/retrieval methodology much better than I can.


suprised you are getting anything? as they are "supposedly" encrypted, unless that is just for the ppv stuff..

The recordings are stored in files, as a seperate filesystem contained within those 1gb files, thats why you are getting bits and pieces.


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