Recovering television recordings on a failed freeview drive

bainbridge · 14 Mar 2020 at 21:09

Hi

My father in law has recorded about 1.5TB of shows on a Humax freeview recorder and it's failed. He took it to the local high street electronics shop and they couldn't fix it, they say it won't power up (which he knew anyway). We've opened it up and there's nothing obvious, not that's I'd know anyway, but what I did notice was that the hard drive is a standard desktop 2TB Seagate 3.5 inch sata mechanical hard drive.

We've removed it and next week I'm going to connect it to a Windows 7 desktop machine, however I anticipate Windows won't be able to play the files. Will we need some sort of program with a codec so we can run the files? Also is it possible to convert them to some standard media files so he can store them on a windows machine?

There's lots of good stuff on there such as all the episodes of Last of the summer wine and some other stuff too

Thanks

Hawk Tuah · 14 Mar 2020 at 21:16

If you can find a codec that can play them, then you can convert them.

https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

If you've got an Intel graphics card, you can convert the videos really quickly using qsv - although it's not the most efficient (size & quality) encoder.

jpaul · 14 Mar 2020 at 22:41

I have a humax freeview t2, you need to have already installed the add-on packages (to its linux based system) that cause both sd and hd recordings to be unencrypted, otherwise, you won't be able to grab any playable codec files off of the drives ... take a look on the hummy forums.

Humax eco-system was wonderfully open, but by default, like any freeview recorders, media is encrypted, with a key specific to individual boxes.

I've never looked on hummy forum to see if either humax or a 3rd party offer an economic repair service.

Deleted member 77746 · 14 Mar 2020 at 23:38

You might be best finding another same type of unit then sticking the drive into it.

Ask on here someone might have a same unit?

jpaul · 15 Mar 2020 at 15:16

a couple of good threads - detailing what I'd said ... I'd consider the cap repair they detail.

https://www.avforums.com/threads/problem-with-my-humax-initialising.2144811/

https://hummy.tv/forum/threads/hacking-the-on-board-encryption-chip.8217/

bainbridge · 15 Mar 2020 at 18:01

Thanks for the responses folks. @jpaul It looks like the only way to access the files is to repair the unit, he's a retired electrician so this won't pose a problem. Plenty of info in hummy.tv, thanks for your help.