Quote:
Originally Posted by worley45 /forum/post/20887155
It can't be that complex. I was the one who figured out a couple of years ago how to get all my recordings off of my Panasonic DMR HD with a hex editor on my PC when a divide-title operation corrupted my DVD recorder. [...] Don't know about pioneer and magnavox, but on the panasonic the data on the HD looked like any other mpg or vob file in hex.
I really need to start looking up the post history of members initiating these kinds of threads, so I can stop making an ass of myself trying to give general-purpose normal-consumer advice to people who later reveal themselves to be uber-geeks in sheep's clothing.
If you're such an utter gearhead that you've actually mastered the heinous process of "oh, just drop into a hex editor and spend the rest of your life piecing together little bits of unidentifiable video until you salvage something," then you already knew the answers to your PC-HDD transfer questions. All DVD/HDD recorders work the same way as your Panasonic, with similar asinine filesystems and hex-readable fragments. Thats where the story ends: little details like file headers may vary, but all recorder HDDs operate on a similar philosophy.
The hexadecimal backdoor is nice to have for cases of emergency salvage, if you've got the chops and you're up for the challenge. But its misleading to claim recorder HDD files are "not complex," simply because you can see them in a hex editor. Your typical AVS member would say, "who cares, if I can't manipulate them like normal files in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder?" There is no software you can run on your PC that will pull the peculiar files off the recorder HDD coherently and quickly, as if they were just intact ordinary MPG files stored on a second ordinary HDD. There was one guy who came here awhile back, boasting he was a professional software developer who had whipped up a utility that does what you want, but thats all he did: boast. No link to a shareware site, no offer to distribute the utility, nada: either he's a sadist, or it was a BS claim, or both. You have a few obsessive types here who knock themselves out with the hex editor, and try to simplify things by wiping the recorder drive and never letting it fragment (they use the hex editor to pull recordings off in one piece, then edit them on the PC).
But this begs the question: why the hell bother? If you're going to spend THAT much time screwing with the PC and hex and swapping HDDs in and out of the recorder, then you actually don't give a rats ass for convenience at all. You may as well just record directly to the PC, and avoid the tedium and headaches of the hex process. Recording VHS direct to PC is a PITA, because the video cards are optimized for tuner input and make a mess of VHS signals unless you ride the system and add supplementary external processors. Its a lot of trouble for those of us with thousands of VHS to digitize, which is why we usually opt for multiple standalone DVD/HDD units and satisfy ourselves with DVD archives. But if you're hell bent on an HDD archive instead, and want the files/HDDs to be generic PC compliant right off the bat, then going from VCR to PC is a necessary evil.
Its
way to much work in my case: I have a huge variety and number of VHS which requires an insane amount of fussing and extra hardware if going direct to PC. When I calculate the time wasted, its actually easier and quicker to dub to multiple Pioneer and Magnavox recorders, burn the stupid DVDs from their HDDs, then at my leisure rip the DVDs to a generic PC format. Not only do I save aggravation and time, I get uniform results (and a standard archive of DVDs to fall back on in case the subsequent HDD rips fail down the road). Others will have different priorities and opt for different compromises.
Quote:
Originally Posted by profhat /forum/post/20886971
BTW here's the post with all that we know about transferring RAW video files from the HDD of a Maggy directly to a PC, the task is still half way.[...]
Same confusion: why on earth would you bother, except in an emergency to rescue the Magnavox HDD? If you want generic PC files, record generic files on the PC. Why clog the workflow with the Magnavox and hex parsing? Hook your cable or satellite box to the PC inputs, and be done with it (or use the PC tuner card). DVD/HDD recorders don't integrate well with PCs: a handful of discontinued models could, once upon a time, but they didn't sell worth a damn and were discontinued years ago. They're the missing link of A/V history, today you get better results networking a TiVO to your PC, or recording direct to PC, if PC is your end goal. Standalone recorders just get in your way, if you have no use for their internal DVD burning feature.
With that I exit this discussion, since it is not grounded in the "average Joe" universe. If you even know what a hex editor is, never mind how to use it on an HDD you removed from a recorder, you're not playing in the same league as typical recorder owners or folks with huge VHS libraries to digitize. You're an advanced user with a lot more time, skill and patience. I wish you good luck in your efforts, and that one of you gets inspired to develop the long-awaited PC utility that can finally read recorder HDDs like a normal file browser.