Recording on USB from TV

enfield_freddy

Can I view the recorded content on my laptop


don,t know , until you do a test record , and then pop it into your computer to see what type of file it has recorded

hanwellmike

My Sony tv has the same facility but it required to completely re-format the drive that I used. That means it wiped all the data and thereafter the drive was not recognised when I plugged it in to a PC. I have been unable to recover the drive for ordinary PC use.


So check the user manual carefully before you plug the drive in and ensure there is no data on the drive that you cannot afford to lose..

marsbar989

I have a Samsung tv.
when i want to record, the usb is formatted to XFS format.
Windows cannot read this format. Linux can.
Even in Linux having mounted the drive the files are DRM encoded.

If the usb is just plain formatted in windows I can drop files down to it in avi/mp4 and it will play - but to record then the tv will want to format it.

paddyrg

I doubt it'll be as simple as you'd hope - hardware manufacturers like to add features like this to sell more TV's, but they're often dreadfully implemented.

It's quite possible that the stock will be formatted to an arcane format, that there will be DRM, that the files will be in an unusual container with unusual compression, etc. For instance rather than pay all the licencing fees associated with recomposing video for a feature they only introduced because marketing asked them to, they may just take the free view MPEG2 steam but store it without headers, and rely on some container metadata to interpret it later!

S0litaire

If it's anything like my LG TV the it will record using a Linux file format which Windows can't read. (jfs and ext3 partition formats

It creates 2 partitions on the USB stick. A small one (50-100Mb)for catalogue/Index files and the rest of the drive to hold the recorded programs (usually split up into chunks).

Until recently only HD broadcast recording were being encrypted, but some people have noticed that ALL files are now being encrypted on some LG TV's. Making it impossible to play recorded TV on anything other than the LG TV it was recorded on.

50Twuncle

I know that Panasonic TV's use a Unix operating system called FreeBSD 5.0 and uses the UFS2 file system. So you will never be able to read it on your PC. You would need to install FreeBSD or PC-BSD on a system to access the info on the drives and even then, only if it is in a standard format.
I am assuming that LG is similar ?