Getting recorded programmes off an old Sky HD box

[Steve McF]

We are in the process of moving house, and in the process will be changing our Sky subscription, which means we get a new Sky Q box, which is apparently not compatible with the old HD box we have.

We have stuff recorded on the HD box we wanted to keep to watch later. Is there any way we can copy the programme files onto something else? eg save them as wmv or mpeg files on our laptops, or external hard drives?

[sgould]

It may not be compatible with the new aerial and signals, but does it have any other connector that could link it to your new box, just for transfer?

Maybe the Sky help line can offer advice?

[Steve McF]

It was Sky who said they'd take our old box away and that it wouldn't work as a standalone box without being connected to the sky network.... :0

[Geoff1951]

Following from Will's comment, can it connect directly to your TV with an HDMI lead, without bothering with aerial or internet connections? Worth a try.

On planet BT, I've had a similar issue when upgrading our BT boxes over the years, and had recordings on the redundant box that we wanted to keep. Recorded material can't be tansferred or converted to an accessible format on another storage medium, not even another box of the same type, something to do with both the file format and the OS software in the BT boxes.  The BT system will only recognise one box at a time connected to the outside world via internet/aerial, (well, it is sort of possible, but only by throwing money at BT)  but simply connecting our old box to the TV via HDMI still allowed access to the recorded programmes. In effect it was a bit like an "access only" external hard drive on a computer. We couldn't use the box to record or watch live TV, but we didn't need it for that anyway.

(BT ask for the old boxes back, but I've never done that.  Once they've served their purpose, I've taken the hard drives out, formatted them, and use for additional storage on my computer. You can never have enough terabytes.)

(If you haven't got enough HDMI sockets on your TV, to avoid having to plug/unplug each time, there are multi adapters widely and cheaply available.)

Any Sky boffins out there?

[carrera]

You need a current subscription to play back recordings

A Sky Q box uses HDCP, pretty sure the HD box will too, so you need a way of permitting that and recording.

I have an arrangement that allows me to archive off Sky Q recordings, two bits of kit needed, probably about £100-£150 to acquire and a laptop. Platform independent too, so Virgin / BT OK

It's not a file transfer method, it's a real time re-record of the digital stream

PM me if you want to know more, real time is a bit of pain

[phoenix]

An HDMI splitter will remove the HDCP protection, the you can use a basics USB HDMI capture device but recording will be real time

[weetabixface]

Have a look for expvr via your preferred search engine

It can extract *some* recordings to .TS/MPEG but only stuff that's not encrypted

You still need your sky sub to keep the encrypted stuff, have used expvr to port between sky+ boxes/drives but not Q

[Steve McF]

Well I tried to connect the Sky box to my laptop, but regardless of which output I use from the Sky+ HD box, the laptop does not recognise it as an external drive. I thought there was a way you could plug something into the old sky box which would mean it would work without having to connect satellite cables. I thought it would at least work with the wireless connector box so that we could watch stuff recorded on the box (if not record anything new on it), but it seems not?