V+ - Watching on PC and Ethernet socket

[roy_huntley]

Hi,
Took delivery of a V+ box lasy month...very happy with it so far, although it does seem to make quite a loud whiny sound alot of the time (lifting it slightly makes it go quiet...may just be vibration?).

I never got a manual with it, so I have two questions...

1. Has anybody managed to get any recorded tv shows on to a portable media player / pc / storage card ? What format are the shows recorded in on the v+ box.

2. What is the ethernet socket for (obviously, plugging an ethernet cable in!)...has anybody tried plugging one in and navigating to the v+ ip address ?

Thanks

Roy.

[Graham M]

Originally Posted by roy_huntley

Hi,
Took delivery of a V+ box lasy month...very happy with it so far, although it does seem to make quite a loud whiny sound alot of the time (lifting it slightly makes it go quiet...may just be vibration?).

I never got a manual with it, so I have two questions...

1. Has anybody managed to get any recorded tv shows on to a portable media player / pc / storage card ? What format are the shows recorded in on the v+ box.

2. What is the ethernet socket for (obviously, plugging an ethernet cable in!)...has anybody tried plugging one in and navigating to the v+ ip address ?

Thanks

Roy.

1. Erm?
2. Broadband using the Built in Cable Modem but they have stopped using this now and the port is disabled

[jem]

Originally Posted by roy_huntley

Hi,
Took delivery of a V+ box lasy month...very happy with it so far, although it does seem to make quite a loud whiny sound alot of the time (lifting it slightly makes it go quiet...may just be vibration?).

I never got a manual with it, so I have two questions...

1. Has anybody managed to get any recorded tv shows on to a portable media player / pc / storage card ? What format are the shows recorded in on the v+ box.

2. What is the ethernet socket for (obviously, plugging an ethernet cable in!)...has anybody tried plugging one in and navigating to the v+ ip address ?

Thanks

Roy.

The only way to get recorded shows off of the V+ box is via the copy to DVD option. You would need to burn a DVD using this, then rip it on a PC to extract the MPEG2 files and then transcode to whatever format you wanted. Very, very long-winded and quality will take a hit because of all the conversions.

What you are asking about is getting the raw digital files off of the internal hard drive, currently there is no means of doing this, short of physically removing the drive and plugging it into something else. Doing so would be completely in breach of the terms and conditions an dyou could expect a large bill from VM if repairs were needed. Remember we only lease the box not own it like Sky. Even if you were to do this, I would expect that the files are encrypted in some way and the encryption key to be related to the actual box. So if a box were to fail, you couldn't simply swop the drive into another one and access your recordings. Very annoying but it's the sort of copy protection I would expect the program makers would insist on.

Note that all this is pure speculation on my part, I really have no inside knowledge of how the V+ box works, but it does seem a reasonable guess.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by roy_huntley

Hi,
Took delivery of a V+ box lasy month...very happy with it so far, although it does seem to make quite a loud whiny sound alot of the time (lifting it slightly makes it go quiet...may just be vibration?).

I never got a manual with it, so I have two questions...

1. Has anybody managed to get any recorded tv shows on to a portable media player / pc / storage card ? What format are the shows recorded in on the v+ box.

AFAIK, the v+ simply saves the MPEG2 encoded Transport Stream it recieves. It does not re-encode the data. It does encrypt it, though.

2. What is the ethernet socket for (obviously, plugging an ethernet cable in!)...has anybody tried plugging one in and navigating to the v+ ip address ?

I'm willing to be corrected, but AFAIK, it's not enabled.

[roy_huntley]

Yeah, the copy to dvd process is far too long winded.

I just thought it would be good if...you could connect your v+ box to your home pc network via the ethernet and then watch back your recorded shows over the network.....maybe in the year 2020 !

[sullerm]

Can you play the V+ recording out to a capture card or device ?

[jonat8]

Yes, I don't see why not, but the quality would be degraded as the box will be outputting an analog signal for your capture card which then gets converted back to a lossy file on your computer. And it would take exactly as long as the copy to DVD option.

[Ignatius]

Your problem is this:

The only legitimate (legal) use for recording of TV programs is not archiving, but timeshifting. Some content providers require that their content is only available for certain amounts of time, and that it is NOT copyable off the V+ box (ie, they protect it with Macrovision). If the V+ provided direct access to its hard disk, then it would be unable to enforce these policies.

If they allowed you to archive all the episodes of (choose your poison - dr who, cold case, .....) why would you go out and buy the box sets? - you wouldn't!

Just because people have been doing this for years - first with VHS then with DVDR - doesn't mean it's legal.

(I'm not trying to tell people what to do - just pointing out a valid reason why Virgin Media would not want to support it)

[mbriody]

Resists the urge, must resist....no I can't any longer.

You mean just like I do with two TiVos?

There, I've said it

Actually I've just signed up for V+ as my new house doesn't allow dishes. I expect I'll still use my Tivos as well.

Originally Posted by roy_huntley

Yeah, the copy to dvd process is far too long winded.

I just thought it would be good if...you could connect your v+ box to your home pc network via the ethernet and then watch back your recorded shows over the network.....maybe in the year 2020 !

[Euromancer]

I had an engineer out because my box is always failing in stupid ways, he did say that there is a firmware update in the works and you will be able to use the eSATA port to connect an external hard drive to either record too OR copy from the internal HD out to the eSATA one, at the time I thought great. However this is the same engineer who told me the buzzing sound from my V+ box was the fan. After 2 more weeks of my box not working (he wouldn't replace it) I took the lid off, it runs cooler and so fair has not craped out at all and guess what there is NO fan inside it it’s the cheap hard drive making all the noise.

Anyone heard of the eSATA port working?

[dpw]

I have a V+ box, with HDMI & HD enabled, and I have been able to copy programmes to the hard disc of a Lite-on LVW5045 HD/DVD recorder using the V+ scart 'out to tape' socket.

As mentioned in previous postings, I have topped and tailed the recording and removed adverts, ready to save to removable media.

What I then can not do, is burn the resulting recording on the Lite-on hard drive to a DVD . Other forums suggest the Liteon LVW-5045 has failed or that it does not recognise the DVD media .

However, unwilling to give up I tried to copy out of the LVW-5045 into a VCR, using a scart connection, the resulting VCR tape recording was useless due to Macrovision.

From this I have to conclude that at least some of the video output from the V+ box has Macrovision copy protection enabled. For some reason this did not stop me copying from V+ hard disc to Lite-on hard disk, but did stop me from copying from that Lite-on hard disc to DVD or VCR tape.

Unless someone else knows otherwise?

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by dpw

From this I have to conclude that at least some of the video output from the V+ box has Macrovision copy protection enabled. For some reason this did not stop me copying from V+ hard disc to Lite-on hard disk, but did stop me from copying from that Lite-on hard disc to DVD or VCR tape.

Unless someone else knows otherwise?

If the programme/film makers request it, the V+ does place Macrovision protection on the recorded output. It sounds like the Lite-On disk does the same as the old Series 1 Tivos. The Tivo breaks any Macrovision protection so it can record the programme to HDD, but replaces that protection when you watch the programme.