okay.. so a friend of mine has a dish network dvr.. we've popped it open a few times to pull the drive and extract the transport streams, edit and burn them to dvd.. long story short, it's too much of a pain in the ass.. recording to a standalone is much easier..

so anyhow, i was checking out the "on demand" feature of his dish network setup.. apparently you can have movies "on demand" with the ability to fast forward, rewind & pause.. mostly older movies (jurassic park, mallrats, etc).. they're $4 or $5 to rent.. and it asks that you keep your DVR off while not using it.. and i guess during that time it downloads the movies to your hard drive.. then when you want to rent one, it accesses your hard drive and lets you have them "on demand"..

so the next logical question is, does anyone have any experience with extracting these "on demand" movies from the hard drive? i dont really care for any of the movies, and of course extracting these movies from the hard drive would be illegal (theft of service, etc).. but i'm just curious.. is it possible?