How to demux video from LG Tv TimeMachine recordings?

[nothrem]

Time Machine is a function of LG televisions that allows to time-shift and/or record the DVB stream to external USB HDD.

When I've connected the HDD with recorded movies to PC, I've found several folders and files that obviously contains the recorded streams. But none of the usual programs seems to be able to find the video inside them and demux them.

Here are the programs I've tries so far:

Media Info - only recognises the STR file as BDAV stream, but nothing else
General
Complete name : E:\TEMP\FileSet00\00000013REC\0000001300000005STR
Format : BDAV
Format/Info : Blu-ray Video
Format profile : No PAT/PMT
File size : 27.0 MiB

DGindex - say there is no video in the files
DGAVSindex - it just crash when I open the STR file
MPEG StreamClip - reports unsupported file
MPEG2Repair - find no PIDs
ProjectX - says "cannot find sequence header"; when I click a file in the list, it shows some PIDs, but after a while repeats the error "cannot find sequence header"
Other video converters (VirtualDub, MoviePlus, Mpg2Cut2, MKVmerge, ...) and players (MPC-HC, PowerDVD) just reports there is no video.

IMHO the problem is that the stream is separated into a lots of files and they needs to be joined somehow to get the actual stream file. Each recording has one PIF file that contains list of all other files; which are the IDX, STR and THM. Also they are separated into time segments so every STR file (which I guess is the video file) has only 25-40MB (usually, some HD/AC3 movies has 200MB file segments).

Here is a sample video: http://temp.chobits.ch/0000000dREC.zip

Is there any way how to get the recorded movies into some acceptable format? (AVI, MKV, MPEG, compatible TS, etc.). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.


PS: I would prefer something that is done on Windows (or Mac), since my greatest thing done on Linux was to SSH to my NAS and few mounts into its boot script .

[hech54]

Demultiplex, Demultiplexing, Demux, Demuxing
Splitting the video and audio to separate files. Also called "Demux".
https://www.videohelp.com/glossary?D#Demultiplex,%20Demultiplexing,%20Demux,%20Demuxing

[jagabo]

They are almost certainly encrypted.

[usually_quiet]

I was a participant in a couple of other threads where the originator wanted to copy and convert recordings made by a Sharp TV. Nobody came forward with a method for copying the recordings.

If you read the manual that came with your TV, it probably does not promise that anything else can use its recordings. I would guess that the reason your recordings are hard to transfer is that conditional access TV services available in some countries where TVs with a recording feature are sold want DRM applied to recordings so that subscribers cannot share recordings with non-subscribers.

LG is not alone in this. HDD-equipped recording devices from most major consumer electronics companies either encrypt the recordings stored on their HDD or use a proprietary file system that splits the recordings into small pieces in order to make them very difficult to copy.