Extracting recordings from Pioneer DVRs to PC now working

[jwillis84]

fyi.. IB 4.3.3 alpha now supports all of the Pioneer DVRs (510, 520, 530, 533, 540, 550, 560 et.al.) for copying recordings from the HDD to a PC as complete recordings. The recording is not removed or deleted from the DVR recorder hard drive.The recordings are in the same MPEG2 format as recorded and no DVD media is required to broker the trip. Recordings from recorders that no longer work can be recovered as long as the hard drive is still readable.

Panasonic DVRs eh55, eh75, eh59, eh69 are now working, but are not included in the current alpha.. projected for the 4.3.4 alpha.. soon.

[hech54]

Nice

[Gil T Remnant]

Sorry if this is a stupid query, but are you removing the HDD from the recorder in order to rip the recordings from it?

[jwillis84]

Gosh that seems like 'ages' ago now.

Yes the last of the Pioneers and SONYs were tested by removing the hard drive from the recorder and attaching it to an IDE to USB bridge and connecting that to a laptop or desktop running IsoBuster to read and copy the recordings off.. (In the beginning I did use a PC with an IDE hard drive connector, but managing the recorder hard drive jumpers proved too annoying.. using an IDE to USB bridge I didn't have to do any of that.)

Youtube videos of the process, Pioneers

The most important thing to remember is to not allow Windows to (initialize) the recorder hard drive if it asks permission, and not try to mount or access the hard drive outside of IsoBuster while it is connected to the PC.

IsoBuster lets you view or verify it can see recordings on a hard drive in demo mode for free, but requires a license in order to enable the copy feature. Its not an expensive program and once its licensed it enables all features. It can be used against a hard drive, a raw disk image of a hard drive, or it can make raw disk images of hard drives. Its basically a data recovery tool that this year (2019) had DVD recorder specific intelligence added to support recovering recordings from those images or hard drives.

Its probably worth stressing that "rip" is not actually what it does.. since that suggests defeating encryption or some other drm feature. IsoBuster does not do that, the recorders it supports do not encrypt the recordings. IsoBuster also does not effect Macrovision or any other copy protection mechanism.. if the recorders captured that.. that remains intact.. so it doesn't "rip".

Each recorder brand and model "stored" its recordings in a different manner, and in most cases did not use a known file system. IsoBuster is a data recovery tool, so it seeks out patterns and reconciles disjointed fragmentation to turn recording streams into 'files'. Its also been taught how to find recording titles and associates those with the recordings it finds.. so navigating to find the recording your interested in is vastly simplified. If the user did not assign a title to a recording they can usually use the recording time and date to infer the recording they seek.

It is very easy to use.

There is a lot of data recovery information, but in general if you head straight for the "recordings" folder, you'll find them all there.

The recorders supported in 4.4 now include most if not all Panasonics, Pioneers, Toshibas, some Philips and Magnavox, LiteOn, Medion, RCA/Thomson and a few others.. it was over 52+ tested and the later generation of SONY were reportedly using the same storage formats as the later Pioneers.

None of the JVC DVD recorders are supported at this time.

[Gil T Remnant]

That is absolutely fascinating. Thank you. I actually have 4 DVD recorders with misc recordings on that it'd be cool to copy from the HDD without the reencoding to DVD. I shall certainly investigate ISOBuster as you suggest!