Flipping bits in an undocumented, proprietary, and mostly hidden file is intrinsically unsafe. This tool comes with NO WARRANTY and may cause damage including (but not limited to) making a file unreadable, locking your PVR, bricking your PVR, setting your PVR on fire, or turning your PVR into an artificial intelligence bent on world destruction. And it would be your fault!
Use this tool at your own risk.
I've got a Humax HDR FOX T2 PVR, and I'd like to be able to easily download programs from it, since its only (only!) got 1TB of space.
There are three ways to get files off the T2. It has an FTP server, it is a Upnp server, and you can copy to a USB stick.
None of these three ways is satisfactory on its own, due to weird copy protection rules. However, other people have done the research to fix most of these problems.
The device can record in standard and high definition. Standard def files are easy, just connect to the DLNA server and download them. High Def is harder, you need to connect to the FTP server download a file, flip a couple of bits and re-upload the file. This marks the file as exportable, and you can then copy it onto an external USB drive.
This tool automates a bunch of the process. It provides a view of the files available on the device, and you can queue and download standard definition files directly. It will also flip the appropriate bits to allow downloading of HD files to USB.
At the moment, its clone the repo, build with maven and then run. My husband's PC runs Windows, and he doesn't quite understand jar files, so I use Launch4j to hide the jar in an exe.
I'm looking into Windows Installers, updates may follow.
Run the jar or the exe, and a window will open. The program will poke around your local network to find your Humax. Assuming it can find one, it will connect to the Upnp service and the FTP service (using the default '0000' password) and scan for files.
When the list of files has been built, you can right click on a file to queue it, or to remove the copy protection flag.
The maven build information stuff is availible on github pages.
Upnp supoprt is provided by the Cling library.
FTP support is provided by the Apache Commons net library.
I'm using Joda Time for some date related stuff
My code is released under the MIT licence. The various libraries have their own licences.