A new one on me! PVR palaver!

[SpuffMonkey]

I was visiting my elderly uncle today, and he said that his Humax PVR had stopped working with an "No signal" error and he had called a TV aerial repair firm. I was just about to stir myself into action to try and save him the call out fee when the doorbell rang.

Lo, it was the said aerial guy, so since the fee was spent, I let him sort it.

I watched him pull the cables out of the PVR and as the aerial cable was removed, I little pool of water formed!

"Ah" he says, so I ask what's going on, and he says the coax cover has been breached probably up on the roof and rain water is flowing down through the cable, apparently he sees it fairly often.

He pulls the cable down and sure enough the where it looped over the roof edge, it was completely abraided.

I've never seen anything like that before - I've seen plenty of knackered cables, but never where water has travelled down it!

Still, you live and learn. Sadly it had knackered the PVR too - so replacing that will be my next job, along with trying to transfer his extensive collection of recordered classical music concerts

[mikeprice]

Hmmmm - recovering the recordings from the old system may be a problem - maybe you could find an old second hand version of the same make and model???

 

if it will play via a SCART connection it may be possible to transfer them to PC formats - with some loss in quality - including the sound - which may be a problem with music

 

if takign the disk out and connecting it to a PC and being able to see and use the files - actually works then I would be amazed - tried it with 2 systems - no luck

[MrEprise]

I've never seen anything like that before - I've seen plenty of knackered cables, but never where water has travelled down it!

 

We've only ever had 1 ethernet cable like that and when we started tracing where the cable ran, we found part of it ran across a flat roof where part of it ran next to a Seagull nest.

 

Found they had been pecking away at that while building their nest and of course whenever it rained, water would find its way into the cable at that point in the run.

[MatthewL]

Isn't it for this reason why a look up put in before it enters the wall if running the cable down so water wouldn't do this? It's what I was always taught.

[Meldrew]

Isn't it for this reason why a look up put in before it enters the wall if running the cable down so water wouldn't do this? It's what I was always taught.

 

I think aerial co-ax would allow the water to travel upwards via capillary action.

 

Regarding recovering the recordings, certainly the older Humax boxes have an odd format on their HDD. There used to be a utility however that could read the format and allow the recordings to be copied off as .ts format, which you can then re-encode into something that is a more common file format.

[southhamster]

Just seen a Humax Pvr 9300t in a charity shop for £35! If you can find one that cheap try a disk swap and sorted. Coax is terrible for water as there's often air gaps round the core which is perfect for channeling water....I'm guessing the 12v DC phantom power on the aerial lead is great for electrolysis corrosion too!

[mavhc]

TS is just Mpeg 2/4 in another container, easy to convert without quality loss.

[SpuffMonkey]

TS is just Mpeg 2/4 in another container, easy to convert without quality loss.

 

Yeah, from what I read, they are encrypted on these boxes, irritatingly!

[mavhc]

Who knew that DRM was bad for users.

 

Problem is the encryption key is in the box, and that's kinda bad if the box is dead

[robyholmes]

My understanding was only HD footage was encrypted but its a long while since I looked in to it.

[mavhc]

Says both are, but if you export to an external drive via the box's own interface, it decrypts it. There's a hack to ftp a file off, change a byte so it says it's not hd, ftp it back, and then export hd.

 

This is why you should only use open source software.

[Sonic007]

Sounds like BS to me. I even saw a scam like this on TV once where they poured a bit of cola on there to say it was coroded.

[mikeprice]

Sounds like BS to me. I even saw a scam like this on TV once where they poured a bit of cola on there to say it was coroded.

 

I've had teachers that do that with most of the inside of the computer

 

jus' sayin'

[southhamster]

I've had teachers that do that with most of the inside of the computer

 

jus' sayin'

Ours prefer to use wine. ...

[Zammo]

Sounds like BS to me. I even saw a scam like this on TV once where they poured a bit of cola on there to say it was coroded.

 

Didn't you read the bit where the OP said he saw the water, the cable damage and the dead PVR himself?

[bald_pig]

Didn't you read the bit where the OP said he saw the water, the cable damage and the dead PVR himself?

Don't let logic get in the way of a conspiracy! Clearly the engineer was a master of sleight-of-hand and planted the evidence!

[Andrew_C]

I had an old recorder and thought I'd stick a larger disk in. Well, it worked after a fashion, immediately formatted the disk to the same size as the old one. Booo! Put old disk back in, it re-formatted that too, wiping the things I wanted to save. ++Booo!

 

Take care...

[mavhc]

Easier to build your own, plus the you can record all channels at once, re-encode them to h265, and then fit loads more in.