A method for saving HiDef recordings on the 5000T (Difficult)

Black Hole said:
If the .hjm is indeed encrypted, there is no progress that could be made until a means is found to decrypt it
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Could be the same method and key as the recording itself. Unfortunately I never did find the key to the 2000T so I’m highly unlikely to get anywhere with the 5000T. Yes I did try the MAC address/ serial number combination on both and got nowhere.
 
EEPhil said:
I suspect the .hjm is a JSON file describing a class/structure "hjm" in a programming language.
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You edited that in after I'd read the other bit of the message, so I hadn't see it when I then wrote that. I thought I was going senile for a minute...
At least we both think the same thing.
 
This post is “looking the gift horse in the mouth” (proverbially speaking) but I am obviously missing something in the instructions because I have had zero success creating a working drive from a Windows PC. In case it is relevant :-
Model Name : FVP-5000T
Software Version : UKTFAE 1.03.53
Loader Version : UKTFAE 1.06
Software Build Date : 13 JAN 2021

I have managed the method. I started by formatting a drive on the PC and recording a short “donor” program (local news is 5 minutes at certain times of day). I then copied it to the drive. I could then insert and remove the drive and both devices on STORAGE says Internal HDD. After inserting the drive into the PC, closing the file window and ejecting the drive the subsequent times the second device in STORAGE changes from Internal HDD to Dev01_00. Deleting the .ts file and coping another file in it’s place and it no longer shows up in STORAGE. However if Windows says you are replacing the file, the drive still shows up and I can use the method. I even tried copying all the files from a working drive to a freshly formatted one with no success.

The method in the post for creating the drive is easier but I can’t get it to work. I must be missing something important. Any suggestions will be welcomed.

Please note that it is not my device. I have FTP access 24/7 but physical access is approximately three quarters of an hour on a Sunday.
 
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EEPhil said “I suspect the .hjm is a JSON file describing a class/structure "hjm" in a programming language.”. I don’t think the j represents json. Wikipedia says “Humax is a consumer electronics company. Founded in South Korea in 1989, it manufactures set-top boxes, digital video recorders and other consumer electronics. It is publicly traded on KOSDAQ.” and the Korean word I thought of makes nts roughly translate to “index of ts file”. Using the same logic on the hj* files leads me to believe I remember the file format :-
{"<structure name>":"<preamble><data>"}
, where non-printable bytes were represented by the escape sequence %nn, where nn is a 2 digit hexadecimal number with the alphas in upper case. I remember using it because you could compile a program for the big endian mainframe and the little endian PCs and use it to transfer data bidirectionaly between the two. The preamble described the data structure in tearms of ‘symbols’ (not to be confused with the symbols used by ld and rtld) because the data was compressed to not contain any zero bytes.

If anybody reading this was programming at the time when mainframes and PCs overlap, can you remember the language? I remember getting a crash course in mixed language programming in order to make a program written in C perform the same trick.

Edit 24 April 2022: The language was PL/1. Looking through my stone tablets (sorry 5.25” disks) and I found the C wrappers and the 286 compilers. Dead end I’m afraid. 49/50 returned an error meaning corrupt file, the other one returned an error meaning bad compression!
 
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I will need to have a think about both the previous posts.
I was programming when mainframes (ICL 1900/2900/3900, DEC VAX) and PCs overlapped and have no idea what you are talking about!
 
Maybe he's talking about Intel Hex Download Format
We used to use it with EPROM programmers and the like (the challenge with all this guff was how short a time could you leave it in the cooker to guarantee complete erasure, having remembered to take the silver foil thingy off the window of course).
 
sceedy said:
but I am obviously missing something in the instructions because I have had zero success creating a working drive from a Windows PC.
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I am rather confused as to what you can and can’t do here.
  • Have you managed to save a playable HiDef file from the Humax to your PC?
  • Have you tried to format the external drive from the Humax?
  • Have you tried saving any StdDef programme from the Humax to the freshly formatted drive (connected to the USB port on the Humax).
  • When you plug the drive into the PC can you see the hidden folders ( those starting with a full stop)? Unfortunately if you can’t I don’t know how to get hidden folders to show up in modern versions of Windows - anyone else know?
As i probably pointed out at the start of this thread - you should be able to save HiDef files by this method. My strong advice is don’t if you can avoid it! If you have access to an earlier model ( Fox, 1800/2000T) use that for saving HiDef - it is much easier. Failing that save a StdDef version instead.
Realistically, this method should only be considered as an occasional way to save HiDef.
 
EEPhil said:
Unfortunately if you can’t I don’t know how to get hidden folders to show up in modern versions of Windows - anyone else know?
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It's only Linux which treats a dot prefix as "hidden". In the Windows world, "hidden" is a property bestowed by an attribute flag. Testing, I have been able to create and read dot-prefix folders in both Windows* and Linux (and switch between the two), in both FAT32 and NTFS.

In a file manager in Linux, the dot-prefix folders are only listed if I set to "show hidden files". Windows doesn't care, and only hides the folder if I set the hidden attribute.

* Win7. I see no reason more recent Windows should be any different.
 
I have been able to use your method to decrypt a Hi Def file.

My problem is that I failed to create a drive purely on Windows that allowed me to do the decryption (hence me saying that I must have missed something important in the instructions).

Instead I formatted a drive on Windows, moved it to the 5000T and copied a small SD file set onto it, moved it back to Windows to overwrite the .ts file and then continued as per your instructions.

I even copied every file from a drive that was working (i.e. showing up in STORAGE) to a freshly formatted drive but the second drive did not work.
 
Black Hole said:
It's only Linux which treats a dot prefix as "hidden"
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I thought that, but have a vague recollection of someone having a problem with such a file/folder being hidden in Windows. Hence my caution.
sceedy said:
My problem is that I failed to create a drive purely on Windows
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I’m still not sure what exactly you mean by create a drive. IF you mean the file structure then perhaps (probably) the folders need to be created from the command prompt. Again I seem to recall I may have come across problems trying to do this from the gui. (I’m not near my computer at the moment so can’t test this). From memory: ( drive on g: )
Code: 
G:
CD \
MD .recordings
Could do the trick.
 
EEPhil said:
I’m still not sure what exactly you mean by create a drive.
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Neither am I. In post 4 you describe the process as creating an NTFS file system (no problem) and three folders with names which happen to begin with dots (which I tested for post 29). Perhaps screedy is saying he did that but it was not sufficient, or maybe that he couldn't create the dot folders in Windows... it's not clear.
 
Black Hole said:
maybe that he couldn't create the dot folders in Windows
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I've never managed it using the stupid GUI. Attempts to create such a thing just results in an error box saying "You must type a file name."
They're stuck in their filename.ext mentality where filename can't be null. You can do it from the command line of course.
 
prpr said:
I've never managed it using the stupid GUI. Attempts to create such a thing just results in an error box saying "You must type a file name."
They're stuck in their filename.ext mentality where filename can't be null. You can do it from the command line of course.
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That does sound familiar.
 
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