Hard drive from one HDR into another - recordings won't play

neutrino

New Member
Hi,
I'm new to posting on sites so here goes.
I had an HDR that developed the intermittent not responding to the remote fault. Tried everything, whilst communicating with Humax support who were jolly good, in the end Humax replaced the HDR.
So I removed the custom firmware, restoring the box to factory including taking the 1TB hard drive out with all it's content still intact and putting the 500GB pipeline back in.

The machine was swapped out and the new one works fine. So I have just put the 1TB drive in the new machine but most of the recording refuse to play with the message "The channel is scrambled or not available".
Recording that I had copied off the previous machine onto a usb drive and back onto this new machine seem to work fine.
The recordings that won't play are not HD and when I browse the recordings in webif with the custom firmware they have the green "Dec" (decrypted) icon and "SD".
I am puzzled! Anyone got suggestions, or better anyone know why this isn't working?
Thanks
 
Well, you seem to have understood the encryption issues... Only thing I can think of off the top of my head: are you sure these recordings played on the original machine? A user on the other forum discovered he had corrupted recordings because of signal problems.
 
Well, you seem to have understood the encryption issues... Only thing I can think of off the top of my head: are you sure these recordings played on the original machine? A user on the other forum discovered he had corrupted recordings because of signal problems.

I can't guarantee they all did but I all the recording I have tried to play used to play on the previous machine.

Not that I believed these would make a difference but hey when you don't understand all details trying things is a way you might learn more -
- I tried copying a recording off to a usb drive and play it from there but same thing happens.
- I tried to play a couple of these recording with the standard firmware, as the new HDR was delivered, they failed so I loaded the custom firmware still no joy.

the loader version of the previous machine was 7.30 this machine has 7.33
I had 1.14 custom firmware loaded on the old machine and 1.15 on the new machine
but I am not sure either of these things would have this effect.
 
This is worrying. The message is typical of a recording that has not been decrypted for playback on a different machine. It would also be typical of a decrypted recording that the machine thought was encrypted, but neither of those seem to apply.
 
I had an HDR that developed the intermittent not responding to the remote fault. . .

You don't describe any action that was taken on the original Humax to decrypt the non-playing files, as you probably know SD and Hi-Def files are encrypted, the only playable files were decrypted when copied to USB, the remainder will remain encrypted unless they were copied to a virtual drive, or decrypted using the Web-If options. This doesn't explain why the files have a 'DEC' flag against them, but even so my guess is they were never decrypted and they won't be decrypted by the new Humax
 
DEC's a flag in the .hmt too. Actually the icon is shown if the flag is unset so we have had problems in the past with the icon showing in error although that was on NTFS and has been long resolved.
 
In that case, presuming neutrino has got his processes correct, it appears that the .hmt is somehow corrupt which may well influence the way the Humax attempts to play the .ts.

neutrino: you could try playing a copy of the offending .ts using VLC, Splash Lite, XBMC etc, on a PC and this checking whether it really is decrypted. We need some test results to get to the bottom of this.
 
Hi, back from work!

I have been puzzling over this all day and realised I had based comments on the DEC flag on too small a sample size, in fact one file that would not play.
I have just checked the flags on lots of other files and I have a mix of decrypted and encrypted files.
The encrypted files will not play, so with adequate data for you guys not too much of a puzzle or worry, these were encrypted on a different machine so won't play on this one.

I have only had a quick look so far and the one file i was trying originally does show a decrypted flag but will not play but this is the file I started with and before checking the flag I had already copied it onto a usb drive and back again, it won't play so must be encrypted despite what the flag indicates so presumably the hmt file is "confused".
I will try to play this file as you suggest to see if it is actually encrypted but I suspect it is.

I did have unencrypt loaded on the previous machine as I do on the new machine.
I assume it's not going to be able to decrypt the files that were encrypted on the previous machine because it does not have the correct key.

Not sure why I have the mix of encrypted and decrypted files, some of the decrypted files will be because I copied them off the original HDR hard drive to a usb drive then back onto the 1TB that I installed to replaced the original hard drive.

Not sure how unencrypt works as the rest of the files I have a mix of encrypted and decrypted, can anyone tell me please,
but bottom line is I should have checked encryption flags before I took the drive out and sent the original HDR back to Humax for replacement.
Also embarrassingly I am IT Infrastructure Technical Architect and know I should have backed up the data and checked the backup before taking the drive out and replacing the HDR, I even had an empty 1.5TB drive in a caddy ready to copy all the data to then forgot/ran out of time/didn't bother!
 
Thanks people, hope I didn't waste too much of your time.

Thanks also for the link which explains why only some files were decrypted by unencrypt, though it was installed for quite a while there would not have been enough opportunities with the HDR out of standby between 1 and 6am for it to decrypt all files .

The file with the decrypted flag that will not play on the HDR won't play in VLC or MPEG streamclip so as assumed it seems to still be encrypted.
 
Don't know if you guys are still watching this thread but
something you might be interested in
I removed Unencrypt and set recursive decryption from the top of the Video directory in Web-if
it then trundled it's way through all the recordings overnight before before I had a chance to delete all the encrypted files left that the previous machine had created.

the auto decrypt has successfully marked all files as decrypted even though it has not been able to decrypt them (they do not play)
 
For the decryption process to complete the Humax must have served a file via DLNA. Presumably it just modified each block of the file with its own internal encryption key resulting in an even more garbled file.
Given that the file was served and ended up being the right size, there's no way the automatic decryption process could have known that it wasn't a decrypted copy of the original file.
 
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