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Playback stopped - "This channel is scrambled or unavailable"

R

rafletcher

Member
Was watching the playback of a recording last night, when suddenly (how else lol) I got the "This channel is scrambled or unavailable). This was maybe 15 minutes into playback. I stopped the playback, and re-started it (resume playback), no good, same issue. I stopped playback and went to the beginning - and had the same message, whereas earlier that part had played. Hmmm. Tried a manual recording of another programme that was broadcasting at that time - recording failed. Turned the box off (at the mains) and on again. Hey presto the original programme playback worked again, all the way through (well to the point I'd turned the mains off). Subsequent programmes seem to have recorded successfully and playback appears to work (I've only checked the first few minutes of subsequent recordings so far)

Glitch or incipient failure?
 
This sounds like a "lost keys" scenario. Further investigation would have been welcome before you rebooted, but it's too late now. The hypothesis is that the HDR-FOX (and presumably HD-FOX) is capable of (on rare occasions) corrupting its encryption key (which is also the decryption key if the encryption is symmetric). A cold boot reloads the key into the encryption unit from the serial boot PROM.

If this hypothesis is correct:
  • Undecrypted recordings being played after the key is corrupted will not play until the unit is rebooted;
  • Recordings made after the corruption will not play after a reboot (and cannot ever be recovered).
 
Thanks for that. The immediate reboot was done to make sure we captured a couple of recordings later that evening (though in retrospect we could have used iPlayer for that!). I'll keep an eye on it, and hope that it's not a HDD issue developing. I may in any event get a new box for Christmas, and keep this one as a backup. It's had a couple of other minor glitches too - freezing whilst browsing the media library for instance, which also needed a cold boot to reset.
 
Well it was something.... Did it again on Friday. Playback stopped, unable to play any previous recordings, and a current recording halted at that point. Did a cold reboot and working agin. Copied recordings to external drive - but it hung several times doing that, and as a result I lost my recordings of Utopia - box thought it had copied them so wouldn't allow a "second" copy. Now cleaned, formatted and replaced with a 2000T!
 
I don't understand the copying problem. Without custom firmware, the box can limit the number of copies of high def. recordings, but this does not apply to standard def. content. If you copied high def. programmes to a USB drive without the use of CFW deprotection, or without using Foxy first, they would still be encrypted and thus unplayable on any other device.
 
Well nearly all my recordings are HD and I just use the inbuilt copy command to move them to an external drive, formatted using the Hummy, and they play perfectly well.
 
Do you use Foxy to modify the HMT files first, or do you have the custom firmware installed with the auto-unprotect package? If not, the copied high def. content will play fine on the original HDR-FOX it was recorded on, but not on any other device.
 
I haven't used any custom software, so I've kept the original box handy to play back the recordings I moved off its hard drive. Messy maybe but I wanted a reliable box for future recordings.
 
I see that using Foxy I can attach the USB drive to my PC and decrpypt the recordings so as to make them playable on the new machine, so that's what I shall do. Question is where do I download Foxy from?

Edit - found it.
 
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If you are saying that using foxy will allow you to decrypt the files on your PC (which is how you comment seems to read), then I believe you have misinterpreted something.
Using foxy only tells the Hummy that the recording is available for decryption.
The Specific Hummy is the only box that can actually carry out this decryption.
This is achieved by getting the Hummy to copy the recording to an attached USB.

It can also be achieved by the DLNA server on the Hummy, you can use a PC to capture said DLNA stream.
On the HDR Fox T2, the Custom Firmware can also decrypt the recording, but again it is the Hummy that actually performs the decryption.

You cannot pull the recording from the Hummy to a PC via FTP (for instance) and then decrypt it.
 
A moot point as my pc doesn't see the USB drive I've used, so I can't even try Foxy! Ah well just have to swap boxes to play the old recordings :-)
 
Have you tried using ftp to pull the hot file directly onto the PC.
You can then foxy it and use ftp to put it back.
 
In the end I did what should have been obvious from the outset... I connected the T2 to a spare HDMI input on the TV so I can just play back over it until I've depleted all my recordings. At least if it stops for any reason now it won't affect recordings ('cos they'll be on the new 2000T) and a cold boot will solve the problem.
 
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