After blogging about the Bell Expressvu 9241 / 9242 HD PVR Plus receivers and the Bell Expressvu 6141 HD Receiver with external hard drive, many people have been emailing me and asking the same question – ”Can I copy the movies from my PVR to my computer and watch them?”
Well, that’s a 2 part question and there are actually 2 answers. From what I have experimented with, yes you can copy the files to your computer system but no, you cannot watch them on your computer system or burn them on a DVD and watch them later.
The external hard drives that you attach to your Bell Expressvu receivers will be formatted by the receiver. The format is not directly compatible with Windows. The external hard disk drives on the Expressvu PVRs is actually formatted in EXT3 format – which means they can be read by systems with Linux. I have successfully copy the files from an external hard drive I had attached to my Bell Expressvu 6141 HD Receiver and move it to my Windows XP computer system. However, the file type was not recognized and could not be played in any media player that I had.
It is apparent that files copied from the Bell Expressvu PVR are in MPEG format, but they are obviously encrypted and require the receiver to play back.
If anyone has any tips, I would greatly appreciate hearing them.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi – I’ve successfully “copied” recordings from my Bell Expressvu receiver to my computer and even transferred them to DVD. It’s not the simplest of processes, but it is possible. I connected my receiver to my Canon GL2 camcorder “in” ports and recorded the desired program to a digital tape in the camcorder. From there I downloaded the camcorder’s tape into a cheap movie editing program on my computer by means of the editing program’s “capture” button. I opened up the capture for editing and added a “menu” in preparation for transfer to a DVD. In fact, this menu had only one clickable option and that was the project I was going to transfer…but I added the menu because I knew of no other way to get the copied program to play once it was on the DVD and in the DVD player. It all worked perfectly!
The nice part of intermediately transfering from the camcorder into a movie program provides you the opportunity to “edit” out commercials or any other undesirable parts of the recording. You can also adjust things like colour and contrast. It certainly yielded me great results!
Capture cards are a sure-shot solution when video data can’t be transferred from a device to a PC. No matter what the Device!
Local video equipment shops will have a wide range of capture cards. Good ones running from $100+. Find one with HDMI or at least component-IN. Then simply playback the content into the card while it captures it on your PC. File sizes will be huge so you’ll want to re encode the content with x264 or DiVX. With a good 2-pass x264 re encode the quality will be very close to original!
I would be really interested to know if a software permits us to copy from the external drive to our laptop, or at least gives us the opportunity to carry the external drive and play on a laptop via USB
Please keep me posted!
Is there a way to reformat (under Windows) the external drive that has been formated with the Bell receiver?
I need help fast!!!
William – Attach to your Windows computer, open Disk Manager, you will see the drives that don’t show in Windows explorer. From there you can reformat or do whatever needs to be done, but you will lose all the data on them, including any recorded shows and you will need to set it up again if you want to use it as a pvr.
Hey Chris great job!
i had the same problem and had to use disk partition to clean the disk first-if you are still having a problem mail me and ill send u instructions
I used to do this with my FTA receiver, I woudl take the external HD which was formatted with EXT2 I think, then I woudl run a program on my winxp / vista machine that woudl allow me to read this.
I think the program was called. Ext2Fsd I could then copy it to the computer HD, Then I used a program called videoredo which could read the files when the video was loaded, I could then remove the commercials with this program in 1 click, then save as Mpeg. Worked great a bit tedious but it did work. I haven’t tried this with my bell PVR i dont’ know if I can read EXT3 but I will try this week and report back.
Yes Chris. Ext3 and Ext2 are basically the same thing and both will be read with Ext2fsd. The problem is I can’t recognize the file format. It is not a known format to me. I have seen TS, TRP etc with my FTA Receiver but none of those are on that HDD.
Still digging though. I am itching to find an answer to this.
Hi,
My Bell HD Receiver wants to re-format my external hardrive, which will cause all data to be lost.
Can I copy the data to my mac computer, reformat the external hardrive, and copy it back to the external hardrive and watch it through ‘My PVR’ on Bell ExpressVu?
Thanks a million.
help !
i need to copy my picture folders to a HD which is formatted by bellexpresvu as pvr , but when i connect the drive with my pc as USB external its not reading it ,is there any way that i could copy my picture files as well as keep the drive in use with bell HD receiver , pl if anyone can help me , thanks
Won’t be as easy as you think unless you know Linux or have EXT3 extensions installed on your PC. This is how the drive gets formatted by the receiver. Plugging it into a computer now will require you to format it under Windows.
Barry,
I want to format a hard drive that I had been using with BEV
but Windows XP doesn’t give me a format option in the drive properties. Is there a way around this?
Why do you find disk manager on Windows XP?
I seem not to be able to see my external hard drive when connecting to the PC from the Bell receiver. I want to format it back so that I can use the HDD again versus having it as a PVR.
Please help!