re: new hard drive
Sunday, October 30, 2005 at 3:37 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Matthew D. Healy
(1255 messages posted)
To begin with, for us to offer any hope you must tell
us exactly which DVR this is.
However, the odds of success are not very good. If a
DVR manufacturer does not take steps to frustrate users
who wish to do what you describe, they are highly likely
to face lawsuits from movie studios whose lawyers are
intensely interested in protecting their copyrights.
I won't get into the complex legal and ethical issues around
intellectual property at this historic juncture, but operationally
this means the vast majority of DVRs use a number of tricks
to prevent what you want to do. They may have totally
non-standard file systems or file formats. They may employ
cryptographic scrambling algorithms. They may have special
hardware built into the disk controller to prevent it from
working correctly in a standard computer. They may employ
other tricks as well. In most cases, the only legal means
to learn the details of how a particular DVR formats the
content on the disk is to sign a non-disclosure agreement
before they will reveal anything.
Of course, there are people who devote considerable effort
and ingenuity to reverse-engineering the copyright protection
mechanisms. This has become something of a cat-and-mouse
game, with manufacturers changing their formats frequently
in an effort to stay ahead of those who reverse-engineer
their formats. Also, despite the NDAs, there will always be
leaks.
Web sites that host detailed information about all this tend
to come and go rapidly, because when major studios learn
of their existence they tend to point lawyers at the sites
and at the ISPs where they are hosted. Whatever the rights
and wrongs may be, the average ISP when it gets a letter
from a movie studio telling them "take down this web site
or we sue" is not likely to fight them.
On Thursday, October 27, 2005 at 11:43 pm, Jenny wrote:
>okay peeps i need ur help please.
>i have a dvr that i have taken the hard drive out of. i am attempting to connect
>it to my computer to get the movies that ive saved on it onto my computer for burning
>to dvd.
- Written in response to:
- new hard drive (Jenny: Thursday, October 27, 2005 at 11:43 pm)
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