The Faffiest Way To Get At Your PVR Content – But At Least It Works
Our Humax 9200 is far from being full on the 160Gb disk that it holds, however, the Library function doesn’t make for an easy read through pages of Bob The Builder episodes. The request was made to sort out getting content off the PVR and on to a spare disk attached to a Mac.
Luckily, the 9200T has a USB 2.0 connector on the front of it that is normally used to shove mp3s and pictures down the line to it from your PC – and therein lies the problem. To date, Humax have a somewhat limited (read non-existant) support profile for Mac users, and so whilst PC users have had some success in getting hold of Humax MPEG TS files, Mac users have been left wanting.
A groundswell of support for Mac software started out earlier in 2006 on the DigitalSpy forums, which has resulted in the release of HumaxGUI for Mac. the Universal binary is a QT-based application (with QT bindings already compiled in, so no need to compile QT for OS X, thankfully).
The GUI allows you to connect via USB to your Humax 9200 and see the contents of D1 (MP3s/Pictures) and D2 (MPEG TS Video files), working like a standard FTP client. Hoorah! The downside at the moment is that the transfer rate is pretty slow. My current transfers are running through at about 1Mb/sec and require the PVR to be in standby – but I guess it’s a start. Perhaps it’s something to do overnight when there’s nothing worth recording.
Anyway, after moving files across to your Mac, you may want to take a look at them / play back or even output to DVD for long-term storage. Quicktime won’t play the TS files as they stand, so you’ll have to grab a copy of VLC for OS X if you just want ot play them back.
The next step of shifting the data out to DVD is a little more involved. None of the likely DVD burning tools you can think of will do anything with the TS files, and so you’ll need to transcode them in to something else. I initially tried VLC to do this, but failed miserably and failed to take into account the warning that file-to-file transcoding isn’t VLC’s speciality. A little more reading led me to ProjectX – a java Demux application that runs happily on OS X and is available on Sourceforge.
ProjectX allows you to edit the TS files to add start/stop clips and chapter bookmarks – pretty handy when you don’t want the links between programmes that the Freeview EPG tends to record. Output is available in a number of formats, but for this HOWTO, I’ve stuck to m2p (mpeg2) format.
So far it looks as though Roxio Popcorn is out for burning to DVD, but the full Toast Titanium is happy to play along and compress multiple files to a single layer DVD.
More anon.
December 28th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
[...] I think I made the right choice – on the downside, I can see why they it the ‘Hummy’ – it hums! I know two people who have them and I never noticed it before, but the fan is a bit louder than I’d hoped. On the plus side, it was a doddle to set up and use. Within no time I was watching back a programme that was still showing from the start, whilst recording another. And it felt good. I felt smug. Of course, I couldn’t resist a fiddle. I’d heard Mac software for getting stuff off the Humax was about and this blog got me started. It seems to work – at least on a short clip – but it’s insanely slow, though – but that’s true of the Topfield as well. And even before I bought it, I’d decided that what gets recorded on the box, stays on the box… [...]
January 1st, 2007 at 2:07 pm
The Hummy is pretty noisy at times – particularly when you’re trying to snooze in the lounge in the wee small hours. That said, it’s almost always less noisy than the children being entertained by it, and also serves to drown out the noise of the Lacie disk and Mac Mini under the TV – so it’s not that much of a problem. It is also incredibly slow in file transfer across the USB 2.0 connection, but then I get around this by running a transfer overnight when I’m not likely to be recording anything with the PVR.
January 7th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Thank you for posting this. I’ve had a Hummy for about a year and have finally been able to retrieve a live David Gilmour session I had recorded in May… now in iTunes and I am happy! Thank you for sorting out a problem that never should have existed, really…
Maybe I’m deaf, but I think the Hummy is almost silent!!
January 8th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Glad it was of some use. I’ve managed to get all the kids stuff off on to USB2.0 storage hooked up to the TV, so I’m happy too – as it’s suprisingly annoying having 100+ episodes of Bob the Builder to scroll through in the Library.
On the humming from the Humax, it doesn’t help that it’s sat on solid Oak
– or it could be tinnitus.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Yes the point about kids’ stuff clogging it up is a good one; my eldest (7) has now got the hang of recording live TV and scheduling stuff to record, so it’s full of Yu-gi-oh GX!
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I am a Canadian coustumer with the Humax 9200 by Bell Expressvu and a Mac user (G5 iMac). Bell and the user manuel of the 9200 says that the USB port is for future use (firmware?) in Canada. Is it possible to connect an external HD to the USB port on the 9200 to download recordings; how do I use the HumaxGui application in the process?
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:30 pm
I haven’t actually tried hanging a USB 2.0 disk off the Humax to be honest, but I think it probably wouldn’t achieve very much. The interface would work OK, but the firmware with the 9200 doesn’t actually provide you with any option to backup/restore from/to another USB device.
Actually, looking a bit further in to this it seems that the 9200 being bundled by Bell is actually an entirely different model to the 9200 sold directly by Humax in the UK/Europe. you have the added advantage of twin HD tuners and a satellite service (I think), and we have plain old standard definition and Terrestrial digital broadcast signals (for now – until Analogue is switched off).
From what I’ve read, the USB port on your 9200 is for use with PocketDish devices in the near future – so I guess that’s basically a USB disk
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
I have 9200c. Should be the same as a 9200t, except it’s voor digital cable. The HumaxGUI doesn’t seem to work for that. Any ideas?
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 am
I think that there are fairly significant differences between the 9200t and 9200c hardware. As far as I’m aware, the ‘t’ is used to denote DVB-T (terrestrial), and the ‘c’ for DVB-C (cable). Each uses significantly different frequencies and modulation – thus proving that:
All Standards Are Created Equal – But Some Are More Equal Than Others.
I suspect there’s a slightly different software implementation on the 9200c. Did you get a Windows application with the unit to allow file transfer? When I get a second, I’ll have a dig about and see what I can find.
As an aside, if I were Humax I’d be making sure that I was abstracting I/O and Interface development away from the hardware engineering to keep a common platform across the products, but I guess that’s easier to do on paper (or blog).
I’d happily go out for a pint with them if they wanted to discuss it – still very pleased with my 9200t.