Burning DVDs from recordings with SA Explorer 8300

fmuellerfmueller Auckland, NZ Icrontian
edited January 2007 in Internet & Media
My cable company recently upgraded me for free to digital service, and gave me a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 SD DVR - which I understand is a very common piece of equipment. Now I am wondering if I could access the HD in that box using a PC, and burn the recordings to DVD. Has anybody around here done that?

Comments

  • fmuellerfmueller Auckland, NZ Icrontian
    edited January 2007
    Apparently this isn't quite as easy as I had hoped. For those unaware of the issue, the SA Explorer 8300 is a cable box with DVR, which for example Time Warner puts into the homes of all its digital cable TV customers. The DVR allows you to pause and replay life TV and to store shows on the built-in HD of 80MB. However, once you filled the HD with your favorite shows and movies, you have to make the hard choice which ones to delete, because there is no way to burn these things on CD or DVD for long term storage.

    Well, theoretically you could store the movies on an external SATA HD - the Explorer 8300 has the necessary connections - and of course you could have several of these HDs, but that seems kinds expensive and inconvenient, and to play these movies you'd have to plug those drives back into the Explorer 8300.

    If you could access the built in HD in the Explorer 8300 using a PC, you could burn the movies to DVD and have greater portability. Rumor on the Internet has it that the Explorer 8300's OS is Linux based. I wonder how difficult it would be for somebody (a lot more computer savvy than myself) to develop software which would allow a PC to access this HD.

    Of course the whole issue opens a huge bag of copyright questions, but since when has that stopped anybody from developing software that would potentially be popular with gazillions of users?

    As an aside, Scientific Atlanta for one seems to believe that the DVD burning feature would be a hit, but their take on a solution of this problem seems to have never made it to the market: Scientific Atlanta MCP-100.

    I guess this is more a philosophical than a technical question, so wild speculations are particularly encouraged :bigggrin:
  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited January 2007
    You should check out the Explorer 8000 Yahoo group.
  • fmuellerfmueller Auckland, NZ Icrontian
    edited January 2007
    Thanks - didn't know there was such a thing!
  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited January 2007
    I found it because I was having serious issues with my Explorer 8000 when it first came out. And yes, the boxes do run Linux, but if it belongs to RR, I would stay away from tampering.

    By the way, I've seen a lot of people on that Yahoo group have success adding the external SATA drive to boost capacity.
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