Humax Freesat HD recording and cross box compatibility.

October 28, 2017 3:36 PM

I have a Humax Freesat HD HB-1000S box with an HDD plugged into it. When the HDD is full I'd rather like to simply plug it into a different box and then continue recording on the current one which has the satellite signal plugged in. But the idea of spending £100 just to do this is unjustifiable. But older, different models, like the YouView branded item are available in the used market at much cheaper prices. I was wondering if plugging this HD into one of those would allow me to watch the contents? In other words do all the boxes uses the same file format?
posted by feelinglistless to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

Here is a page which talks about how to perform this type of operation on an earlier Humax box. I mention this to give an idea about how technically deep in the weeds any possible fix for your HD HB-1000S box might be. Humax are quite at liberty to change their disk encryption rules from one box to another - these things tend to become more elaborate over time (which means that reverting to an older model will be unlikely to work) and it is fairly unlikely you will find any proper documentation of them.

But you might conceivably be able to buy a higher capacity HDD, clone the existing disk from the Humax machine, expand the cloned image to the higher capacity disk and then re-insert the cloned but expanded disk in your original machine. If this did not work then you could swap back your original disk and re-use the new HDD for something else.
posted by rongorongo at 11:26 PM on October 28, 2017