Copying Dishnetwork DVR video's to PC

[Rusty Heap]

I'm curious if anyone has been able to get DVR files off a Dishnetwork DVR recorder onto a PC for viewing/archieving without streaming / playing them real time and doing a capture that way?

1st Scenerio:

I've got a 10-12 year old Dishnetwork DVR, one of thier first, not even HDTV, just SD. I was going to toss it in the garbage but was curious as to even what recordings I might still have on it. So I was going to just pull the hard drive and install in a PC.


Doing some Goggle Searching, red flags come up about copy protection, proprietary formats that Linux based, and pointed me to several Yahoo chat groups called DishRip.

Anyone tried this?

2nd Scenario:

On a newer "in kitchen use" a Dish Receiver that has HDTV recordings, Talking to the dish phone tech rep, they want you to get a whole new 120VAC powered external hard drive, hook it up to the Receivers USB port, and it formats the hard-drive (into a linux format?) then you can use this external hard-drive as an external back-up or data library, but it'll only play back on a dishreceiver (not sure if you can even move the external hard-drive between dish receivers........)

So I totally understand copywrite issues and legal restrictions of digitized versions of Dish Broadcast shows, but what is the easiest way for me to grab shows of my old ancient SD recorded disk before I toss it, as well as copy off the HDTV DVR without just playing the show real time?

PM me if you want. THANKS

[intakexhaust]

Do you know what type or file extensions are? I've never tried anything off of a DVR but had great use of MediaMax 123 and RealPlayer SP for most conversions.