Transfer Samsung TV Recordings to Computer

[Sobi]

How can I send recorded tv programs which have been saved into a usb disk to computer

 

[Fredrik]

I don't think you can. Windows can't read the file system. If you find software that can read the file system, you can copy the file to the computer, but you would still have to deal with encryption, DRM, and possibly other problems. (I knew about the file system issue, so I googled and found the claims about encryption and DRM here).

 

[Routaran]

Samsung smart TVs are running android, it's possible that the file system on the USB flash drive may have been changed to ext2 or ext4 in which case, you will have issues reading it on windows.
But most USB sticks are formatted to FAT32 out of the box. They should be readable in windows. I cannot see a good reason why the TV would format a USB flash drive to ext.

What do you see when you plug the USB drive into your computer?

 

[Fredrik]

Samsung smart TVs are running android, it's possible that the file system on the USB flash drive may have been changed to ext2 or ext4 in which case, you will have issues reading it on windows.
But most USB sticks are formatted to FAT32 out of the box. They should be readable in windows. I cannot see a good reason why the TV would format a USB flash drive to ext.

What do you see when you plug the USB drive into your computer?

According to Wikipedia, they're running a Linux distribution called Tizen OS. And according to the article I linked to in my previous post, the file system is XFS.

It's been a couple of years since I last tried recording to a USB drive, but I think the TV demanded that I let it format the drive before I record anything on it. Windows couldn't read anything off the drive after I had made the recording. I don't remember what happened when I plugged the USB drive into my computer, but I would guess that Windows just asked if I wanted to format the drive, since it couldn't read anything off it.

I don't know why they have chosen to do this. Maybe to make it more difficult to convert TV shows to a nice format and upload them to a torrent site?

The TV has no problems reading a drive formatted for FAT32 or NTFS.

 

[Routaran]

Then I guess it's time to download a live Linux distro, boot that up and see if there's anything on the flash drive.
Probably have to install a package for xfs support and then try to see if there's anything on that drive.

 

[Fredrik]

Then I guess it's time to download a live Linux distro, boot that up and see if there's anything on the flash drive.
Probably have to install a package for xfs support and then try to see if there's anything on that drive.

From the article I linked to in my first post:

Windows can read the contents of the drive with suitable software, but that wouldn’t solve the problem. Even if you could copy the recordings to your PC they would still be unreadable as they are encrypted. Whilst decryption is theoretically possible, they are further protected for Digital Rights Management (DRM) purposes.​

 

[Routaran]

Should have probably read that DRM link before posting lol