Mass Media & Technology

SKY Q USB ports question

Can I uses an external HDD (May 2019)

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HA
harshy Founding member
That’s Sky boxes for you, plug, play and view and everything else is crippled.
NL
Ne1L C
Sad but true.
ST
Ste Founding member
You might be able to copy recordings off the Sky Q drive onto your PC and then other an external hard drive for keeping. However if they are encrypted channels you cannot watch them without copying them back onto a drive and putting it into the Sky Q box.

http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk/ is the software to use but I don't know if it works with Sky Q, it works on Sky + but it depends if they have change the software and file types used.

EDIT according to a few posts on SkyUser, at least on the German Sky Q equivalent the file system format used is completely different to on Sky+HD so the above won't work.
Last edited by Ste on 7 May 2019 3:10pm
NG
noggin Founding member
Yep - Sky+ (non-Sky Q) boxes effectively record the stream as received directly to the hard drive without decrypting them.

If the broadcast is FTA (i.e. unencrypted) then it can be copied off and played on a PC or other platform if you have the right software and hardware and know what you are doing.

If the broadcast is encrypted (i.e. pay-TV or FTV) then the recording is encrypted. You can copy it off, but you won't be able to play it on another device, though can copy it back on at a later date.

It was possible to get Sky+HD boxes with eSATA ports to use eSATA hard drives IF you removed the internal hard drive ISTR, which made this a bit easier.

The Sky+/Sky+HD boxes decrypt on playback, not on recording, hence the recording on the disk remaining encrypted.

(When we replaced our Sky 1TB box with a 2TB box, I was able to copy recordings over so we didn't lose stuff we hadn't watched or wanted to keep. I also archived all the FTA recordings to a second HDD)

Sky Q includes a lot more functionality (including the ability to playback local recordings to iOS devices like iPads) which may change the way decryption is handled - but I suspect the 'on-disk' recording of encrypted content remains encrypted (there may just be more than one decryption path in the Sky Q box.)

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