Tata SKY+ New DVR STB split wide open (The inside with photos :)

Well its a sturday and I didnt really have anything else today , woke up at 6am and there was no electricity , so I decided it was time to use the new Tata Sky + DVR STB in a diffrent way 😀.

So I decided to open it up to see what they have hidden inside , what kinda upgrade we can try ourselfs to get more recording time , can we transffer the recorded videos to a PC ....and guys the answers were all positive!!!

Opening the Tata sky STB is one of the easiest experiments I have ever done (this may vary from person to person , opening your STB up causes your warranty to be void , so please do this at your own risk - this is not my responsibility nor is it the forums , but all I can say is its very hard to do something wrong and mess it up ) .

Opened up the 5 screws of the STB , one on each side and 3 at the back of the stb , this causes the upper lid of the STB to slide off , so once the screws are removed just gently slide the top of the STB open.


The HDD imaged :

Sitting right in the middle of the board is the Broadcom chip :
The big broadcom chips is a :
BCM7453TKPB10G
UN0829P31
881512U3




Just above the HDD enclosure is the processor used by the STB :
I didnt open this up to see what they are using here (this is for another experiment another day.

A closer look at the HDD Area :



The HYNIX Chips (these are the memory modules on board ) :

HYNIX -830A
HY5DU561622FTP-D43

The Dual tuner and another broadcom chip :


Broadcom chip details :
BCM4506KQLEG
CN0834 P11
8884213

HDD removed : WD 1600AVJS -63wna0







The good thing is its a regular SATA Desktop (not laptop) HDD.
It Can easily be replaced with another HDD say a 500 GB increasing your recording capacity by 3.5 times 🙂.

To see if this is possible connected this HDD to my PC :
Vola.... The file format is FAT 32 !!! so what you would ideally need to do is
Buy a new SATA - Desktop HDD - create one big partition and format it in FAT 32 and then connect it to the STB and it should simply work (I havent tried this yet , but will do it next week , but i dont have any doubts it will just work).

The good thing is in case you have recorded something important and you need to transffer to the PC you can do it this way (since the file system is FAT 32!!

Screen shots of the HDD connected to my PC :




After all this o just put back everything to gether , and switch on the STB and well everything just worked like nothing happened 🙂
Feedback appriciated!

thanks for ur efforts . U are great...

Excellent work :thumbsup:. Isn't there supposed to be a 4 Gb limit to fat32?Also any idea what file format is used to capture the recording? Could u upload a 5 minute recording here please?

Yeah will work on the 5 minute recoding (may not be possible today , dad just chased me off from the TV area : he wants to watch the match).Yes FAT 32 will have a 4 GB limit but the DVR will split the recorded files into multiple parts for senarios where recording is scheduled for long hours. I Should have first recorded something and then removed the HDD in the first place but there was no electricity at the time when i started opening up the STB :wall:

gr8 work chetan....😀..

Thanks for this valuable information 🙂

gr8 work keep us updated on the format of file and if it works on comp

.........class act cheta......keep it up !!!!! .....many will afraid to open their STB.... hats off to you !!!!!!

Thanks for the information ... 😀

Great work there! Really appreciated. Now a few more questions.1. Did you notice the network controller chip? What make/model?2. What about the USB controller?3. Need you to record something for about 2-5 hours and check the files on the computer using some codec information tool. Will give us an idea about the encoding and bitrate.With this information, I am sure someone can come up with a hack to either connect this to a network or to use some kind of an e-sata cable to directly use the recordings on the computer.Great work nonetheless. Keep it up.

Alright tried to get a 5 minute recording off the HDD and I couldnt copy the files !
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/5692/wd3zn1.jpg

In the above screen shot the recorded file is stream.str ! all other files in the above screen shot copied except stream.str , this was a 6 minute recording and the file size was 122 MB .
I couldnt open this file with any of the media players either....

Some sort of write protection!

So looks like if you want to upgrade you just cannot get a new HDD and add it you will mostly have to first use norton ghost and ghost the original HDD to the new HDD then it may work (planning this experiment for next week.

I did try connecting my 120 GBG hdd and when I switch on STB no channles showed up.

So hold on for the next few days ill try to see what exactly we would need to do to upgrade the HDDs and copy recorded content.

Upgrading HDD may work but copying the recorded content may not !
R15: Need to copy/transfer saved videos/movies - DBSTalk.Com

Frojm a user on the above site ".STR files are encrypted on the hard drive, and the only way to de-crypt them is with the original DVR and access card they were recorded on. There is absolutely no way to retrieve or recover them as a computer file"

Great work! I really appreciate this effort 🙂

Great effort.. Keep it up... one doubt.. If we pause the live tv, then how the Time will be adjusted ? it ll be running delayed only right...

Great post!But the .str files are copy protected? 😱Keep experimenting man! Let's hack the hell out of this damn DVR. 😎

chetan. try this fast and let me know! if this plays the str file!
PSMplay - Playstation Utility in General Category - Zophar's Domain

GREAT Playstation utility that plays .str and .xa files, and can also view .tim files. This utility can also convert the movies to either AVI's, or the sound output to .WAV's