PanHDD

Because there has brokem DVD drive in my Panasonic DMR-EX88 recorder, I wasn't able to get my recorded videos into PC. Unfortunately Panasonic uses special harddisk formatting with special records saving and this patent is very meticulously protected. I found the Stefan Haller's page with his great program dvr-recover written in multisystem programming language Python (it works in text mode) https://sites.google.com/site/haliner/dvr-recover. This program can search continuous areas with videoblocks on harddisk (it can be recognized according to a clock mark), sort it along time and tries to link found fragments. This program has several changeable parameters, but it seems to me a little bit like a black box - after several hours you could see, what is the result.

I wrote a Windows program (tested on Windows XP and Windows 7 64-bit), which can copy all contents of the recorder harddisk to a file (make harddisk image - this is not necessary, it is possible to work directly with the harddisk, but work with file is quicker), find continuous areas with videoblocks, search and collect the record names and match it (manually) with the fragments for better identification, sort it along the time, play separate fragments and whole links of fragments together, cut off beginning or ending fragments (with advertising) from the link, find next or previous link of fragments, list all processed records (films) include consisting of individual fragments, export to PC etc.

Program can restore records e.g. after unintentional formatting, but it cannot save films in the same form, as they were saved (without advertising) on the recorder, without manual join, because I don't know the structure of the saved data, unfortunately. If somebody wants to solve this puzzle, the program can display hexadecimal contents of all blocks, make whole disk map, search text and hexadecimal strings and also records names (letters with diacritics are replaced with another letters in recorder).

If someone need another language than english or czech, it is simple to make own language file. Copy the English.txt file as file with changed name (language name) and edit the lines. But don't remove or exchange any rows, only change it's contents - program reads texts from exact position in this file. Then place this file into Language directory and change language by Language button in basic window. If you send me this file, i will place it on my page.

 Writing and testing of this program took many programming hours. My mate is not very happy and she prefer when I spend my time with our children. According to her this program is not worth such many hours of my work. I will be pleased, if you will write to me (and to my mate, which I thank for tolerance), that my program was useful for you. And I will be pleased even more if someone of you resolved structure of recorded data on disk - it would be great to export all recordings by one button.

Here you can download the prohram. It's using is free, but modifying is prohibited (to prevent spreading of several versions, it could be confusing).

(sorry for double extensions, it is allowed to upload only reduced set of extensions on this server now)

Last version: 1.23.12.28 (date 28.12.2023)

Archive (zip file, please erase the .doc extension): PanHDD.zip.doc (554,1 kB)

Installation version (exe file, please erase the .doc extension): PanHDDi.exe.doc (2,2 MB)

Manual (is already in archive and installation version): PanHDD.doc (166,5 kB)

ChangeList: ChangeList.txt (1,5 kB)