HDD Playback stopped on new Bravia TV

[mike2015]

Just treated myself to a KDL-50W800 TV. Tried out recording to an attached HDD over Xmas. Things were working fine. Yesterday it stopped working.

On the list of recorded programmes everything still shows.

When I try to play any program it says "Playback not available". If I try to record a new program it says recording not possible.

I have checked the HDD - still works if I plug it into my PC & I can see the files on there. Sony TV says it is not 100% full & knows it is still registered.

I have tried fully switching off the TV, checking the HDD connections etc. It is obviously connected OK since it shows the list of recordings OK.

My only guess is that the TV has screwed up its own encryption, hence the error?

I guess there is no way out of this other than re-register the drive & lose all my recordings?

Glad this was only an experiment. I'll stick to my X-years old, steady as a rock Humax PVR for all my recordings. That works much better anyway - it gets the program titles correct, shifts recording time if needed, series link etc.

So much for this being a Smart TV. I was hoping I could use the HDDrecording facility to start recording in HD, seems that it isn't to be trusted.

Unless anyone has any idea to overcome this issue?

[rooobb]

You may want to try to hack it 

See this discussion on how to open the databse in which the information are stored http://community.sony.co.uk/t5/televisions/hdd-recording-titles-disk-format-info/m-p/364820/highligh...

There is only one table in there called "recprograms" in which one field is called something like "isplayable"... since you are losing it anyway may worth a try ...

[mike2015 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the link. For the record, the KDL-55W800B TV I have formats the HDD in NTFS, not some strange partition layout as others reported. This made it easy to attach the HDD to my PC & analyse the database mentioned. No problems there, so I looked to other issues.

I ran a full CHKDSK /r against the drive, no reported problems.

So I copied all the files off the drive, did a full re-format in Windows (not quick format), and then copied all the files back.

Re-attached the HDD to the TV & I now have everything back! Hurrah. So maybe there was a low-level HDD problem that reformatting cured. Maybe the HDD is on the way out. I will run full diagnostics on it sometime.

Looking at the list of files you see, in the root folder there is a file with a ".reg" suffix which is what I reckon Sony use to identify the HDD against the TV, so that is esential. Then there are the SQLite database files used to itemise the recordings. Finally there are the recordings in M2TS format. The "recprograms" table has the program name in it. I guess you could edit this column to set the correct name to overcome the annoying mis-naming of recorded programs that Sony TVs are infamous for. Easy to do via a GUI SQLite database editor.

So, moral is to backup the HDD just like any other HDD & you have a good chance you can recover your recordings should the HDD fail. Just copy all the files back & the TV should recognise them.