OLDER QUESTION

Can someone please HELP!!. I'm not techno-know-how as most of you guys on this forum but need your help!

We've moved from a house that had Foxtel satellite and now live in one that has cable. We'll be having a technician coming out in a couple of weeks to install. The box we have is IQ for satellite from our old place. After talking with Foxtel, we were told that the IQ satellite box will be taken with the technician, as we will need a different IQ box for cable.

PROBLEM: I want to record all the programs I have saved on the IQ satellite box to DVD. Lots of NBA stuff. I would have done it at our old place before moving but I thought we'd just be using the same box. It's very confusing.

Now that I am in my new place, which has cable running through it, but not connected to Foxtel yet, would I be able to record/transfer all the programs that's in the IQ satellite box onto DVD without it being connected and activated to Foxtel signal?

In other words, could I just turn the IQ box on and try and retrieve the programs somehow before the technician comes to install Foxtel via cable?

I'd appreciate some guidance.

(Originally posted August 2007)

Jonels , Queensland, Australia

That's a question that plagues many Foxtel IQ owners.

I'll recap the situation for those who don't have Foxtel or the IQ box.

• The Foxtel IQ box comes in two versions - one for Satellite and one for Cable users. It's just the front end that differs but the boxes aren't swappable.
• Foxtel IQ differs from standard Foxtel in that it has two tuners and a hard disk. This allows you to record one or two programs at once and play back another. You can also pause and rewind broadcasts.
• The material is recorded on the hard disk as exactly the same digital stream that is broadcast, so there's no degradation of quality.
• There is absolutely no provision for extracting the recorded digital data from the hard disk. There are various ports on the box, including a USB port, but none will allow this.
• The only way to extract (save) a program from the box is to play it back in real time and record it to another, external device such as a VCR or DVD recorder. This has a couple of disadvantages:
  • It's time consuming and fussy because you have to do it in real time, and this may be tens of hours of recordings.
  • It will be via analog, therefore it will lose some quality. This won't bother everyone, but does annoy purists (such as me).
  • You lose the embedded program information and any other features of Foxtel IQ such as perfect pausing of the picture.

Your problem is that you'd presumably be happy to record the material via the analog method, but you're unsure if you can even get the box to work without being connected to the satellite dish. As anyone who has Foxtel IQ Satellite knows, you can lose signal for a while in really heavy rain, so the box IS capable of working for a while without the signal, nut will it work permanently without the signal?

Why mightn't it work? For the simple reason that Foxtel is keen to protect itself from what it sees as unauthorised use. For all we know the box does a periodic check to make sure it's getting an authorised signal, and otherwise it locks up or whatever. The only way to tell is to try it.. And perhaps someone in the know can write in (below) and tell use what the full situation is. If your account is still active, my guess is that you could simply take the box to a house that also has Foxtel IQ Satellite installed and plug it in there. Then you could do your analog copying.

(In a future Q&A we'll discuss the other (less legal) ways you can get the material off the hard disk.)

Here are the other HelpStation questions that mention the Foxtel IQ box.

Paul Zucker