TBC-5000 USB stick format

[pa4wdh]

Hi All,

I see you mostly use the German language over here, but i see some English posts so i hope you'll understand me

I'm using a TopField TBC-5000 for "KPN Digitenne" DVB-T in The Netherlands and it works quite alright. It records on a USB stick, but i can't read the USB stick on my computer because it seems to use a non-standard filesystem.
Do you have any technical documentation on how topfield uses the USB stick ? I would like to write a program myself to be able to read the USB stick.
(Just in case you want to help by pointing to programs written by others: I'm using Linux ).

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Wesley

[TV-Junkie]

sorry for my bad English, but you may TFTool brings further because it may be that the USB stick has the same format as the hard drives of the 5000 series. Here it was FAT12

[Gerti]

Hi!

FAT24

Gruß,
Gerti

[TV-Junkie]

@Gerti, würde TFTool den Stick erkennen, bzw die Daten darauf?

[Gerti]

Hi!

Ich denke eigentlich, dass der auf NTFS sein müsste, kenne das Gerät aber nicht.

Gruß,
Gerti

[TV-Junkie]

Dann stehen wir beide wohl im Hemd
@ pa4wdh. What operating system do you have on your PC

[pa4wdh]

Thanks for all the reply's.

I'm using Linux (Gentoo Linux). I already tried every filesystem Linux supports but it can't read the USB stick. On an other (dutch) forum i found that it uses a propriety filesystem from TopField. Now i'm seaching for information to make a program to read it

[FireBird]

@ pa4wdh. What operating system do you have on your PC

(Just in case you want to help by pointing to programs written by others: I'm using Linux ).

Maybe you can post a hex dump of the first sector of the stick.

[TV-Junkie]

Hi Alex, habe oben noch was freigeschaltet

[FireBird]

Danke. (was mich zur OT-Frage bringt: wieso 2x?).

[pa4wdh]

[quote="FireBird"]Maybe you can post a hex dump of the first sector of the stick.[/quote]
I'll do that tomorrow. I've looked at it before and it contained "FAT32" in ASCII, but mounting it as a FAT32 partition didn't work. I think it where left-overs of whatever was on the stick before it was formatted with the TopField.

[TV-Junkie]

Danke. (was mich zur OT-Frage bringt: wieso 2x?).

Was für 2x
Oder meinst du das freischalten, bei mir war das so noch markiert
Siehe auch im internen

[pa4wdh]

I've just inserted the topfield-formatted USB stick in my PC, this first appears in dmesg:

Code: Alles auswählen

usb 1-4.3: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
scsi6 : usb-storage 1-4.3:1.0
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SanDisk  Cruzer Switch    1.26 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 62530624 512-byte logical blocks: (32.0 GB/29.8 GiB)
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
 sdb: unknown partition table
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Note the "unknown partition table" line ...

Then the hexdump, here it is:

Code: Alles auswählen

00000000  07 26 08 07 46 50 4f 54  44 4c 45 49 35 46 54 20  |.&..FPOTDLEI5FT |
00000010  50 30 30 30 48 20 52 56  00 00 44 44 00 00 00 00  |P000H RV..DD....|
00000020  14 08 01 01 00 00 00 00  03 00 00 00 00 27 10 00  |.............'..|
00000030  be e1 d4 8f 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000040  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000200  07 26 08 07 46 50 4f 54  44 4c 45 49 35 46 54 20  |.&..FPOTDLEI5FT |
00000210  50 30 30 30 48 20 52 56  00 00 44 44 00 00 00 00  |P000H RV..DD....|
00000220  14 08 01 01 00 00 00 00  03 00 00 00 00 27 10 00  |.............'..|
00000230  be e1 d4 8f 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000240  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000400  ff ff ff f1 ff ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |................|
00000410  80 26 10 00 4f 52 5f 5f  5f 5f 54 4f 00 5f 5f 00  |.&..OR____TO.__.|
00000420  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
*
00000470  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff 32  |...............2|
00000480  ff ff ff f3 ff ff ff ff  01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |................|
00000490  00 27 10 00 45 52 5f 5f  4c 43 59 43 00 5f 5f 45  |.'..ER__LCYC.__E|
000004a0  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|

I can't see anything useful in here, if i scroll down a bit further i can see FAT32 again and names (and content) of files that where on the stick before i formatted it with the TopField.

If you want i can also make a hexdump from my other USB stick which is filled with recordings

[FireBird]

You need to swap all dwords and then you'll get:

Code: Alles auswählen

00000000  07 08 26 07 54 4f 50 46  49 45 4c 44 20 54 46 35  |..&.TOPFIELD TF5|
00000010  30 30 30 50 56 52 20 48  44 44 00 00 00 00 00 00  |000PVR HDD......|

Does that make more sense? It is the FAT24 system created by Topfield. You can read more details in my PDF, chapter "Topfield TF-5xxx Hard Disk Structure".

[pa4wdh]

That indeed makes a lot more sense Firebird !
I've also hexdump'ed my used stick and i was able find the names of all the recordings now

Also thanks for the link to the PDF, i think that's all info i need. Just one question:
I understood that a few mediaplayers (mplayer, vlc) can actually read the rec format of the TopField, but to do that, do i still need to swap de dwords or is that done by the media player ?

[FireBird]

You need to swap all dwords. Assuming that the recordings are identical to the old 5000, they are standard DVB transport streams, which would be understood by many players. The first 3kB or so contain a header, which may confuse some players. So you can skip the header and start with the first real TS packet.

[pa4wdh]

Is there anything i can search for in the file to recognise the first TS packet ?

I also found this project: http://tffs.sourceforge.net/index.html
It's doing exactly what i was planning to do, but it claims to be compatible with the 4000 series, does that use the same format as my 5000 ?

[FireBird]

Look out for a 0x47, which is the start of a TS packet. As the packets are aligned, this byte is always located at byte 0 and then every 188th byte (of course except where the TF header has overwritten the DVB stream).

I can't remember that I've ever seen a TF4000 stream. It is also a transport stream but I'm not sure about the alignment. The header is different and therefore tffs might not accept your data as a valid TF recording.

[pa4wdh]

Ok, thanks for the info. I'm actually looking at the sourcecode of the TF4000 program i found, it searches for the string "TOPFIELD PVR HDD", which is different from my hexdump. I'm not sure if that's the only difference

[pa4wdh]

The program i found didn't work for me, so i started writing my own

The first results are there: I can read the superblock, fat and the directory structure. I can ee my recordings and if i copy some sectors to a file mplayer is able play it

The only problem seems to be that i can't address all sectors. I guess it has something to do with 32 bits etc. Some files show a nice TFrec header, some seem to be more or less random fragments of other recordings.
I'm already using off64_t which should give me 64 bits of addressing space but it doesn't work

Any ideas ?