I have a Panasonic DMR-BW880 Blu-ray Recorder connected to my home network. I often watch Freeview recorded content from my Win 7 PC, also connected to the network, using either WMP or VLC.
When I first purchased the BW880 several years ago there was the odd recorded program that could not be viewed from my PC using either VLC or WMP but nowadays more and more TV shows refuse to be played over the network. I have had some codec issues in the past with WMP eg see the video but no audio, but using VLC usually sorted this. In this case if I use VLC, the content streams but there is no video or audio and WMP just exits with an error message. The other interesting point is that if I look at the properties of the offending TV show in WMP (right click, properties) there is no value showing for the video bit-rate (in fact most properties are missing). Recorded TV shows that do show the video bit-rate (WMP, properties) play happily over the network.
I have attempted to copy the files of these ‘non-playable’ TV shows from the BW880 hard drive to my PC and also burned them to Blu-ray disk (file extensions are .m2ts or .tts) but these files refuse to be played by VLC, WMP or any other media player. Yet, they will play quite happily through the BW880 (ie from Blu-ray disk or internal hard drive).
If I copy a recorded TV show that I can view over the network from the BW880 to my PC or burn it to disk then these copied files (eg show.m2ts) will play quite happily using WMP or VLC from my PC hard drive or from the Blu-ray disc in a Blu-ray drive on my PC.
I don't believe this is a codec issue or similar but rather some sort of copy protection that only allows the recorded Freeview TV show to be played back on the device that it was recorded on. Is anyone aware of anything like this? If this is the case it kind of makes DLNA useless as it prevents viewing of the recorded show on other devices over the network.
I would appreciate any comments/feedback. And is there any way of removing this limitation so that I can view this recorded content on PC’s elsewhere in my house.
Thanks