www.makemkv.com

I've got several hard drives full of video from a Magnavox 537 DVR. That uses a proprietary file format that won't read on a standard computer. Kind of a long shot, but can MakeMKV rip these?

Way I understand it, the video is all stored sequentially in one big file with an index to store pointers for the media tags and start/stop markers. Where it gets interesting, as with any hard drive, it can get fragmented if you do a lot of deletes and edits, and you'd need to be able to read the index to piece things together. Basically, we're talking about making approximately 300 SD videos from each 1tb hard drive.

PS ... only option right now would be to copy the individual titles to DVD-r's, then do the conversion OR play them back real time to capture software. I'll pass on that if I can.

No, MakeMKV is not likely to be of help, since it is intended to work with DVD and Bluray type video. It would be limited to you're undesirable DVD-R option.

And a google search for "Extracting magnavox dvr video" was not encouraging.

Yeah ... figured it was a long shot. Maybe it'll get added as an option ... nudge nudge ... (wink wink) <G>

There's a couple gurus on another one of the AV forums who've come up with a way to slice and dice the Maggie drives to separate titles that will play on a computer, but as you noticed, it's quite a convoluted process. There was some talk of automating the process and bulk ripping to ISO, but that kinda sorta stalled some time back.

MakeMKV is still a handy tool here though. I also have a few hundred DVDr's left over from a Panasonic DVR that I'm slowly but surely converting.

PS ... I did figure out a way to use a "placeholder" MKV file (only 793 bytes!) and a generic sidecar file so I can at least list all the titles from the Maggie (and DVDr's I haven't yet converted) in jRiver Media Center. That gives me a centralized database of what's what and where to find it. That gets exported and printed into a catalog. Better than nothing I suppose.