With access to the internal hard drive of the Amazon Fire TV Recast, it’s easy to transfer video recordings off of the internal drive. This guide will walk you through how it’s done and explain why you may want to do it in the first place. There are more reasons than simply to save recordings and free up space.
Why Pull Recordings
- Free Up Space – The most obvious reason to pull recordings off is to free up space on the internal hard drive. The 500GB Recast can store 75 hours of HD video and the 1TB Recast doubles that to 150 hours. Once that limit is reached, the Recast will begin deleting unprotected recordings to make room for new ones. If you want to save old recordings but still have room for new ones, the only way to do that is to pull the recordings off and save them somewhere else before they are deleted.
- Compress Files – The Fire TV Recast stores all recordings in their raw MPEG-2 format. This ensures that the maximum image quality is always available when you go to watch a recording. The issue is that MPEG 2 files are huge relative to modern compressed video formats, such as H.264 and H.265. One hour of MPEG-2 HD video takes up about 7GB of space, while that same video will take up only 1GB to 2GB compressed, depending on the bitrate and compression format chosen.
- Access to Full Resolution – The Fire TV Recast stores 1080i broadcasts at their full 1920×1080 resolution, however, it will always reduce them to 1280×720 when streamed to a device. This is the case when viewing either a live feed or a recording, and is the main reason why many DVR aficionados say the Fire TV Recast has a slightly poorer image quality than other DVRs. Unless Amazon allows the Fire TV Recast to stream its raw video feed in the future, for now, the only way to watch the full 1920×1080 video file at full resolution is to pull the file off of the device.
How to Pull Recordings
For now, the only known way to transfer recordings off of the Fire TV Recast is to remove the internal hard drive. Doing so is fairly simple by following my teardown guide. You don’t have to disable the Recast entirely, as shown in the image above, to access the hard drive. Amazon has said they will add support for external hard drives in the future through the Recast’s USB port. When that happens, it should be possible to pull recordings from the external drive without needing to take apart the Recast. Another possible future simplification is for someone to figure out how to enable ADB support for the Recast, since it seems to be running a variant of Fire OS. With ADB support enabled, it should be possible to pull files off of the internal hard drive through the network connection, which will greatly simplify the entire process.
Once you have the Fire TV Recast’s internal drive removed, you need to connect it to a computer. I used a SATA-to-USB Cable (specifically, this one) to connect it externally, but you can also connect it internally. The Recast’s drive uses the Linux ext3/4 file system, so a Mac or Windows computer will not be able to read it by default. Unless you are using a Linux PC, you will need to install 3rd-party software to mount the drive. For Windows, there is Ext2FSD, Linux Reader, Ext2Reader, and ExtFS among others. For Mac, there is ExtFS (which is what I use) and Fuse, among others.
Once you have the Recast’s drive mounted and can view the files, you’ll see a flat list of all of your recordings and their accompanying data files. All of the files for a single recording will have the exact same file name but with different file extensions. The files that end in
The simplest way to find a specific recording is to sort the files by the date they were modified, because that value will match the date and time that the recording was made. This will let you easily find a recording if you know when it aired. If you prefer, you can sort by the file name to see recordings grouped by channel, since the first two numbers (e.g.,
It’s also worth mentioning that the name of the movie or TV show that you recorded is embedded in each video file. Depending on the software you use, you may be able to pick out a recording by reading this embedded information. In the screenshot above, I’m using a program called MediaInfo to view the show’s name, which you can see is “The Superbowl LIII” in the upper-right. The additional data files that accompany each recording likely have additional media information, but I have been unable to extract any info from them. A sample of these files can be downloaded here for those of you interested in trying to dissect them.
Plex was the only Fire TV app that I tried that could play the raw video files taken from the Fire TV Recast, but I did have to change the file extensions to
Once you pull the recordings off of the Recast’s internal drive, you’ll probably want to combine them into a single video file and convert them into a more universally usable format. The video files are in the MPEG-TS format, so searching for “Convert TS” will bring up countless guides and applications that can merge and convert the files. You may need to rename the raw video files to
After saving your video recordings from the Fire TV Recast hard drive, do not delete the files from the drive using a computer. You should connect the drive back up to the Fire TV Recast and delete the recordings through your Fire TV.
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Damn it. I got so excited for something simple.
How much more simpler do you want it?
Not removing the hard drive. I’m fine with everything else.
I feel ya, brother.
Hey Calvin, don’t feel bad….I agree with you. Something simple for us domestic users, no tech degree necessary.
I’m sure the process will get simpler in time, especially when external drive support arrives. Consider this the brute force method, just to show that it’s possible.
Elias, has there been any updates to pulling recording off a Fire TV Recast? Wondering if it is possible without opening up a Recast.
I’m wondering the same; there’s gotta be a way to pull these off the network or USB.
Might consider looking at Android Virtual Devices, could emulate a FireTV and monitor the network traffic, I notice that port 8082 is open, seems to be a web server of some kind.
I thought that i was supposed to be able to put recorded files onto the SD card. In settings ,it has that option,but it must be for show. That would have been great.
If you want simpler, you can do this with a Tablo or TiVo (via 3rd-party utilities).
The new Tivo interface doesn’t allow this anymore, but you can still use the old Tivo interface and do it.
You can do this with the new TiVo interface. It’s putting things back on that you can’t do.
Did you try Handbrake? It works pretty well for converting/transcoding files into something a little easier for media players to digest. It can be driven from the command line too, though the ‘queue’ support in the GUI works well, if you just have a handful of files to convert/compress.
If you want the drive to be ‘external’ today, use a longer SATA cable :) if you’d like something neater, use a SATA to eSATA cable inside, and an eSATA enclosure for the drive.
The advantage of USB-based ‘external drive’ support is hot-plugging, and with DVRs, hot-plugging (or specifically hot-UNplugging during a recording) provides a bunch of difficult-to-solve usability issues, so there are usually caveats to external drive support on DVRs. The best the Lab126 guys could do is always to record onto the internal drive, and then copy it automatically to the external drive when the recording completes. That approach is robust in most scenarios.
Tablo?
A little out of topic, but can we replace the 500 GB HDD with a larger one without jumping through a huge amount of hoops? I was thinking of a 2-3 TB, copy the Root files and pray it will work.
I’ll be testing that soon.
Were you ever able to test this?
I pulled the hd out of mine, and no system partitions or code to be found. Must be on board flash.
So did putting in a bigger HD than the 1TB work, or did you have to do something special?
Just get Plex
I wonder if the software tsmuxer would be capable of joining the files? It’s my favorite application for m2ts, ts, & MKV muxing.
MrMC will play and stack these without an issue.
Not working on my end. I’ll try to get you a log soon.
MCE Buddy a program that was designed for windows media center supports the conversion of .ts files. So you could strip the ads and compress the file size.
Have you tried replacing the 1tb drive with something larger?
Wondering if its possible to replace the 1tb drive with something larger or with an SSD.
An SSD would fail in a year or less because of limited writes.
Hmmm. I am in USA and my fire tv recast has adb. So downloading is a simple `adb pull `. To add a larger drivs I would pull the block image (`adb pull /dev/block/mmcblk0 mmcblk0.img`) and format a larger drive with it, then stick the larger drive back
How did you enable ADB on your recast?
I’m in the USA as well. My Recast and Firestick are on a network with Windows PCs. If anyone can provide an idiot’s guide to downloading from the recast via adb it would be greatly appreciated. (I am comfortable at the command prompt, just need some spoonfeeding lol)
What about accessing the files on the external hard drive? I connected it to my Linux box, but it says that I don’t have permission. Pretty please?
You say to only delete through Fire TV, not computer, but what will happen if I delete using the computer? I ask because Fire Recast completely screwed up a series deletion so that the shows are inaccessible but are still shown in the library and are still blocking off recording space. I looked this up in the hope of being able to manually wipe those files without affecting what I want to keep, but if that will somehow break things I don’t want to make things worse.
Have you ever changed the hard drive while retaining the videos? You were going to try that.
I want to “relocate” the internal hard drive to external and “backup” the current internal and external hard drives to larger drives. But Amazon states: “However you will not be able to copy any recordings made by Fire TV Recast from your existing hard drive to the new one.”
I haven’t tried it because I never really heard anything back about whether it’s feasible or not. And I’ve seen the same thing, so until I get to a point where I’m willing to lose what I have I don’t want to try anything without a clear understanding of the steps involved. Plan B is just to get a Tablo or something for newer recordings and just keep the Replay to watch what I have on there already.
I thought that i was supposed to be able to put recorded files onto the SD card. In settings ,it has that option,but it must be for show. That would have been great.
Is it correct to assume that you have pretty much abandoned Recast (much as Amazon has)? There are several different things you were going to do/try per both the article and comments, and there hasn’t been a substantive post about hacking the device in three years, nor do you generally respond to comments/queries on Recast articles anymore. I’m not saying I don’t understand why there would be good reasons not to waste your time; but considering your posts are still among the top results when searching Recast tips, and there are precious few other resources dealing with the product, it would be thoughtful to make some statement that there is no new information to be found here.
At the very least we should be discouraging people from buying a product that receives no support or maintenance rather than touting every time it goes on sale.
I suspect Recast won’t get further investment from Amazon until they find better ways to monetize it. As a rule, they create hardware products to drive demand for their other services/subscriptions, not motivated by making a profit from the sale of the hardware.
During sales, I’m pretty sure that some of their hardware products are being sold at a loss, since the margins are pretty thin to begin with. The loss would be recouped though Kindle book sales, Amazon Prime Video sales, Amazon Channels subscriptions, accessory sales, etc.
I agree with you. My comment was directed at the writer of this blog, not Amazon, which I already acknowledged has abandoned development of the Recast.
Sorry, but there are too many comments for me to be able to read them all, yet alone reply, so I don’t really see the discussion going on in the comments of old articles. I only saw your comment because it got (incorrectly) flagged as Spam so it was in a queue for review.
As for articles about the Recast, there aren’t anymore because it is, unfortunately, pretty locked down. I tinkered with it for quite a bit when it first came out, but I wasn’t able to figure out anything interesting that was worth posting about.
I haven’t pulled the internal hard drive yet, but I did pull the external – a 6TB 512K/sector drive that the Recast formatted as EXT4. I placed a 12 TB 4096/sector surveillance drive on the Recast and it formatted it EXT4 and recognized it. I then used Eassos DiskGenius to copy the files from the 6 TB drive – it was almost full – to a local NTFS hard drive and then back to the 12 TB drive. A little cumbersome, but worked.
Next project is to pull the internal drive and see what’s on it. I plan to duplicate it so that I have a backup. When I re-install, I’ll extend the cables so it is sitting outside the Recast which will allow me to make backups at will.