That's happy news.
We specifically focused on that model after you mentioned it earlier this year. I got lucky and found one to test with. It is a nice recorder and produces very nice video files.
It sounds to me like your a Power user and explore using a lot of the more advanced options regularly.
I wish I had that time. My interests drag me from task to task.. next shiney object.. grabbing my short attention.
The LSI recorders (Polaroid and JVC) are never far from my mind. I've spent a lot of time looking into their storage format. The meta data can be recovered fairly easily, but we've never made that last leap to connect the metadata to the video stream. They are all descendants from the same LSI Hobby kit they sold to those manufacturers to build their own DVRs.
Backtracking I have found pieces to that Hobby kit, but Polaroid and JVC seems to have gone separate ways when it came to actually storing things on disk. Polaroid seems to have stuck with the Hobby kit default example.. where JVC went off and did something else.
Toshiba, Pioneer, Panasonic, Thompson (Magnavox/Funai) were all part of the same group that defined DVD-video and when time came to build their DVRs they stuck pretty close to the specification they agreed upon.. so even though their hardware varies dramatically from company to company and model to model.. they do things conceptually nearly identically once you get over a few details.
Polaroid and JVC entered the same market after the others and trusted the LSI Hobby kit to get them to market the quickest with least development. I wonder what went through their heads when touching the on disk storage.. maybe one day I'll figure it out.. but very few people have ever looked at the disks. You have pointed out one or two guys that did in the past.. but they didn't dig nearly as deep as we've been going.. and getting so close.
One problem with finding and extracting the video is when we look at these we have to keep all that we learned in mind all at once. We can't switch back and forth between brands and models or we forget what we've learned. Its hard documenting how things are laid out. I've been looking at Hexinator to try and help get over that problem.. but its a hard program to learn how to use and takes time.
Another avenue is a year or so ago, I came across a surplus IDE analyzer, which can watch how the drive is used while its being used. I'm not sure if it will help.. but it might.
We will see what progresses after the first of the year.
Now that you (mention) "Batch".. you'll be happy to learn that
Isobuster has a very thorough command line interface as well as its GUI.
It can override behaviors, set variables and execute commands.
I'm not sure if it has its own scripting language.. but it might. But you could use any scripting language you like with the command line interface to perform "batching".
Peter showed me the command line syntax one time.. he has a web page for it.. but customers don't always ask him about more advanced features. And I don't think there is a direct link off the main web pages anymore. He's turned towards simplifying and automating many of the basic functions to make it as streamlined and fast as possible.
I don't think he thinks the casual user, or highly stressed user trying to get their video back cares too much about advanced features.
Extracting speed.. is none too shabby.
Its really fast.
The limit is really the hard drive itself and how you attach it to the PC, but even USB 2.0 bumps up against the top speed of most hard drives from that era. So the bottleneck is really the drive.
Early scraping scripts that were available for some few specific DVRs extracted "chunks" or "pieces" of recordings and people had to string it all back together.
I don't think
Isobuster gets credit enough for not doing that.
Isobuster in contrast, knows how to read the entire recording from beginning to end (without) scanning the entire drive. It can pluck a single recording off in minimal time, or all recordings, one after the other.
It also covers "vastly" more brands and models leveraging what it knows about common storage patterns and applying it to all drives it comes across. Peter really likes to discover a unique "signature" he's invented for each brand and model and shows its identity when you right click the top level drive folder and select "Properties".
Its telling you what it thinks it sees.. on unsupported model drives it will try to "guess" and this helps to be sure its working properly. We use this to know when we need to examine the hard disk in greater detail.
The Philips 3575 and 3576 have been tested and are supported.
There are other Philips models that have not been tested and are not supported at this time. I've been looking into a 3570/3590 model which has its own flavor of storage.. its European however and that usually puts an extra special spin on things.
I don't know how to characterize Euro models as a group. The UK models are not that different from North American models.. there seems to be some convergence of design, except for their tuner model support.. which we don't look at.
Continental Euro models though, especially those with SECAM support tend to have more LSI and unique storage formats. I'm running on and on here.. but I've acquired a few Euro models and trying to figure out how to get the information to Peter to support them. He's added some on his own.. but they are a large group which needs attention.
Most of the North American models we come across are either LiteOn or DVD-video based and get supported fairily quickly.
Forgive me if I run on a bit.. I don't get to talk about this stuff with anyone much.