Some older Samsung TVs stored the encryption key together with the video files on an attached USB drive but this is not the case in newer series. For these we need root access to the TV firmware in order to read the encryption key generated from the TV before we can decrypt our recordings. David Lodge, of Pen Test Partners, borrowed a Samsung smart TV and used network inspection tool Wireshark to examine the data coming out of the set to the wider internet; he has good and bad news. The telly only records what’s said in front of it after the wake-up command, such as 'Hi TV', is spoken – so it's not recording all the time.
Challenge
You have recording(s) made with your Samsung LED TV on a harddisk and you want to keep them as Matroska (mkv) files.
Prerequisites
How To Decrypt Samsung Tv Usb Disk Recordings
- Linux (I use ubuntu so you might have to do some substitutions)
- git (
apt-get install git) - (lots of) space
Solution
We need to do:
Destroi - Decrypt Samsung Tv Recordings 1.3
- Mount the Samsung LED TV formatted disk
- Decrypt the needed file(s)
- Convert the needed file(s)
Mount disk
The Samsung LED TV formatted disks are formatted as a XFS filesystem and you have to be able to mount it.
It can be done on a Mac (search for fuse-xfs) and on Linux. I will explain the Linux version as I have not yet found
a decryption tool for the mac.
- Put your USB harddisk with Samsung TV recordings in your linux machine
- First you have to find which disk you have inserted. Use
sudo fdisk -land find the disk you have inserted. The output should look something like below and you should be able to recognize your disk.
- Use the disk found (in the example /dev/sde1)
- Mount the XFS formatted disk
- See what’s there. You should see something like this.
The structure of the Samsung LED TV formatted disk is always like above.
The Items in the CONTENTS folder are probably different :-)
The *.srf files are the actual media files. These srf files are encrypted though.
Samsung is trying to make it difficult for us, but we are smarter!
Decrypt srf files
- Enter drmdecrypt. I actually use my own fork because I changed a few bytes.
So now you have the means to decrypt the .srf files to .ts files!
Convert ts to mkv
- Get HandBrakeCLI
So now you have the means to convert movies!
- I use the following command to convert movies. You must of course search for your own best settings.
Decrypt Samsung Tv Recordings Online
Done!
Automate
The first time you should do all of the above because you must install stuff but when done you don’t want to type a lot
so I would say… automate it :-) Fx-pcs-win-e software download.
- You might want to create the following script in your bin folder. I called it
samsungtv
- Make it executable
chmod 755 samsungtv - Now you can convert files by just mounting the disk, go into the CONTENT folder and use a command like:
samsungtv 20140131221505 - It will take care of the decryption and conversion in 1 go.
June 10, 2014 - Thanks to Nick
You may also want to mention that on at least some Samsung TVs if not all recent
ones ? ie the one that I own Model UEF5064000AK, the TV will quite happily record
to a ext4 filesystem and not require the disk to be reformatted in XFS as would
be the case if the filesystem was FAT32 or NTFS.
December 25, 2014 - after a couple of mails
It seems that the drmdecrypt does not work for all models or for newer model of Samsung.
Please do not mail me with questions of how to fix them. Mails of that nature won’t be answered anymore.
You may of course mail me with a fix :-) or do a pull request on github.
I will give credit where credit is due…
The current version works for me, so good luck in making it work for you hehe.
Ivo.
Please have your discussions but don’t ask me for help anymore…