BT sent a letter in the post saying they are axing the BT Vision service on 22 July 2014. More info on it here: http://www.a516digital.com/2014/04/bt-vision-to-close-this-summer.html
If they really do turn the servers off, then the silver BT Vision box could become unbootable and unusable even as a Freeview PVR. It is a sad day. The silver BT Vison box was a good solid PVR, shame to see BT kill a perfectly good piece of kit (and appallingly wasteful and damaging for the environment). It never missed a recording or developed problems with its hard drive in 5 solid years of service.
Other Freeview PVRs are apparently very unreliable and prone to going wrong (most of them Linux based). So I'm really going to miss the silver box if BT actually do kill it off.
The question is, could there be any way to get a computer to impersonate the BT servers so the silver box can continue to live a happy life as a Freeview PVR?
The silver boxes communications with the BT servers are encrypted, so can't be easily replicated. Has anyone had any success in decrypting it or peeking inside the boxes code to see what kind of responses a fake BT server should give?