You can actually recover these. It is a little bit of work, but not too bad.
My old Tablo died sometime back. I am able to plug the hard drive into my Windows computer and browse into the ‘rec’ folder. The drive is formatted in Ext4, so you will need a Linux file system driver if you are doing this on Windows. I use Paragon Linux File Systems for Windows.
Inside of the ‘rec’ folder are a bunch of numbered sub-folders. Inside each of those is a ‘segs’ folder that contains the actual video files. The show is broken up into multiple 5 minute video files, each with a ‘.ts’ extension.
From a command prompt you can do a binary copy of the individual files to combine them back into a single video.
H:\rec\19958421\segs>copy /b 00001.ts+00002.ts+00003.ts+00004.ts+00005.ts+00006.ts+00007.ts C:\Temp\Combined.ts
I am unsure about other televisions, but my Samsung television can play these '.ts' files directly. You can also convert them to another format using HandBrake.
If you wish to be able to play them directly on the Windows computer, you can use VLC media player.