Rick Stein - Taste of the Sea 1995 - episode 4 (UKTV cropped)

UKTV Good Food Channel have just started showing all the really old Rick Stein programs. I only realised after missing the whole of Fruits of the Sea, and the first 2 episodes of Seafood Lovers Guide and the first 4 of Food Heroes, but was able to record them to my Virgin V6 box. Yippee I thought - plug in a scart to record to my DVD/Hard drive, but it seems that the mini Scart is disabled on the Virgin box. so I had to buy an HDMI-to-Scart adapter, which alas drastically reduces the overall picture quality. They've got about 7 minutes of each episode cropped out (to allow for a shed load of adverts) Still looking for a better solution for capturing the HD footage out of my Virgin box's HDMI socket - maybe to pc? Please feel free to advise me!