# New 942 user- Install Notes; Feature Request: PLASMA protection



## scn101 (Jul 11, 2005)

I've owned a 508 for sometime now and have been with Dish since 1998. I've also lurked around DBSTalk for sometime now with my eyes on the 921. After reading Mark Lamutt's excellently written 942 review and recently purchasing a Panasonic 42" Plasma TV (42PX500U) I decided to take the plunge and bought the 942 on July 9th.

Install was easy. I used my existing Dish 500 with twin legacy LNBF and two SW21's. I did NOT want to get back up on the roof. The Dish has been happy up there without me for the past 7 years and frankly, I hate getting on my roof. I have two RG6U coax's running to my TV. I used 4 diplexers, one pair on one coax to bring down the OTA antenna I have in my attic and the other pair to feed my 2nd TV from the 942's TV2 RF coax out on my other coax. I could of used my OTA antenna feed to feed back the TV2 output but I didn't want to radiate my signal to my antenna and the rest of my neighborhood.

The 942 was up and activated quickly. L226 loaded. I was a bit embarrassed when I shoved the 508 yellow smart card into the 942 and was later told by the Dish CSR that the 942 has a built-in smart card. But apparently this did not damage anything.

The TV has a built in ATSC tuner and delivers an amazing HD picture. Surprisingly, the 942 tuner reports the same (+/- 1%) signal strength as did the TV's meter. Picture quality is identical. All my locals in Dallas scanned in. So far, so good.

As a side note: two weeks ago I almost went cable. I bought a Sony DVR (the HDD500) with a cable card input and a OTA ATSC tuner built in. It was ok at best. The PVR functions are well thought out (like the ability to set the skip forward/reverse times) but didn't work all too well. The skip back would cause the box to mute for about 2 seconds as the video played. This happened with my 508 too when I first got it but corrected itself in time (probably due to a Dish software download). How could the Sony box get upgraded since it is on a cable system? Also, its stretch mode did NOT fill up my entire screen, leaving a 2" black bar on each side, not good for a Plasma. Back to the store it went.

The 942 PVR functions work amazingly well. I've had no real issues to date and believe that Mark, Dish, and DBSTalk will get the bugs squashed. My caller line ID always reports Unavailable on any incoming call eventhough all my phones have the correct data. But that doesn't really bother me too much.

A lot of new features have been requested on DBSTalk. All are good suggestions. What I am hoping for is all related to Plasma protection.

Enhancements request:

1. Need a setting that times out the Pause banner after 5 or 10 seconds. Since the paused picture is random it probably won't burn-in over time but the banner is cumulative and may begin to burn in. This should be an easy "upgrade" I would think. Even better, and I mean really nice for any phosphor based TV, would be a screen saver option on Pause. Why not have the dancing Dish logo appear after a predetermined time (30 secs, 1, 2, or 5 minutes, or off, for example)?

2. What would be amazing would be the ability to stretch 720p and 1080i 4x3 content to fill the screen. Again, this protects the Plasma by "wearing" out the entire screen uniformly. Over time the black bars will appear brighter than the center of the screen. The TV can only stretch 480i/p signals. So right now I need to either change to the composite input or change the 942's output. Of course that loses resolution. 

3. Also nice would be allow one to zoom 2.35:1 HD content to remove the top and bottom bars, again, not great for a Plasma.

Questions:

1. How can the 942 ever handle analog OTA? Does it have a video capture device in it to digitize and store the stream to the Hard Disk for PVR functionality? Or simply a OTA analog tuner so you can watch analog OTA real time only?

2. Can the 250GB SATA drive be cloned for a backup (I would think that the two most likely things to fail on the 942 would be its fan and the hard drive)? Are there any instructions on how to do this (i.e. can any 250GB SATA drive be used)? Can a second 250GB drive be added for more storage (outside of the box I would presume)?

Roy


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## Bichon (Jun 5, 2003)

1. Analog OTA is to be added in a future update. Live viewing only.
2. An upcoming upgrade to support external USB 2.0 hard drives for archiving was mentioned during the last tech forum. Unfortunately, they said that the recordings would be encrypted and tied to the box, which would make them useless if the original DVR failed and got replaced, or was upgraded to a future MPEG4 model. I'm hoping they'll find another way to protect the content owners interests before this feature is deployed.


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

Enhancements 2 and 3 are coming in the next software version.


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## Jon Spackman (Feb 7, 2005)

Can you tell me what Hd source is 4:3??? HD is by nature 16X9, so when would you ever need to stretch a show that is already filling your screen? 

Do you mean to stretch an SD show? isn't that an option already? If you mean a 480p show from the dtv channels with the annoying grey or black side bars then I understand why you would want to stretch that. That would be an industry first, no other dvr i have ever seen will allow you to stretch 480p or higher.

Mark, Is their any chance in hell of the 942 ever getting native resolution(is it possible with the hardware it has??)


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## Mark Lamutt (Mar 24, 2002)

I don't know the answer to that, J5.


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