# DVR 622 extra storage possible?



## lancia (Jun 19, 2006)

I recently got 622 DVR and realized that 30 hours of HD recording is quickly used up. Is there a way to hook up an external HD to increase storage? It has a UBS port and I'm wondering whether I can just hook an external HD. Do I need special software?


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## ChuckA (Feb 7, 2006)

No. Using an external hard drive on the USB port is not an option at this time. We are stuck with the HDD space we currently have.


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## chucksvstar (Jun 17, 2006)

Get a DVD Recorder and copy the shows you want to keep!


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## stol (May 31, 2006)

Is it possible just to add a larger hard drive to the 622, or is that a big no no?


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## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

stol said:


> Is it possible just to add a larger hard drive to the 622, or is that a big no no?


I have not heard of anyone successfully doing this, but I haven't really looked either. However, I'm guessing this would void your warranty and/or lease.


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

stol said:


> Is it possible just to add a larger hard drive to the 622, or is that a big no no?


That's a big no, but external hard drive support has been demoed and is coming.

I believe they are talking about fall time frame.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

There was some effort to do this on a 921 but it failed. The best case was in the 921 one could create multiple 250G drives and swap them out keeping archived programs on the shelved hard drive for later playback. The problem in this case was that the 921 OS had a built in limit of 250G that prevented larger partition size in the bigger capacity drives for programming (in other words the partition was limited. The 300G drives were successfully mounted in the experiments but only recognizing a maximum of the same partition size as the 250G drive. 
( bottom line- 25 hours is what the limit was regardless of hard drive size) 

With the VIP622, there was some talk by the E* engineers at CES that the USB port is in development for external USB 2.0 hard drives. No information on whether this would be a universal USB2.0 drive off the shelf or you would have to purchase from DishNetwork with custom OS installed. But this is in the R&D stage at E* Technologies. They did say that this would not permit swapping the drive to other 622's as it would be married and encrypted to the 622 it recorded from. (Copyright issues you know!) No ETA for this was stated.


Just saw your post David, Didn't know it was demoed and now ETA for FALL delivery. Thanks for the update.


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

Was on display at team summit:

http://www.satelliteguys.us/showpost.php?p=583367&postcount=17
http://www.satelliteguys.us/showpost.php?p=584366&postcount=19
http://www.satelliteguys.us/showpost.php?p=583527&postcount=206
http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=68239

There's a lot of discussion on requirements and capabilities of the external drive (like being able to move it between the boxes on a single account), but I'd take all this with a grain of salt till we see it implemented....


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

chucksvstar said:


> Get a DVD Recorder and copy the shows you want to keep!


This isn't a very good solution for HD content.


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## Jim5506 (Jun 7, 2004)

Reports are that the USB hard drive on a 622 will be tied to your account, not your 622, so if you have multiple 622's you could swap it among them.


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## Moridin (Mar 22, 2005)

Everything I've read leads me to believe that if E* ever gets around to supporting external HDDs (remember it's been "planned" since the early days of the 942), the implementation will be framed as archival of selected programming, rather than a seamless expansion of storage capacity. So you could connect a 1TB USB drive, but still be faced with the tedious task of manually moving programming from the internal HDD to the external drive.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

That is my understanding also Moridin and I believe Dish as stated this officially.


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## DonLandis (Dec 17, 2003)

Ron, what will make this easier will be if the USB method is hot swappable. In case you didn't know the process I have to go through for the HD TIVO HD archives is a bit of a chore, especially if the shelved drive being installed for playback has an older version of the OS and in addition to the reboot (5 minutes on the TIVO) will take as much as several hours for the update. IF Dish makes this a straight forward process, I can easily swallow the dumping chore. However, what does appear like it will do is at least be able to play the program from the USB drive, just not record to it directly. IMHO, that is perfectly acceptable to me as it would be a big improvement over the present TIVO system.


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## Mike D-CO5 (Mar 12, 2003)

Okay can someone explain to me what all this means for the average Joe here? Does it mean that we have to move a recording from the outer external hard drive to the internal hard drive to actually watch it? IF so how would you actually go about moving these recordings. Would it be in real time or fast compressed time like with the pocket dish. I am not that tech savy with this usb stuff. Can someone break it down for me?


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Well first off I don't think anyone here has yet had the pleasure or actually getting to play with this feature. Well even if they did, I am sure they would not be able to comment on it since that would mean they are either a Dish employee or has seen it through some type of Beta program. 

I am not sure how it will work so at this point it is hard to speculate. 

I think we will have to wait and see how this feature will actually work. One thing that has been stated is that the external HD will be for archival purposes only. As to playing it from the external HD drive, I have not heard anything in this regards. 

One thing we can count on. HD movies will take a lot longer than SD movies to move around.


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## RobbieB (Jun 21, 2006)

So, if I understand correctly, this unit has no way of allowing you to transfer recorded shows to your pc... and this forthcoming extHD might allow you to do that? or is it going to be a proprietary device that they'll want you to use only with their dvr and not your pc.
You'd think they'd activate that ethernet port so you can just stream content over your wan or something. :/


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

The extension HD will be just storage, not transfer. I'm sure someone will hack it and I'm positive that we will not allow the hack to be discussed here.

If the ethernet port is ever put to use I doubt if it will be able to send video to anything other than another E* receiver. It will likely be able to receive video (such as AT&T's receiver) but not send.


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

:welcome_s Robbie

From my understanding, there are no current plans of streaming content or allowing the user to archive content to your PC. From the description I read what will be provided will be the ability to use a USB Drive to archive content from yorur 622. Beyond that the details are shaky, but given the copyright issues Dish is concerned about, I doubt there will be any capability to take that drive and use a PC to play its contents.


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## c_caz (Jul 15, 2003)

While it would be great to have the USB storage working, for what it's worth the the 622 does a great job outputting via SVid to a DVD recorder. It actually outputs in 480i widescreen and in effect these are anamorphic wide screen DVDs They look a lot better then those recorded from my 811 (which didn't actually record them as anamorphic, instead they were letter boxed). Yeah you need to record in real time and yeah it's no longer digital but the DVDs made from HD recordings look great.

I tend to watch things the first time in HD (that I really want to see in HD) then I got a spool of DVDRWs and record/re-record to extend that 30 hour limit a bit.


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

Mike D-CO5 said:


> Okay can someone explain to me what all this means for the average Joe here? Does it mean that we have to move a recording from the outer external hard drive to the internal hard drive to actually watch it? IF so how would you actually go about moving these recordings. Would it be in real time or fast compressed time like with the pocket dish. I am not that tech savy with this usb stuff. Can someone break it down for me?


I'm not sure it's worth trying to answer until the feature is in the users hands...

But, did you look at the screen shots from Team Summit at the links I provided?

One shows a "Play" button with the display of files on the external HDD. So, it looks like the event will not have to be copied back to the internal HDD for playback.


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## Moridin (Mar 22, 2005)

David_Levin said:


> One shows a "Play" button with the display of files on the external HDD. So, it looks like the event will not have to be copied back to the internal HDD for playback.


Yep, that was nice to see. What would be _really_ nice, though, would be an option on a DVR timer to automagically move the recording to the archive once recording is complete. That way users with a giant external drive connected wouldn't have to worry as much about remembering to manually move recordings to keep things from being deleted from the internal HDD due to a lack of space.


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## Mike D-CO5 (Mar 12, 2003)

David_Levin said:


> I'm not sure it's worth trying to answer until the feature is in the users hands...
> 
> But, did you look at the screen shots from Team Summit at the links I provided?
> 
> One shows a "Play" button with the display of files on the external HDD. So, it looks like the event will not have to be copied back to the internal HDD for playback.


 That sounds good but you would have to "MOVE" the recordings from the internal hard drive to the external harddrive right? Or else the receiver would delete the older recordings when the drive was full . I wonder how long the moving of the recording would take?


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

As David said, until this feature is in someones hands it hard to say exactly how this is going to work. It most definitely will be nice if you can play the content from the archive drive for sure. 

From my experience in both producing and viewing software for tradeshows, what is shown at the show is not always what the final product will do or what it will look like. In a lot of cases it is smoke and mirrors to show a concept. 

As to moving off content, One could do some math to figure out what the optimal throughput would be, but my guess it will be much less than the optimal transfer given the drive will most definitely be performing other operations like recording content, filling the buffers etc.


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## zapatasghost (Aug 7, 2006)

Ron Barry said:


> As David said, until this feature is in someones hands it hard to say exactly how this is going to work. It most definitely will be nice if you can play the content from the archive drive for sure.
> 
> From my experience in both producing and viewing software for tradeshows, what is shown at the show is not always what the final product will do or what it will look like. In a lot of cases it is smoke and mirrors to show a concept.
> 
> As to moving off content, One could do some math to figure out what the optimal throughput would be, but my guess it will be much less than the optimal transfer given the drive will most definitely be performing other operations like recording content, filling the buffers etc.


Sooo....what's the word now? I notice the last post in this thread was back in June...I'm dyin' to put that USB and/or ethernet port to real use - and either stream to my desktop computer (NOT PC - I'm a die hard Mac man by the way!) or externally expand the hard drive on my 622!


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## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Word still is there is no word. Still being worked on and still coming down the pipe. From the last couple of software updates, their main focus is to stablize the code. Looks like a lot of effort towards the jitters. 

Guess patience is a virtue on this one. Last guess i heard was by the end of the year.. Also heard something about a major upgrade in October. Both I would take with a grain of salt. 

As for streaming to your desktop. I would pretty much rule that one out. From the reports so far, what one could expect is the ability to archive content off your 622 to an external HD drive.


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## christophersj (Apr 21, 2006)

c_caz said:


> While it would be great to have the USB storage working, for what it's worth the the 622 does a great job outputting via SVid to a DVD recorder. It actually outputs in 480i widescreen and in effect these are anamorphic wide screen DVDs They look a lot better then those recorded from my 811 (which didn't actually record them as anamorphic, instead they were letter boxed).


This changes my view of archiving HD in SD-DVD or even MiniDV right now. It is very good news about the anamorphic setting. Anamorphic SD is much much much better than letterbox SD on an HDTV. Very cool.

I think I will capture HD to anamorphic SD via MiniDV tape or hard drive over S-video. DV is less compressed than DVD. You can do this with your MiniDV camcorder, or use software, in this case on a Mac, like QuickTime Pro, iMovie, or Final Cut Pro. QuickTime Pro is only thirty dollars and iMovie is free with new Macs.

This IS all analog, and it is a degrade in resolution, but at least its better than a little letterbox.

The big point I always want to make here is that there is a HUGE market for legitimate Fair Play archiving of shows we already paid to watch! This is about Fair Play!

-Christopher


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## Joe Clark (Jan 10, 2006)

For those of you who may not be aware, there is a Dish receiver modification that will allow you to record anything Dish transmits to a computer (sorry - it works only with a PC), all 100% legal. It has been discussed here before on DBSTalk. There are some long, detailed threads about it on the AVS Forum sister site to DBSTalk.

It's the Nextcom R5000 and you can find info about it here:

http://www.nextcomwireless.com/r5000/products.htm

I have a modded Dish 211 and with the release of HD DVD have begun authoring my own HD discs in the new format. A guide for doing that has become a sticky in the AVS Forum HD DVD Software section. You can find it here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146

Happy trails.


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

A reminder that any such mod should be done on a receiver you OWN and not one leased from E*. Also per their website, the mod works for live tuned channels only ... so your PC will have to do the timing of the record. (You cannot use this mod to transfer content from the DVR hard drive to a PC ... only live tuned content.)


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## Joe Clark (Jan 10, 2006)

James Long said:


> A reminder that any such mod should be done on a receiver you OWN and not one leased from E*. Also per their website, the mod works for live tuned channels only ... so your PC will have to do the timing of the record. (You cannot use this mod to transfer content from the DVR hard drive to a PC ... only live tuned content.)


Thanks, Jim. I own my 211 and lease my 622, which is unmodded. I wouldn't suggest modding a 622 anyway, because of the potential for conflicts between R5000 scheduled recordings and regular 622 recordings. It could get really messy. But the 211 mod is great. Of course you have to be careful to remember not to disturb recordings there, too. I have my 211 pretty much devoted to recording. The 622 is tied into my main home theater system, as is the computer where the R5000 recordings reside. It's not exactly a cheap solution, but for those who want to archive, it's the best solution.


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

OT posts moved to appropriate thread.


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