On Thu, 1 May 2008 20:17:34 -0500 Deke <no spam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
| Yes. And, at the same time, watch a program already recorded from the
hard
| drive, SD or HD. So you are recording 3 HD programs, two from
satellite,
| and one from OTA, while watching something else from the Hard Drive.
| Its an amazing machine. It kicks sand in the face of every other DVR
that I
| know of. Plus you can add an external
| hard drive, up to 750gb, without losing the use of the built-in hard
drive.
| I'm using mine in single mode, by the way. The above features may not
be
| available in dual mode, but who cares?
I noticed that 750GB limit. I'd like to have a talk with the programmers
as
to why they put that limit in place (or the managers if they are the ones
who
did that). I happen to have a 1TB USB drive spare right now. There are
2TB
drives out now (they say the 722 does not support array drives, but those
can
be set up to appear as one drive, so I don't know what the issue with that
is).
What good programmers should do (and good managers not get in the way of)
is
simply accept whatever size gets plugged in. I do understand why they are
encrypting the recordings keyed to the subscriber account. If the drive
is
a 16TB drive that the USB standard _can_ handle NOW, and _will_ show up at
some point in the future, then their firmware code should just accept it
and
use it all.
Maybe they are limiting their code to 32 bit integers to index sectors?
If
they did, they could do up to 2TB. Even if they were dumb and used only
signed 32 bit ints to do that, they could still go up to 1TB. The 750GB
limit just doesn't make sense from a technical perspective. Someone had
to
have made an aritificial decision to set that limit.
I have a 1TB drive that is actually less than 1TB expressed in binary.
Even
with signed 32 bit ints indexing sectors, the whole drive can be accessed
as
it is just short of the full binary 1TB size.
USB supports multiple drives connected through a hub. Why can't they
handle
that? Bad programmers or bad managers again?
Features I'd like to see that COST THEM MONEY (so I don't expect they
would
do for that reason): connectivity for Firewire drives, eSATA drives, CF
cards,
SDHC card, ... and even allow BURNING onto attached DVD or BR-DVD
recorders
in the encrypted form that can only play back on the same account (not on
the
regular players unless the player is attached through the recivers
associated
with that account).
--
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|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at
ipal.net) |
|
