On Sun, 04 May 2008 08:10:43 -0500 Jer <gdunn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
| phil-news-nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
|> 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).
|>
|
|
| As a follow-up, I noticed this on the Dish website...
|
|
http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/our_products/user_guides_and_manuals/index.shtml
|
| Click on the "Linux Source Code" bar
OK, they're running Linux as the underlying OS. That could explain the
disk
reformatting. In the "misc" programs section, there is "e2progs" which
more
strongly suggests ext2/ext3 formatting.
Still, at least the files that are stored will be encrypted. It is also
possible they could encrypt the whole disk (and that might be the cause of
their 750G limit). They are using Linux kernel 2.4.31 based on the source
file names. But I don't recall a 750G limit in that version of Linux.
If they are doing the encryption only at the file level, and if it is easy
to identify files related together for one program (maybe one file, but
maybe
in split files), I could still collect those files and archive the
programs
on an individual basis in a larger storage system. I could also enable
USB
gadget support on _my_ Linux have have it host the "external disk", and
get
the files out of it as they come across.
--
|WARNING: Due to extreme spam, I no longer see any articles originating
from |
| Google Groups. If you want your postings to be seen by more
readers |
| you will need to find a different place to post on Usenet.
|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at
ipal.net) |
|
