Freesat, the downside?

juliescot

Leopard wrote: »

With respect, I think you're seeing fire where none exists.

My comment which you quote was a studiously neutral observation, entirely devoid of any provocative and/or demeaning language.

Perceiving it otherwise smacks of paranoia.

I beg to differ, so we shall leave it at that.

Jake'sGran

Leopard wrote: »

With respect, I think you're seeing fire where none exists.

My comment which you quote was a studiously neutral observation, entirely devoid of any provocative and/or demeaning language.

Perceiving it otherwise smacks of paranoia.

Some people do seem to be a tad more touchy than others on this forum but I love your extremely grammatical responses.
(re your post above, I had understood it was the hard disc drive being referred to but did not know about the amount of space required for downloads).

Leopard

Jake'sGran wrote: »

Some people do seem to be a tad more touchy than others on this forum but I love your extremely grammatical responses.
(re your post above, I had understood it was the hard disc drive being referred to but did not know about the amount of space required for downloads).

Quite so. Nobody could ever accuse me of being touchy! :rotfl:

Yes, JG, even on a 1TB hard drive, a three hour programme in HD takes up about 2%.

That said, it plays back perfectly, so I guess it's worth it.

Glad we were able to help you, through all the gunfire!

This is a nice DVD recorder: it's got a 250 GB hard drive, which is fine for Standard Definition. I'm sure you'd like it. (We love ours! :dance: )

And thank you for your kind personal comment.

:xmassign:

juliescot

Leopard wrote: »

Quite so. Nobody could ever accuse me of being touchy! :rotfl:

Yes, JG, even on a 1TB hard drive, a three hour programme in HD takes up about 2%.

That said, it plays back perfectly, so I guess it's worth it.

Glad we were able to help you, through all the gunfire!

This is a nice DVD recorder: it's got a 250 GB hard drive, which is fine for Standard Definition. I'm sure you'd like it. (We love ours! :dance: )

And thank you for your kind personal comment.

:xmassign:

Gunfire? What gunfire?

Anyway as I sit here and watch an listen to a delightful and uplifting HD programme unavailable on any other broadcast platform other than Sky I have decide to move on.

Enjoy your viewing and surfing.

I bid MSE goodbye........

Leopard

juliescot wrote: »

Gunfire? What gunfire?

Anyway as I sit here and watch an listen to a delightful and uplifting HD programme unavailable on any other broadcast platform other than Sky I have decide to move on.

Enjoy your viewing and surfing.

I bid MSE goodbye........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRrRBKKXotM

almillar

Just to counter Leopard's data hogging, I find the 320gb drive more than adequate. But I'm used to far less space on my Freeview recorder. I'm sure as more HD stuff is broadcast it'll be more of a squeeze, and this Christmas will be the first big test for me, but I'd say that you'd have to take his request for 2TB of space as being in the 'extreme' category!

Leopard

I find having two 1 TB drives, one internal and one attached to the rear USB port, a fairly comfortable amount of storage space at the moment.

The big problem is the encryption of FreeSat HD by the Humax box. It means, in effect, that the only place you can store HD recordings is on the internal hard drive (or what you can fool, as explained earlier, the Humax box into believing is the internal hard drive by running the connector wires out through the back of the casing).

I upgraded the internal hard drive a couple of weeks after we bought the box because I could see the rate at which its 320 GB was being devoured. I figured that if it was going to need more storage space in the long run, it would be better to install it right away, before HD recordings that we want to keep had amassed on the 320 GB drive that I would eventually be removing. (I've put that badly but I'm sure you understand what I mean; better to bite the bullet immediately and put all our recordings on to a larger-capacity drive from the outset.)

Gradually, one does build up a library of things one wants to keep in HD and this will increase as other HD channels are added to FreeSat.

One thing I like to do is keep all the episodes of a series we are watching until it's concluded, so that we can refer back, days or weeks later, to some obscure point or event that occurred earlier but which has become pivotal to the plot. At the end, I then delete the whole folder of episodes and release the disc space – but it hogs quite a lot in the meantime (particularly if we are watching several different series), so it's helpful to have some elbow room with which to work.

The main reason for having an external hard drive attached to the USB port is so that one has somewhere to keep SD recordings (which the Humax box doesn't encrypt) without them taking up precious space on the internal hard drive - that enables one to dedicate storage on the internal hard drive to HD recordings.

Ten months after buying the box, about 65% of the 1 TB internal hard drive and about 45% of the 1 TB external hard drive are currently occupied. I reckon that about half of those recordings we'll delete over the coming months but it still leaves a quietly and relentlessly growing core of things we want to keep. I'd estimate that some 20% of the HD recordings on the internal hard drive is stuff I'd be loathe to delete and that about 10% of it I really do want to keep long-term.

Overall, the two hard drives provide a good combination of archive space, medium-term library space and short-term storage space, allied to a degree of flexibility and working space.

But, most certainly, if we'd stuck with only the single, original, 320 GB internal drive for everything, we'd have filled it weeks ago and would now be struggling.

Two 1 TB drives seem about right for our present needs, providing a decent amount of space without permitting one prodigally to start amassing vast collections of multi-part series that we shall never actually watch!



By the way, almillar, I always read and enjoy your postings.

I was rather hoping that somebody other than I would point out to juliescot that while she was busy watching – at not inconsiderable expense – the HD programme exclusive to Sky that she so enjoyed, those with FreeSat HD boxes were watching "Collision" in HD completely free – something denied to those who pay Sky, which is only broadcasting it in SD – while recording "Around the World in 80 Days" on BBC HD.

But, just as I am grateful to all those who stick defiantly to Windows and, thereby, keep the attention of malware writers firmly focussed away from Mac users, I am grateful to juliescot and to all those who pay money to Sky HD and enable it to make me offers to rejoin at rates that it denies to its existing subscribers.

We subscribed to Sky for nearly twenty years, while it held a monopoly, and during that time were subjected to a series of deceitful attempts by it to extract money from us to which it wasn't entitled.

But the thing that finally convinced me to be rid of this disgusting company once and for all was when it told us that we could upgrade to Sky HD but would have to wait weeks for the equipment that it would bust a gut to deliver to new subscribers within days.

That, for me, summed it all up. Sky operates the precise opposite of rewarding customer loyalty: it treats its existing subscribers with contempt and regards them as mugs whose money can be used to give favourable exclusive offers to those it has not yet duped into joining.

Ten months after giving Sky the elbow, a letter (the latest in a series of them) arrived from Sky this morning offering to supply us with a free HD box and half-price subscription for six months, to go back. They use juliescot's money to induce me to obtain at half-price what they are supplying to her. I hope she admires that.

Sky? The only way to deal with that company is to beat them at their own game and take a sabbatical every other year, returning as a new subscriber on deals subsidised by its loyal, unappreciated and never-rewarded existing customers.

timbim_2

I have to say, Leopard, that I enjoy your posts. For me, it's the precision with which you write that I like. The thing that really put me off about the Humax PVR's was their inability to archive to DVD, thus providing a good long term storage mechanism. That's the place where the Panasonic machines have the edge.

I'm intrigued by what you say about encryption on freesat programs. So if you record a freesat program to the external disk, can it replay it from there, or does the program have to be on the internal drive? To give you a huge 'internal' drive, and had plenty of cash to spare, you could hook one of these, a NAS with eSATA connections, so you could hook it up to the internal HDD socket via the eSATA, and also into your network, so any computers could pick up and play SD recordings. Expensive though

Leopard

Well, to be precise – which always runs the gauntlet of being called pedantic, on here, so I thank you for making the distinction – the BBC doesn't encrypt its HD output but it does flag them as being HD.

The Humax FoxSat-HDR box only records on to its internal hard drive (or what it has been fooled into thinking is its internal hard drive). It offers no alternative destination and – when in FreeSat mode – if it sees the HD flag on a programme, it encrypts it. That's built into its (current) firmware - for copyright reasons.

So, initially, everything (both HD and SD) gets stored on the internal hard drive.

The box (when in FreeSat mode) provides the option to copy-off what's on its internal hard drive on to an external hard drive via its rear USB port.

That external hard drive has to be formatted in something Linuxy called COM3 (or something like that, which I don't recall, offhand). We did that by downloading a Linux iso, making a CD and booting my companion's work Dell laptop with it. (Our Macs didn't want to know, when the CD was inserted into them!)

Thus equipped, you can copy anything off the internal hard drive on to the external hard drive, but, if it's been encrypted by the box (because it's HD) the box won't play it back – the picture just breaks up. To watch it, you'd have to copy it back on to the internal hard drive and play it from there. But it's quite happy playing back unencryped programmes directly from the external hard drive.

(One good thing is that you can created nested folders, to several levels, on the external hard drive – something that the Humax format of the internal drive won't let you do. Well, I've never found a way to do it, anyway.)

Once the box is out of warranty (next January), I'll probably go the route of drilling a hole through the back of its casing and extending the wires that plug currently into its internal drive. If those are routed out of the box, instead, and plugged (by eSATA) into a docking device, one can then just close down the box, swap the hard drive in the docking station and then re-boot the box off a different hard drive (which the box will think is its own internal hard drive). The real problem (which applies to a conventional NAS) is that it will only – as far as I have been able to ascertain – address and boot off a drive with a capacity of up to 1 TB.

That's as far as I've gone, at the moment, in investigating the possibilities. This is essentially because the box is still under warranty and my present solution is working fine.

Once its warranty expires, I'll take a further look at the situation as it then is and decide exactly what to do. No point in crossing that bridge before then: Humax might update the firmware in the meantime, to make other things possible!

I should point out that the USB port on the box – again as far as I have been able to establish – is only supported to a simple degree: you can attach a USB drive to it but a USB hub wouldn't work.

The box also has a 10/100 Ethernet port (which I've connected to our router) but it's only programmed to talk online to Humax and look for updates, etc.

I'd love to be able to network the thing fully!

timbim_2

On the precise/pedantic issue, I think both are required, to a greater or lesser extent. As a scientist, precision in statements is hugely important, and ambiguity always rubs with me, maybe too much. Every community needs a pedant, if only to pick up on possible ambiguities and ensure that they are clarified to prevent people working at cross purposes. To put that in perspective, it really is important here to prevent people with a poor understanding of computers and the like from wasting their money by buying the wrong thing due to a misunderstanding. Appropriate pedantry can prevent this. It's just a shame that some people take your blend of precision with maybe a little of what some may call pedantry as an insult, almost as if you're talking down to them or the like. Just shows how petty some people can be.

To avoid the issue of fiddling with awkward set top boxes, I've decided to go the whole hog and build a server, and chuck in a couple of hauppage tuner cards chucked in, and to run a linux app called myth tv to manage TV recording. That will give me initially a 2TB RAID5 protected array, easily expandable as I want to grow it, along with being able to schedule recordings from an external portal, and watch programs back on any networked computer. Much better than video+, and a step up from our current Panasonic CRT, decidedly unstable Nokia freeview box, which we got right back at the dawn of freeview, a Panasonic DVD-RAM recorder and a very old Panasonic VHS, used only very rarely.

We did have sky for a time, but eventually scrapped it. Just a shame that if you want to watch cricket, sky's the only option, has been for some time and will be for at least another four years. In the mean time, TMS keeps me happy!