Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

Andy Champ wrote:

Why would it be more? How often do you replace the disc in your PC?

Indeed.

--
SteveT

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:15:02 +0100, Andy Champ
wrote:

On 08/04/2013 20:36, Paul Ratcliffe wrote:
Take the disk out of the 9200 and connect it to the PC.
Then use the Humaxrw software from he
http://humaxdisk.wikispaces.com/HumaxRW

This is a whole lot less grief than trying to get the ****ty USB stuff
to work. It's also at least 10 times faster in terms of transfer rate.

Process 1: Plug in USB cable. Perform slow transfer. Unplug USB cable.

Process 2: Extract HUMAX from under TV. Dismantle. Unplug disc cable,
carefully counting how many times I unplug this limited-cycle connector.
Dismantle PC to expose disc bus. Connect disc. Perform fast transfer.
Disconnect disc. Reassemble PC and put back in proper place. Replace
disc in hummy, replace lid, put back under TV & reconnect.

I wonder how much you have to be transferring before it's worth it?


Interesting question: It depends on just how excerable a rate the
files transfer at from the PVR to the PC (in my case, laptop - the
mountain going to Mohammed so to speak).

Whenever I need to collect a recording or three off of the Toppy, I
see a rate around the 8GB per hour mark. AFAICR, it's about half that
for the hummy (assuming the transfer does manage to complete - I
understand there was a workaround to that issue where the data packets
are sent twice over to make sure of a successful transfer so it might
be even slower again in practice).

Transfer speed tests I did a few years back with a 500GB USB2
external drive gave the following read transfer rates of 98GB and
116GB per hour for Ext2 and NTFS respectively. The toppy uses its own
proprietry FS so I'd expect an even slower rate using the TopfHDRW
transfer utility, perhaps 80GB per hour?

The speed with the smaller 250GB toppy drive will be a little slower
when using an IDE to USB2 adapter (to eliminate the hassle of opening
up the PC case). Obviously, connecting directly to an IDE port to
bypass the USB2 bottleneck will speed things up somewhat but 80GB or
so per hour is enough to copy every recording on a full 250GB disk in
little more than 3 hours.

The one and only time I resorted to pulling the drive out of the
Toppy to connect to a PC was when it crashed due to bad caps in the
PSU. If the Hummy is anything like the Toppy, you're looking at a good
10 to 15 minutes just to pull the drive out before you can connect it
to the PC which might only be a 2 minute job for a USB2 connected
setup or another 10 or 15 minutes for an IDE connected one.

Restoring the drive back to the PVR when you've finished will double
the total time involved so you might have to allow anywhere from about
half an hour to an hour for this part of the work before you consider
the time saving of a 'direct' connection over a USB one.

In the case of the Hummy, when the time factor is the only
consideration, I'd estimate that you'd be looking at transferring a
minimum of 4 hour's worth of BBC programmes before you see any
benefit.

Obviously, this figure goes up if the 'hassle factor' is also being
taken into account, which might require a doubling or tripling up of
the amount of data being transferred to justify this course of action.

In the Toppy case, the figures are simply doubled for the amounts of
programme material being transferred. I simply wouldn't entertain any
thoughts of pulling the drive out for just 7 or 8 hours of programme
material and only perhaps start considering the choice with 10 to 14
hour's worth. I'd need to be looking at a good 20 hour's worth or more
before pulling the drive remains the only sensible option.

Since I very rarely avail myself of the toppy as a means of resolving
scheduling conflicts, it's very rare indeed that I find myself
transferring more than an hour's worth at a time. Indeed, it's likely
to be even rarer since we acquired an AKAI LC24G77D 24 inch DVD Combo
TV from TJ Hughes (the last one in stock, as it happened) for the
bedroom just yesterday. It has a usb port which, unlike the usb port
on the back of the 19 inch LG TV we bought for the kitchen dining room
a couple of years back, _does_ support playback of (admittedly, a very
limited number of) video file formats and, quite usefully, allows the
TV to act as a basic PVR (including Live TV pause function). I'll be
able to avail myself of this feature next time I have to resolve any
scheduling conflicts.

Unfortunately for those looking for a recommendation for a "Bedroom
TV" (it's an ideal choice IMHO[1]), it appears to be end of line (all
too common for product older than 6 months in this market segment) and
was being sold at a "Sale Price" of £140 by TJ Hughes (the only 'High
Street Shop' selling it).

Googling for a better price option only produced e-tailer prices
ranging from 149 to 199 quid on a set with an original RRP of 299
quid. I was lucky to get hold of it when I did (a telephone enquirey
less than an hour before we (the XYL and I) got to the shop elicited
the information that they had two of them in stock).

The problem with TJ Hughes is that they won't reserve goods for you
when you contact them (phone or internet) so you have to take your
chances if you need to make a special trip. In this case, it was a
choice between nipping over to the shop either before or after the
XYL's 1:15pm medical appointment. If we'd left it til afterwards, it's
almost certain we'd have been accepting a poxy 5% discount on the shop
display model (assuming no one else had snaffled it).

I figure that if I'm forced to buy a severely compromised TV set
(lack of "Freeview HD"(tm) tuner on a 24 inch 1080p Full HD TV set
being one ludicrous compromise, the other being the very limited video
formats that could be played back via the usb port), then it aught, at
the very least, be at the most commensurate price. I couldn't find
anything else in this class for less than 150 quid plus P&P.

[1] What makes this model an ideal bedroom TV is the depth of the
cabinet due to the presence of the DVD drive allowing for a decent
enough sound quality (reminiscent somewhat of the Lo-Fi sound typical
of a CRT set, now elevated by comparison with that of the typical
slimline LCD TV into Hi-Fi status) that the addition of a cheap pair
of PC speakers is no longer a mandatory requirement (as we discovered
to our disgust with that 19 inch LG set when we set it up in the
kitchen - sadly, typical of all such slimline designs).

Hats off to Akai for very sensibly using the DVD drive as an excuse
to fatten up the whole of the set to benefit the quality of sound from
the built in speakers. Nearly all such "Combo TV" sets I'd looked at
in Currys et al, had simply accomodated the drive by an add on lump to
the back of an otherwise bog standard slimline case.
--
Regards, J B Good

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

Andy Champ wrote:
On 09/04/2013 14:06, Steve Thackery wrote:
Brian Gaff wrote:

Limited cycle connector?
Are they really that bad then?

Yes. 50 cycles, isn't it?


Why would it be more? How often do you replace the disc in your PC?

Andy
We used to say that the aerial sockets on some tellies were designed to
be connected once and disconnected once.

Bill

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:15:02 +0100, Andy Champ wrote:

Take the disk out of the 9200 and connect it to the PC.
Then use the Humaxrw software from he
http://humaxdisk.wikispaces.com/HumaxRW

This is a whole lot less grief than trying to get the ****ty USB stuff
to work. It's also at least 10 times faster in terms of transfer rate.

Process 1: Plug in USB cable. Perform slow transfer. Unplug USB cable.

Slow, unreliable transfer which may or may not complete without errors.

Process 2: Extract HUMAX from under TV. Dismantle. Unplug disc cable,
carefully counting how many times I unplug this limited-cycle connector.
Dismantle PC to expose disc bus. Connect disc. Perform fast transfer.
Disconnect disc. Reassemble PC and put back in proper place. Replace
disc in hummy, replace lid, put back under TV & reconnect.

Use a IDE-USB adapter and you don't need to take the PC to bits.
I was using a laptop in any case, so it had to be USB.

I wonder how much you have to be transferring before it's worth it?

Not much in my case. Doing it the USB way invariably ended up with
corrupt files or failed transfers and I ended up trying one at least
3 times before giving up and resolving never to waste my time again
on such junk.

The first time I tried it, it was about 10 minutes overhead to get
the disk out. The second time was about half that.
The third time was to transfer everything off in preparation for
using the new HDR-T2, which is a much more useful thing with the
customised firmware.
What would have taken a solid 2-3 days was accomplished in a handful
of hours.

I don't advocate doing this sort of thing every day, but it is
certainly the most time effective way for more than about 1 or 2
programmes.

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

On Tue, 9 Apr 2013 13:57:29 +0100, "Paul D Smith"
wrote:

OTOH, there was a "hardware hack" where someone essentially created a "T"
from a USB/IDE adapter to the disk. Using the Humax in "offline" mode to
provide just power, and then the tools to read the disk via the USB
apparently worked quite well and avoided all the issues you raise.

And from my experience, the standard USB interface was expletive deleted
and normally took a number of attempts to download even a relatively short
program. When I upgraded I copied the stuff I hadn't yet watched off my
9200 but a single movie took over 8 hours to copy because of the number of
failure/restarts required. I didn't care because I had it just sat on a
table doing nothing else but it would not have been practical if it was my
"live" system.

Paul DS.

I still use a Humax 9200 and very little trouble transferring programmes
to a PC.

My method is

1. Set the box to a text-only channel so as to minimise demand on the
9200's limited computing capacity.

2. If the programme is a long one split it into approx. half-hour
sections.

3. Use Andy Chappell's Humax PVR2000T Media Controller on the PC to do
the transfer. I avoid having other applications running on the PC that
might grab processing or disc transfer capacity.

4. Join the sections of a split programme back together using VideoReDo
TVSuite.


--
Peter Duncanson
(in uk.tech.digital-tv)

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

Peter Duncanson wrote:

1.
2.
3.
4.

That's what I did with my 9200, except I didn't find the need to split
the programmes into half-hour segments.

BUT - surely it's time to think about retiring your faithful old 9200
and getting something that supports HD.

--
SteveT

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

On 09/04/2013 19:50, Steve Thackery wrote:
Peter Duncanson wrote:

1.
2.
3.
4.

That's what I did with my 9200, except I didn't find the need to split
the programmes into half-hour segments.

BUT - surely it's time to think about retiring your faithful old 9200
and getting something that supports HD.

That's fair enough, but of course whatever HD PVR he gets it won't be
possible to transfer HD recordings to a computer, only SD ones.

--

Jeff

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:00:36 +0100, Jeff Layman
wrote:

BUT - surely it's time to think about retiring your faithful old 9200
and getting something that supports HD.

That's fair enough, but of course whatever HD PVR he gets it won't be
possible to transfer HD recordings to a computer, only SD ones.

Huh? Why not?
I've got HD stuff playing on the PC which was recorded on my T2.

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

On 09/04/2013 21:46, Paul Ratcliffe wrote:
On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:00:36 +0100, Jeff Layman
wrote:

BUT - surely it's time to think about retiring your faithful old 9200
and getting something that supports HD.

That's fair enough, but of course whatever HD PVR he gets it won't be
possible to transfer HD recordings to a computer, only SD ones.

Huh? Why not?
I've got HD stuff playing on the PC which was recorded on my T2.

I've always understood that copyright provisions meant that HD recording
were encrypted at the PVR end, and were not transferable to a PC. Does
your T2 transfer without difficulty as I've just seen this at
http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywi...ax-hdr-fox-t2/


"Apparently the Humax box encrypts recordings it makes itself, so you
can’t get those off by FTP. You can copy SD (non-HD) recordings to a USB
stick and take the files elsewhere, but not HD recordings. One way round
this that doesn’t involve mucking around with the Humax’s firmware is to
use something called Foxy. This doesn’t break the encryption itself,
rather it modifies an HD recording so you can copy it back onto the
Humax and the Humax box will then decrypt it when you copy it off again."

Are you using Foxy or modified firmware?

--

Jeff

Humax 9200 and Windows 8
 

Paul Ratcliffe wrote:

I've got HD stuff playing on the PC which was recorded on my T2.

But presumably you're using that custom firmware which includes a
decrypter?

--
SteveT