Hi i am new here so please bear with me! i Have a Digital Stream PVR Model DHR 820 xU
500GB The problem iam having is copying to a memory stick 32GB i keep getting a message saying can't format stick needs to be 160GB or greater? while i understand what the message is saying it seems rather strange to request a larger memory stick my friends PVR has no problem copying to a 32GB memory stick.. My PVR is linux OS and uses a variant of linux (XFS) need a work around so I can use a 32GB meory stick kinds of defeats the object using a higher capcity memory stick when all i want to is copy some programmes to a memory stick freeing up the main PVR HDD TIA

Does your friend have exactly the same make and model of PVR, with exactly the same version of firmware as yours? If not then you can't compare the two.

It might be some odd bit of coding with the firmware in which case I doubt there is anyway round it. Maybe the USB ports expect to see a hard drive and not a memory stick?

HI Thanks for your quick reply! in answer to your questions my friends pvr is a humax and obviously uses different software. MIT London who designed the software updates (which has now ceased) for the digital stream pvr's told me a 32GB device would be ok. Which it clearly isn't. now i have question if i can format the memory stick on a linx pc using the variant XFS would this then be accepted by my pvr and overide the capcity error message remembering the message stated can't format device needs to be >160GB
thanks again

You may find this some help...

A couple of references regarding USB, one stating more success with v2.0 and a list of compatible/non compatible USB'S

Section 3 says - External HDD must be 160GB or larger and will be formatted to XFS by the DHR

http://www.avforums.com/threads/digi...8206u.1362337/

One thing that I notice from the link in Deacon1972's post is that for software upgrades they say use a USB stick formatted with FAT32 file system. So I'm just wondering if this would also work for copying recordings?

Though if the stick already is in FAT32 that kind of rules that out. But might be worth checking.

Can't really say if formatting it on a Linux PC will work or not. If you have easy access to a Linux PC then certainly no harm trying. But it may depend on what, if anything, that the PVR does with the drive alongside the formatting.

Are you using the Copy To function?

If you are this may have your answer

Copy To is used with an external drive (160GB+ Formatted by the DHR to XFS)
Currently only SD program recordings are allowed to be exported but the next release will add HD export. The HD programs will be encrypted for playback only on DS machine.
(professorhat's Invaluable Guide is FAQ 3)​

well the recordings re in sd and there is no more software updates being provided do have a digital stream pvr and what the current version of software i will post my version later and thanks for yuor reply been posting on another forum with little or no replys so thanks

it seems as though i cant edit my posts on here and i need to contact the support centre on here to make adjustments to my post, saying that though one of my previous posts i did manage to edit succesfully do you have to wait for a set time (mins) before posts can be edited? any way back on topic all the recordings i wanted to copy were in sd and i tried both copy and move to and still didn't work beecause of the formating problem
of my memory stick when trying to copy or move to the memeory stick it would try and copy or move to the external device but the capcity error message came on screen after 5 secs. as promised here is my software version: 4.14. r 8683 i have even emailed digital stream in america as it seems all support is now ceased a while back. trouble is I don't have a pc or know any one with a pc running on linux which i presume the memory stick also has to be formated FAT 32 but using the linux variant XFS I ma not 100% sure it would cure the error message but if the memory stick could be formated via a linux OS on a pc using XFS then the pvr would think it's been formated on the digital stream pvr so kind of fooling it some eaht but would it then still look at the capcity of the memory stick
and bring up a new error message due to the incorrect size of external memory device?
once again thanks for every ones replies

If you are attempting to copy TO the USB stick then I am afraid it wont work. The Digitalstream can only copy to devices with a capacity of 160Gb or larger and it insists on formatting the drive to XFS itself.

You cannot copy recordings, regardless of whether they are SD or HD, to a 32Gb USB stick regardless of what file system it is formatted with or the size of the recording.

Copy recordings is primarily designed for backup purposes, or to allow playback on other Digistream devices that were available at the time. It wasn't designed for PC archiving which, although possible, is a bit convoluted.

I'm afraid you are out of luck unless you have a USB device with 160Gb capacity or larger.

You should also know that the DS will request a reformat of the drive, regardless of the existing file system, so you will lose any data already on the drive if you allow it do format the drive. If you do not allow it to format the drive you will not be able to copy anything to it.

You only get a short time to edit posts, 15 minutes I think. After that time you cannot edit your posts.

Even if you format the USB stick to XFS it wont work, both for the reasons I mention above regarding it being less than 160Gb, but also because the DS doesn't just format the drive, it also creates other partitions on the drive for it's own use.

Thanks for the
info on the editing time on the forum cheers for the PVR info even though it's not good news. so fooling the pvr isnt going to work. now for plan B maplins electronics have a 1 terabyte hdd for £50 it was £5 more but they have lowered the price for a few weeks didn't really wanted a bigger hdd as i would only fill it up and wouldn't have the time
to watch everything on there. so what i am after is some external device that once i have copied off the pvr's hdd prgrammes i want to keep to be able to then copy off the external memory device obviously >160GB to a smaller 32GB memory stick can you get such a device? many thanks for you reply

Given the XFS file system the easiest way is to use a PC.

It would go like this:

Method 1:
Download a Linux Live CD, burn it to disc.
Boot your PC with the Live CD in the drive so that the Linux OS is loaded from the CD.
Copy the video files from the 160Gb drive to the PC. You need to make sure your Linux variant supports the existing file system on your PC, but 99% of them fully support Fat32 and NTFS anyway, but if you experience problems look at that issue first. If you do run into problems it's normally just a case of either activating NTFS support on the Live CD or installing NTFS drivers from a Linux repository.
Use one of the myriad of free converters to convert the video file to an appropriate format.
Copy the converted file onto your USB stick, which can be formatted as Fat32 or whatever.
Use the USB stik in other devices to play the file.

Method2:
Purchase one of the commercial packages that allows Windows to read XFS formatted drives. From memory there are only two available, one is called UFS Explorer and costs around 40Euros (which is around £30 give or take). It's designed primarily for data recovery so is really overkill for what you want, but fully supports XFS reading on Windows.
Copy files from the drive to your PC.
Convert the files to a more supported format if needed.
Copy to USB stick.
Play files from USB stick on another device.

You should be aware that HD files are encrypted, so although they can be copied to a PC you cannot actually do anything with them, you cannot even view them on a PC never mind convert them to another format. This is, unfortunately, a requirement of Freeview HD certification and not Digitalstream's fault.

SD files are unencrypted though and can be viewed, converted and/or copied willy nilly.

Sadly i don't own a pc. but thought of another possible way round thiis.
buy thie 1 terrabyte hdd from maplins which i was told could copy both ways ie: copy from the digital stream to the 1 terrabyte drive and vice versa is this correct?

if it is in therory couldn't i connect a 4 way usb adaptor to the external hdd and then plug a 32GB memory stick in to one of the spare usb ports that is connected to the external hdd and what ever has been copied from the digital stream to the external hdd
can then be copied from the external hdd (1 TB) to the memory stick?? again thanks for your help

And what exactly are you going to plug into this USB hub to control the copy process? The Digitalstream is very unlikely to do this. If it won't recognise a USB stick plugged directly into it it is very unlikely to recognise one plugged in via a USB hub. It is also possible that it can't handle more than one storage device plugged in to it at a time. It is not inconceivable that it won't even recognise the hard drive if it is plugged via a hub.

So you are going to need some sort of computing device that is able to recognise both drives and read and write data to whatever file systems they use to control the copy process.

And if it is not a daft question why do you want to copy stuff to USB sticks anyway? What are you planning to do with them?

Ok prehaps i wasn't clear enough! the mapins 1 terrabyte external hdd is obviously>160GB so this will be accepted by the my pvr which will then format the external hdd and i can then free up much needed space on my pvr.
the reason why i want to move series or single programmes to smaller memory devices is
i want to archive some programmes a bit like a dvd recorder that has a hdd bulit in so you record to the hdd then free up space on the dvd recorder's hdd and copy to disk so you can watch again and again if you wish!
The reason why i think it may work is because the external hdd (1 TB) according to maplins will copy both ways ie from my pvr to the external hdd and from external hdd back to my pvr so in therory is if i connect a 2/3/4 usb adaptor in to the external hdd
run a usb lead from the external hdd to my pvr the adpator will be connected to the external hdd and the spare ports (one of them) could be used once programmes are on the external hdd to export not back to the pvr (which iam told by maplis that it will work)
but to a 32GB memory stick after is this remotely possible that it could work??

Yes the Digitalstream will be able to copy files from it's internal drive to the external drive provided it can cope with that size of drive. It might even be able to copy files back from the external hard drive to it's internal drive. Though you have to factor in whether it likes having a USB hub in between it and the external drive.

But I have my doubts that it will copy from the external hard drive to a USB stick. Especially as it won't copy from the internal drive to a USB stick directly. So you would need some other device to handle the copying between hard drive and USB stick.

I'm also not entirely sure why you even need bother faffing about with copying to a USB stick anyway. The recordings are on the external hard drive so just play them back from there.

So the 1TB external hdd will just be a extension of the internal 500GB digitalstream hdd then? in the case of my friends humax pvr it will copy straight to a external device 32GB and may be also accept less than 32GB so you still might say why bother with it and again i say it gives the user the choice to archive programmes/series and free up space on the main huimax hdd which makes sense to me and that's all iam trying to do nothing strange about that unless there is another reason why the humax would accept a 32GB memory stick and what else it could be used for

The Humax runs a different operating system to the Digitalstream. Humax obviously decided that they would support USB sticks and Digitalstream chose not to. Effectively however the capacity of the external storage device is the only real difference between the two.

The external hard drive you plan to use with your Digitalstream can be thought of as just a very big USB stick. It will work in exactly the same way as a 32GB stick would on the Humax. You can move recordings off the Digitalstream internal drive onto the external drive to free up space on the internal drive in exactly the same way.

So I'm still not clear why you need to faff about with further copying the recordings to yet another storage medium? It's not the fact that you are trying to move recordings from the internal drive to an external drive that I question. It is just this whole thing about copying yet again to USB sticks that I don't get.

You've achieved the aim of freeing up primary storage space on the internal drive and have a secondary storage on the external drive. I really can't see why it makes any difference that it is a 1TB hard drive and not a 32GB USB memory stick. It is exactly the same end result surely?

The Humax box does support the use of a USB hub and multiple devices. USB sticks have to be supported as it's the way firmware updates are uploaded.

From the manual link in an earlier post it seems the OP's Digitalstream unit only accepts USB sticks for software upgrades. It doesn't accept them for copying off recordings. For that you need something larger than 160GB

Which I know to be true as MIT London who supplied the software updates would send me a usb memory stick with the new updates on it! it's clear though the parameters could have been lowered some what for copying purposes though only hacking the software would now solve this problem but that would be too technical for me.

As I said, the functionality to copy files off to an external HDD was for the purpose you want, namely to allow you to free up space on your PVR but still be able to play them back on the device later, or on another Digitalstream device.

Humax did things slightly differently, and allowed their machine to support smaller devices for copying onto. The Humax I believe also supports formatting to Fat32 formatted USB devices. It seems to me Humax decided to allow this for people to be able to archive stuff off to their PC and burn to DVD. That's the only reaasons I can thing of why Humax included that functionality.

The Digitalstream by contrast was never designed to do that.

Although both machines were based on the same basic platform, the Humax had a number of more advanced features such as supporting those smaller devices, DLNA support etc. which the Digitalstream did not have.

The DS supported USB sticks for firmware updates, and could also play back AVI files from a USB stick with a later firmware, but it cannot copy to one less than 160Gb.

But then the Digitalstream was £100 cheaper than the Humax at the time.

The ONLY way to do what you want is one of those methods I outlined earlier, namely via a PC/Mac or similar device. Without that you cannot do what you want to do.

Edit: There is another way actually, but it still requires a PC. Digitalstream added support for third party add ons in their last, or second to last firmware update. A user over at AVForums created an add on that allowed you to share the DS's hard drive as a Samba share on your home network, allowing you to copy files off the device onto a PC across the network. No need for an external HDD and no need to worry about how to deal with the XFS file format. But it still requires the use of a PC or Mac I am afraid.
Last edited by captainkremmen : 05-09-2014 at 16:51

There's no DLNA support on a vanilla Foxsat. The CF and one of the DLNA server packages is required. There's no DLNA client capability but it is possible to play back files from a NAS provided the required support files are created (Raydons AV2HDR)

I thought the OP was talking about the Humax Freeview recorder, the Fox T2 not the FoxSat?.

My mistake.

Hi i am back and need to run this idea to you guys. Iam going to get a Seagate hdd from amazon it's 500GB And costs around £35 will these unformated?
the main idea is to get stuff off the main digitalstream hdd which is should do as it meets the 160GB preferences made by the pvr.

As for the copying to a smaller external memory device I also have a Digisender
smart media box that runs on the Android OS (4.2.2) Has any one heard of the box or got one? the idea is when I have some programmes on the Seagate hdd
i then connect the Seagate to my smart media box and transfer some programmes via a file brower (there is already one installed on the box)
to the smart media box then from the smart media box insert a 32GB stick then using the file browser transfer to the memory stick!! Will this work?? TIA