Cliff

The card would have been in the slot when I did the transfers. The next time I do a transfer I'll try it with the card out.

Stoker

You're joking aren't you Rhubarbe?

I would find it near impossible to hook up my laptop if I had to pull the humax out and find a socket on the back. I guess I would have to leave a spare USB cable plugged in and lying round the side... seriously ugly.

I guess if you are going to have it permanently connected it would be more aesthetically pleasing though. Maybe they should have provided both.

Hear hear. Of course they should have provided both. And they should have stood up to Mr Hollywood and provided an ethernet port. There's one on the Tivo2 - made by Humax, and before anybody starts to go on about how hard it is to implement and the processor not being up to the job go here and look at the little processor in this job:

http://www1.linksys.com/products/pro...id=640&scid=43

Grr!

Umm that's got a 266MHz IXP420 in there hasn't it? That's actually quite a LOT of processor for an "embedded" application

Remember that in PVRs the "CPU" is often not that high a spec (often an ARM or a MIPS perhaps) as a lot of the silicon area is taken up with the MPEG2 gubbins.

Cliff

EDIT: OK, just realised that 266MHz is the operational limit for the CPU - it's actually clocked at 133MHz but that's still a fair amount of horse power

I for one think it's the best place for it, but what do I know I'm just an end user who thinks the Hummy is an excellent little machine.

Well, I leave the usb cable in all the time: it connects to my HTPC. At least I keep it connected. Mrs r MKII disconnects it, religiously.

@ Cliff

Dreambox DM500-T has a 250 MHz IBM PowerPC (350 Mips), but it manages a network interface, poor thing.

I tried this last night but ended up having to reboot both the Humax and laptop. Unfortunately I didn't have time to investigate further last night but I'll try again over the weekend and report back.

Stoker

But these things depend on the hardware/software split as to how relevant the CPU processing power is. For example you can implement and ethernet NIC using a simple I/O pin on an embedded CPU but the CPU then has to pedal VERY fast to wiggle the wires at 10Mb/100Mb! Or you can just lay down a piece of silicon to implement the NIC, program a few of its registers and leave it to it. The same goes for USB and most other interfaces.

So I guess I'm saying that a Toppy/9200's abilities to do USB "properly" may be realted to CPU horsepower or it may have very little to do with it.

Cliff

The answer is yes and no.

The CAM can only decrypt one stream at a time. Now if only one TUTV stream is being recorded then it can be decrypted and saved to disk in the clear. Where the CAM is unavailable, say because you are watching another TUTV channel at the time, it will be recorded encrypted.

So you end up with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted recordings, and the encrypted recordings expire when the keys change.

To work around the key change problem it is possible to make a copy of an encrypted recording, and end up with an unencrypted copy that doesn't expire.

This problem isn't unique to the 9200, the Toppy also has similar issues. Unfortunately unlike the Toppy the 9200 doesn't make it easy to tell whether a recording is encrypted or unencrypted, and so whether to make a copy. The only way I've found on the 9200 is to try replaying with the TUTV card out.

Unfortunately on my 9200 at least many of the recordings end up encrypted when they shouldn't be, say when recording from standby when the CAM should be free. I suspect there may be some bugs in the 9200 CAM management.

I've seen this message on 2 recordings of Jamie's Italy from C4, about half way through. There was nothing else recording at the time, or scheduled to record, although I believe Rome was scheduled to record afterwards on each occasion. Nothing appeared wrong with the recording however; I was able to watch it. I don't have a CAM/TUTV subscription.

Has anyone else seen this?

Is this via the USB port or can you do this in the machine. Forgive me if this is in the manual, but I don't remember reading it!

You make the copy on the machine. Start playback as normal, then press the record button which then makes a copy of what's playing.

If the original is encrypted it gets decrypted as it plays, and the copy is unencrypted.

Since you have to do the copy before the keys change it's only a partial workaround. e.g. You are away on holiday and can't make the copy in time. It would be much better if Humax did a better job with the CAM, automatically decrypting for you when the CAM is free (e.g. overnight).

Thanks for the info!

Cliff

I've just tried transferring, with the TUTV card out, a programme recorded off Discovery Real Time and I was able to watch it on the laptop so it looks as though it was unscrambled as it was recorded. However I've also found that some other programmes were recorded scrambled as all I get when I try to play them back on the Humax is a line of text across the screen saying that the programme is either scrambled or unavailable. I'm also pretty sure that these were also on Discovery Real Time and not recorded in parallel with anything else. Pretty confusing!

Stoker

Sorry if I have mislead anyone but I'm now definitely sure that the programmes in question WERE recorded in parallel. So not so confusing after all.

Stoker

Just found some strange behaviour - set box to tape Silent Witness (from UK Gold on TopUpTv) while tuned to another TopUp channel - TCM. The recording of Silent Witness has about 24 minutes missing in the middle - it jumps from 26 mins to 50 mins. What would cause this to happen? Any thoughts?