Rather a long post so if you are not interested in upgrading PVR80 with a bigger disk and/or copying recordings to a PC, move along.
I bought a Digihome PVR80 from CPC for £65 on the recommendation of a work colleague. Although a return and missing a manual, it worked perfectly. After using it for a while I realised that it had completely changed the way I watch TV - no more adverts! I now record anything that looks interesting and watch the recording, skipping adverts and other unwanted content as I go. I was particularly impressed by the firmware which was just a pleasure to use (I had given up using my VHS recorder because I just could not remember how to programme it and did not have a child in the house to help).
Soon I had filled the disk and began to think that a larger disk would be good. I consulted my friend Google and soon found that I was not alone in wanting to do this. I found the following links helpful and would like to thank all the contributors for their efforts and for taking the time to document the findings.
Useful links on digital spy
General http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/f...play.php?f=171
Upgrading disk http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...6&page=1&pp=25
Copy to PC http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...d.php?t=538347
and information regarding upgrading firmware http://www.pvruk.co.uk/reviews.cfm?a...0%20,%20PVR160
and of great help this http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/vestel/digihome.htm
Having read everything I could find I concluded that the recorder was unlikely to support disks bigger that 160 GB and that using the same disk as in the PVR160 model was the safest way to go. I did not want to waste money on a succession of non working disks - there is a limit to the number of disks that 'will come in handy later'. I selected a Western Digital Caviar 160.0GB UDMA100 bought for £35 from DABS link I was ordering some other parts so the delivery charges were shared across several items.
Replacement of the disk was very straightforward. The original was set to CS so I left the new disk as supplied set to CS. Switched on and the unit asked if I wanted to format the disk so I selected yes and a few minutes later it was ready. All the previously selected channels were still there as they are stored in some form of flash memory and the unit was ready to use. The unit worked perfectly, recorded programs and played them back OK. The disk does not appear to be any noisier than the original as far as i can tell. I did take the opportunity to install the disk the 'correct' way up but mostly on aesthetic grounds - I have not seen any overheating problem with either the original or new disk so although I did consider adding a fan, I have not done so.
So, a palpable success!
After a few days I was sure I did not need to replace the original disk and was about to reformat it for another project when I realised that there were a couple of recorded programs I would quite like to watch and that it would be an interesting challenge to see if they could be recovered and recorded on DVD. The one proviso was that I did not want to spend any money on this and would only use already available bits and applications. I had to hand both a Windows PC and an external USB disk box which would handle PATA disks so I put the original disk (a Samsung drive) in the disk box and connected it to the PC. I could of course connect the disk directly to the PC motherboard if you have a spare ATA connector but that would have required taking the PC to bits which I preferred to avoid.
The disk showed up but of course could not be read by the OS so I avoided formatting it and looked for some suitable drivers. First I tried Win2fs http://win2fs.sourceforge.net/index.shtml but this does not work on my Windows 2003 Server machine. As an alternative I tried ext2fds http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/proje...ts.htm#ext2fsd which appears to be a fairly mature, open source project offering support for a fairly wide range of operating systems. TIP - download the exe version for the simplest installation procedure. Having started ext2fds (no need to restart Windows) I mounted the two partitions and assigned them drive letters X (the 200MB index) and Y (the 60 GB video). Each recording consists of a folder containing sequential 188 MB .trp files. I ignored all the index information and concentrated on the MPEG2 video files.
At this stage I copied all the files from the old disk to the PC to ensure that that nothing was lost whilst playing around with the files. On my PC and with a full disk, this took 45 minutes. I then removed the original disk.
Next I needed to turn the video into something useful. I had little success in playing the ,trp files directly with the usual suspects but I had previously used MPEG StreamClip from Squared5 http://www.squared5.com/ on the Mac for this sort of thing with great success but suspected that most people would be more interested in a PC based solution. Conveniently there is a new version of MPEG StreamClip for Windows which supports .trp files.
Nearly there now! Download MPEG StreamClip and install the alternative Quicktime element which is needed for MPEG2 data - read the documentation on the site for details. Now start MPEG StreamClip and from the List menu select Batch List and convert to MPEG with MP2 audio - check the join file checkbox. (Choose the appropriate format for your requirements.) This will produce a concatenated video file which can either be played on the PC or written to DVD with a suitable DVD authoring application. I used Nero, but almost anything should work.
Job done - I would not consider doing this on a regular basis, but when upgrading the disk or for some very special content one wanted to preserve, then it may be worthwhile.
Hope that this helps others. NB My Digihome box had previously been updated to the V5.3 firmware offair.
In hindsight I would have copied the existing information from the original disk to my PC, put the new disk in the Digihome and let it format it, removed the new disk and connected it to the PC and copied the original contents onto it before replacing it in the Digihome. I think that this would allow the upgrading of the disk without loosing any of the existing recordings. In this case you need a writable ext2 driver so use ext2fds. There is nothing lost if this doesn't work other than a couple of hours of time - you can always format the disk again. It is possible that the lost+found directory in each of the partititions that this process will generate could casue a problem!
I bought a Digihome PVR80 from CPC for £65 on the recommendation of a work colleague. Although a return and missing a manual, it worked perfectly. After using it for a while I realised that it had completely changed the way I watch TV - no more adverts! I now record anything that looks interesting and watch the recording, skipping adverts and other unwanted content as I go. I was particularly impressed by the firmware which was just a pleasure to use (I had given up using my VHS recorder because I just could not remember how to programme it and did not have a child in the house to help).
Soon I had filled the disk and began to think that a larger disk would be good. I consulted my friend Google and soon found that I was not alone in wanting to do this. I found the following links helpful and would like to thank all the contributors for their efforts and for taking the time to document the findings.
Useful links on digital spy
General http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/f...play.php?f=171
Upgrading disk http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...6&page=1&pp=25
Copy to PC http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...d.php?t=538347
and information regarding upgrading firmware http://www.pvruk.co.uk/reviews.cfm?a...0%20,%20PVR160
and of great help this http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/vestel/digihome.htm
Having read everything I could find I concluded that the recorder was unlikely to support disks bigger that 160 GB and that using the same disk as in the PVR160 model was the safest way to go. I did not want to waste money on a succession of non working disks - there is a limit to the number of disks that 'will come in handy later'. I selected a Western Digital Caviar 160.0GB UDMA100 bought for £35 from DABS link I was ordering some other parts so the delivery charges were shared across several items.
Replacement of the disk was very straightforward. The original was set to CS so I left the new disk as supplied set to CS. Switched on and the unit asked if I wanted to format the disk so I selected yes and a few minutes later it was ready. All the previously selected channels were still there as they are stored in some form of flash memory and the unit was ready to use. The unit worked perfectly, recorded programs and played them back OK. The disk does not appear to be any noisier than the original as far as i can tell. I did take the opportunity to install the disk the 'correct' way up but mostly on aesthetic grounds - I have not seen any overheating problem with either the original or new disk so although I did consider adding a fan, I have not done so.
So, a palpable success!
After a few days I was sure I did not need to replace the original disk and was about to reformat it for another project when I realised that there were a couple of recorded programs I would quite like to watch and that it would be an interesting challenge to see if they could be recovered and recorded on DVD. The one proviso was that I did not want to spend any money on this and would only use already available bits and applications. I had to hand both a Windows PC and an external USB disk box which would handle PATA disks so I put the original disk (a Samsung drive) in the disk box and connected it to the PC. I could of course connect the disk directly to the PC motherboard if you have a spare ATA connector but that would have required taking the PC to bits which I preferred to avoid.
The disk showed up but of course could not be read by the OS so I avoided formatting it and looked for some suitable drivers. First I tried Win2fs http://win2fs.sourceforge.net/index.shtml but this does not work on my Windows 2003 Server machine. As an alternative I tried ext2fds http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/proje...ts.htm#ext2fsd which appears to be a fairly mature, open source project offering support for a fairly wide range of operating systems. TIP - download the exe version for the simplest installation procedure. Having started ext2fds (no need to restart Windows) I mounted the two partitions and assigned them drive letters X (the 200MB index) and Y (the 60 GB video). Each recording consists of a folder containing sequential 188 MB .trp files. I ignored all the index information and concentrated on the MPEG2 video files.
At this stage I copied all the files from the old disk to the PC to ensure that that nothing was lost whilst playing around with the files. On my PC and with a full disk, this took 45 minutes. I then removed the original disk.
Next I needed to turn the video into something useful. I had little success in playing the ,trp files directly with the usual suspects but I had previously used MPEG StreamClip from Squared5 http://www.squared5.com/ on the Mac for this sort of thing with great success but suspected that most people would be more interested in a PC based solution. Conveniently there is a new version of MPEG StreamClip for Windows which supports .trp files.
Nearly there now! Download MPEG StreamClip and install the alternative Quicktime element which is needed for MPEG2 data - read the documentation on the site for details. Now start MPEG StreamClip and from the List menu select Batch List and convert to MPEG with MP2 audio - check the join file checkbox. (Choose the appropriate format for your requirements.) This will produce a concatenated video file which can either be played on the PC or written to DVD with a suitable DVD authoring application. I used Nero, but almost anything should work.
Job done - I would not consider doing this on a regular basis, but when upgrading the disk or for some very special content one wanted to preserve, then it may be worthwhile.
Hope that this helps others. NB My Digihome box had previously been updated to the V5.3 firmware offair.
In hindsight I would have copied the existing information from the original disk to my PC, put the new disk in the Digihome and let it format it, removed the new disk and connected it to the PC and copied the original contents onto it before replacing it in the Digihome. I think that this would allow the upgrading of the disk without loosing any of the existing recordings. In this case you need a writable ext2 driver so use ext2fds. There is nothing lost if this doesn't work other than a couple of hours of time - you can always format the disk again. It is possible that the lost+found directory in each of the partititions that this process will generate could casue a problem!
When I said I'd read "quite a lot" I should have remembered how many other brands that included - the disk under-usage referred, I think, to one of the others.