Hi Chaps & Chappess?
Could some one spoon feed me on how on earth we transfer files files from the HDR unit to a USB hard drive.(had to delete some program as getting low on space).

I need the procedure's on how to do it as the user guide isn't that clear. out of ten attempts I've manage it once but don't know how.

Had the FoxSat for coming up to 3 weeks now and no problems as of yet.
Any help we be most helpful.
Happy New Year!!!!!!

Right then Jazz here goes:-

Switch on, flip down front flap, insert USB device. A message should pop up on screen saying 'A USB device has been connected' or something similair.

Press the 'Media' button on your handset and then press 'Opt+' and select 'File manager'

You should now see a table with your HDD listed on the left and your USB listed on the right. Navigate to the right and open up the root folder normally called 'sda', you could now press blue and create a new folder if you want, if not then navigate to the right hand HDD side, if you only want to copy one program, highlight it and the green 'Copy' icon should light up, press it.

If you want to copy a few then before pressing green, press yellow to enter edit mode and put check marks next to all the things you want to copy (be aware you can't choose individual programs held within folders without first coming out of edit mode, entering the folder and then going back into edit mode.

When you're done choosing again press green to copy, a little message appears at the bottom of the screen to give you some idea of how it's going.

That's it you're done, hope this helps.

HNY

S

Has anyone tried the reverse of this :

As in, download a HD TV rip like a 'x264' .mkv video file and upload it to the HDR

Will the HDR play it back ?

If not what formats does it playback ?

It won't work. As well as a .ts file the foxsat has two other files (one fixed size containing programme details -title etc and the other a variable size file having at a guess chapter and navigation data). Without these files the foxsat won't play even a native .ts video file

But presumably if someone could work out (or get from Humax) the specs of these additional files it would be a relatively simple job to code a utility to create the files and then you could perhaps play some files?

Absolutely but so far no one appears to have figured this out (If you have please post you will be a hero). The fixed size file looks very easy as it simply contains ascii text which you can read with any file dump software. The other one is a different kettle of fish and Humax unlike Topfield don't release this type of info. For example the Topfield freeview .rec files are fully documented by Topfield and within days Video Redo could write the Toppy file header and then you could upload your own video. Some have tried changing just the .ts file and renaming it to match and not surprisingly failed to make it work. It would be interesting however to substitute a different .ts file of exactly the same size and see what happens

Edit:- Just read my typing and the HDD is the LEFT not the RIGHT side as I stated, quite foolishly!!

I have tried with VideoRedo and put a file back (after advert removal) with exactly the same name as the original.
VideoRedo says file format is the same but the HDR just plays it back as a mess

Automan.

Try exporting the original file without editing and see if this works. If the two files are the same size and the new one does not work it's not to difficult to check them byte for byte with a bit of programming to find what's different. Excel will do this fine using vba

They are not ASCII - the two .nts and .hmt files are binary. Screenshots of the hex and ASCII dumps are available here, if anyone interested: hmt and nts.

The .hmt file above contains mainly only ascii text and a load of padding bytes of 00Hex. It can't be a coincidence that every non zero byte after the opening block converts to a text string relevant to the recording.

The two I looked at also contained a complete ascii of the full programme information text
Last edited by grahamlthompson : 02-01-2009 at 16:15

But they are NOT ASCII files... If you create or edit the files using a text editor, they will not be read by the HDR... Sure, what you might think as relevant info might be just text strings... but the other bits in the file is just as important... hence there is a differentiation from ASCII and binary files and info...

I totally disagree with this interpration. All files saved are binary they contain a series of bytes containing the Hex nos 00 to FF. (Be they ascii, executable machine code or any other form of data). It's the programme that opens the files that decides what the information means. In this case it's obvious that this information is interpretable as ascii code. If you have text editor capable of generating asci 00H (nul) you could write a text file and save it and it would look just the same in a file dump. Similary you could open the .hmt file and read the text in a text editor with the 00H characters displayed as whatever the editor uses for non printing characters. The hmt file does not even have any delimiting characters so must consist of a series of fixed size text blocks with unused characters having 00H as padding. I am prepared to bet that you could change any of the text and write it back and it will still work. Provide your own programme description for example. You could easily read this info byte by byte into an excel spreadsheet modify the text and write the file back and it will still work

Hopefully I'll get some time to sit down this evening with a load of HMT files and see if I can make any sense of the format. Had a quick look through the NTS file for JPEG & GIF image data and couldn't see any at a quick glance - but not ripped that apart yet either.

But I would say that the HMT file is binary - chars 4 & 5 are 01 01 which is not a valid ASCII character. The 7th & 15th chars are identical non-ASCII (within the file) in the 6 files I'm looking at.

Agreed the first few bytes in the .hmt file have data that can't be intelligible text. But the remainder of the file has recognisable text followed by bytes of 00H until the next text block appears. These blocks are the same size in all .hmt files and all .hmt files are the same size.

It woud be interesting to look at the .nts file before the thumbnails are written and after. (This should give a clue how the thumbnail chapter graphics are stored). As this file gets bigger as the recorded programme length gets longer it seems very likely that it will contain chapter navigation data (and thumbnail images).
At a guess chapter locations will be held in 4 bytes of data (hours:minutes:seconds:frames) with the frame count going from 0 to 24

Had a quick play over the weekend.
Will try and get my assumed basic structure online somewhere soon.

What I'd really like is the format of the HDF firmware update file (I see the latest has some HTML in there) and would like to see what else they have included (I know some of the Broadcom based routers use CramFS)) as with a MIPS32 cross-compiler it might be interesting to see if we can push some of our own binaries onto the box. Would definately like a webserver with streaming support so I could stream the files straight off. Which is were finding out what the format of the hmt files comes in - so we could do a web version of the Media menu.

The thumbnails are kept on the internal HDD (in . folders), see here: http://foxsatdisk.wikispaces.com/The+HDR+filesystem

Why not just put it on a DVD and play via a DVD player?

What data rate do you get when transfering files to an external HDD?? I transfered a 2.5G file in 14 minutes! that equates to 3MBps or 24Mbps! certainly not High speed USB 2.0 almost as bad as my 9200T USB transfer to a PC.

Hi leeboy I've just done a test with a usb stick and using a 1 hour SD prog 1.96GB and transfered in 7mins 20secs then I repeated the exercise but this time tuned to a channel that wasn't transmitting (BBC4) and managed a still pathetic 6 mins 5secs.

Parking the tuner on a dormant channel obviously eradicates the hdd buffering and so speeds up the transfer proccess, But yes it's still pityful

Try transfering a file to the same stick with a pc, the bottleneck is likely the write speed of the usb stick not the Foxsat.

laptop to usb took 4mins using same files graham and the same for laptop to Archos

No, it isn't Hi-speed USB, and I have stated this before. The average HDR USB speed I get is 3.5MB/s. It is faster than the 9200T! And some of us can tell you that this is a big step already... But USB transfer on the HDR is slow - and hence my eSATA HDD mod main purpose for transferring recordings...

Thanks for all your replies. To be honest the HDR transfer is better than the 9200T especially when it comes to reliability! and yes is a big step . Just wish it was faster, I may opt for the eSata mod!

When I have some time I will try transferring a file using the foxsat usb port and the same file direct from the drive by usb and let you know (I have foxsat HDD in external caddy). I will have to use linux to access drive directly in caddy so this may affect results