Team Summit Discussion Thread

[Scorpion.sting]

I had the channels in my channel lineup and I turned it to NGHD and bam lost it.

 

[nazz]

So far NGHD has been 4:3, zoomed/cropped 16x9 SD, and stretch-o-vision.

Okay....thanks. I didn't realize they were going to do the zoom,crop, stretch thing since they also had the SD 4x3. I figured they'd do one or the other with their SD.

 

[John Kotches]

John, the "sufficient bandwidth with USB2" that you speak of: Does that include HD streams? From the screenshot, it appears as though most of the programming recorded there is SD.

480 Megabits/second aggregate on USB2. It would take multiple (2-3 depending on bit rate) HD streams to utilize 10% of the aggregate available bandwidth.

Thanks! Here's hoping the Alpha and Beta testing achieve bueno results and doesn't require mucho, if any, tweaking.[/QUOTE]

Most of the real issues will have nothing to do with the external storage and everything to do with protecting the content from duplication.

Cheers,

 

[Purogamer]

I don't see any way Dish will be allowed to let you take external storage to more than one box. Certain Hollywood types would be in an uproar. Sure the user can think of legitimate reasons to do this, but that doesn't matter.

If you send back a 622, and hook up the USB drive to the new 622, it probably auto-formats and marries itself to the new 622.

 

[abricko]

I am happy to see external storage and I hope it goes well I'd like to see that before fall season begins... HOWEVER with that, we'll need a better way to manage / display recorded content... the simple list dish menu provides is lame... I strongly URGE dish to look at a TIVO menu, the ONLY thing I miss is the lack of grouping recordings into a folder, for instance if I record conan every day, it'd be nice to have a Conan folder which contanis all 5 episodes so when i sit to watch them on saturday i can easily see how many there are...

Also the external storage drive will most likely be EFS (linux filesystem) and the recordings on that drive will all be encoded so that's what they can tell their content providers if they are worried about security...

I'm stoaked, I'll buy a 750gig drive and build an enclosure, or pick up a terra station, I just hope it's not only going to work with a E* branded enclosure, but if it is, it looks like (maybe) they'll at least provide a 500gig drive.

 

[nazz]

This 500 GB USB external storage for the 622 is exciting stuff. I'll have to wait and see what they want from our wallets but it would be great to have.

 

[John Kotches]

I don't see any way Dish will be allowed to let you take external storage to more than one box. Certain Hollywood types would be in an uproar. Sure the user can think of legitimate reasons to do this, but that doesn't matter.

If you send back a 622, and hook up the USB drive to the new 622, it probably auto-formats and marries itself to the new 622.

I have no problem with a special procedure required to relock a drive to a new 622.

My issue is that if your 622 fails in service, with no way to relock the drive you lose all the content.

Regards,

 

[HokieEngineer]

480 Megabits/second aggregate on USB2. It would take multiple (2-3 depending on bit rate) HD streams to utilize 10% of the aggregate available bandwidth.

Thanks! Here's hoping the Alpha and Beta testing achieve bueno results and doesn't require mucho, if any, tweaking.

Most of the real issues will have nothing to do with the external storage and everything to do with protecting the content from duplication.

Cheers

Exactly, there should be no bandwidth limitations with usb2. I can send an entire 50Mbit transponder mux across usb2 no problem (although it eats up about 9% of a p4 3GHz to process the incoming data!)

 

[Purogamer]

I forgot the big question just mentioned, Do we buy an E* enclosure and have the ability to put any drive (any brand/size) in it, or are we stuck overpaying for whatever size/brand charlie can make the most money from?

If we don't have choice over size or brand, this loses a star for me. Doesn't e* use maxtor drives? Ugh...500gb I can live with, but i'd prefer to buy something besides maxtor, especially since you know it'll cost a lot more to buy it from E* than from newegg...

and god help us if they sell us these things with refurbished hard drives, i'll blow a gasket...

 

[hzhao]

I am sure htat you will be stuck with whatever they put inside. That's where the profit will be. I am sure the drive has to content some special "firmware" in order to work with the ViP unit.......

 

[lakebum431]

No, I think we'll be able to use any USB drives. When it is connected to the STB it will format the drive correctly.

 

[Purogamer]

Hopefully scott sees this and gets someone to shed some light on it...

 

[nazz]

No, I think we'll be able to use any USB drives. When it is connected to the STB it will format the drive correctly.

That would be very, very cool. :up :up :up

 

[Poke]

Has Anyone Heard what he next roll out of Local HD Channels will be ???

 

[TNGTony]

After the Dish500+ and Dish 1000+ are distributed. My guess is shortly after June 15

Tony

 

[mike123abc]

I can see the USB being bandwidth limited. Even if the spec is 480mbit/sec how much could the 622 really handle? There are lots of other places that limits appear. How fast is the bus that the USB port sits on? What does it share bandwidth with? How fast is the processor? What is the driver like? How about the file system overhead? So many places the transfer rate could get bogged down.

The VIP can do 5 streams at once (record 3, playback 2), potentially approaching 100mbit/sec, but how much could they get through the USB? This is probably why you have to "move" a program there. There will probably be a limitation of only 2 connections to the drive, and you probably can only watch one show while "moving" another (i.e. you cannot watch 2 streams while moving programs, you have to stop viewing on one or perhaps even both).

You have to remember people will expect to be able to move programs and watch them from the external drive while simultaniously recording 3 programs to the main drive... This is a lot of work for a box designed for low low cost...

 

[Poke]

We one thing that I would have done is not only put USB port but also a FireWire port..

 

[NightRyder]

We one thing that I would have done is not only put USB port but also a FireWire port..

They probably had too many bad memories from the 921 fiasco.


Nightryder

 

[John Kotches]

I can see the USB being bandwidth limited. Even if the spec is 480mbit/sec how much could the 622 really handle? There are lots of other places that limits appear. How fast is the bus that the USB port sits on?

It's PCI, even at 33 MHz with a 32-bit depth it far exceeds the data rate of USB 2.0.

What does it share bandwidth with?

It being the USB bus? It's on a PCI interface, so it isn't going to be sharing with much ;-)

How fast is the processor?

All of the heavy lifting is done by ASICs. Heavy lifting == decoding. Pass the data from spindle through memory to the ASIC is not a CPU intensive task.

What is the driver like? How about the file system overhead?

It's Linux, not windows so the driver will be efficient and the file system has dramatically less overhead than NTFS.

The VIP can do 5 streams at once (record 3, playback 2), potentially approaching 100mbit/sec, but how much could they get through the USB?

Enough. There's no contention on the USB bus, and as such you can get very close to theoretical bus limits.

This is probably why you have to "move" a program there. There will probably be a limitation of only 2 connections to the drive, and you probably can only watch one show while "moving" another (i.e. you cannot watch 2 streams while moving programs, you have to stop viewing on one or perhaps even both).

It will boil down to DRM and the number of copies you have of the program. If you copy you now have two versions of the program stored. The paranoia of the content providers think's that is 2 too many, but they can live with one

You have to remember people will expect to be able to move programs and watch them from the external drive while simultaniously recording 3 programs to the main drive... This is a lot of work for a box designed for low low cost...

And ASICs are incredibly efficient these days. Most of this work isn't hitting anything but the CPU core once it's come off the spindle.

Also, unless you're moving programs constantly through the recordings, your copies will run only for a small portion of the time.

 

[ralfyguy]

Scott, the things I'm more worried about is if there's any word there about the bugs in the 622, and the 129 (E5) satellite. Is there any news about that? They're talking about all that nice stuff that's to come, nothing wrong with that. But did you hear anything about the problems they have with some stuff and how to fix them?
Also I would like to know how much bigger the 1000.2 is compared to the old 1000, and if it's worth it to swap. Or is the 1000.2 the "FIX" for 129?