The 942 is HERE!

[shanewalker]

Off-center picture issue...

Scott, We have a 942 set up in the show room and was wondering if you are seeing the samething we are. To be honest I haven't had the time to go through the manual or check out the web. Here is the issues we are having. First we notice the picture is shifted to the left on the screen. (We are using the 34" DISH monitor.) I can't find anything in either menu to center the picture. Also the format is not working.

Are you seeing the same problems?

Thanks
Shawn

Don't have the 942, but I may have an inkling of what may be your problem. It might be your TV's DVI/HDMI setup, not the 942. My bedroom Samsung 26" HD set has DVI, and when we had Voom installed , I took advantage of that input. Well, I immediately noticed the same left shift of the picture when looking at the tuner through the DVI. I pondered, then I went into the TVs set-up for the DVI input on a lark, and saw that there are two DVI standards, SMPTE and something else (sorry, name escapes me. anyone? it was alpha-numeric jibberish--ER1183-H441 or something). It was set to SMPTE by default, and when I switched it to the other DVI standard, voila, the picture centered out perfectly.

Hope this helps.

 

[csschrot]

I don't remember seeing anything like that in the menu. However I will check it out when I get back to the office.

Thanks for the info shanewalker.

Shawn

 

[shanewalker]

Sure thing. Let us know if you get to the bottom of the issue. Hope the 942 turns out to be quite a decent box, as I may end up an E* customer one day. I almost was, but thought I'd give Voom a roll of the dice. Curious how the PQ of the HDD recordings hold up, what your archiving options are and whether Dish comes out with the Home solution (i.e. the handheld device and ability to watch in another room).

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Scott, I have a new 921 in a box, never opened, which I just haven't gotten around to setting up yet. Would you sell it and go for the 942, or stick with the 921?

I would sell it. No matter what others try telling you the 921 is essentually dead. There will be no new features, its still has lots of bugs that need to be fixed. It will never support things like Name Based Recordings, OpenTV, DishComm, Video on Demand.

The 942 is a nice receiver, don't get me wrong, I guess I am sour because I laid out a grand for a beta version of something that will never have all of its advertised features.

I say shame on Dish.

 

[samlooker]

Scott I did not see you mention a very important thing, how about the PQ? SD and HD? OTA?

Thx.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Inside the Dish 942

A number of you have asked to see the insides of the 942, so here you go.

I was surprised to see that the 942 features a SATA Hard Drive. I did not look at what brand or model hard drive was in the 942 as it had one of those stickers stating your warranty would be void if you removed the drive.

Unlike the 921 the 942 has no place to add any kind of expansion, there are no free slots or even space for a second hard drive.

For those of you who hate fan noise it is easy enough to turn off the fan in the 942, although I don't recommend it. (Just pull the fan power cord off of the motherboard.)

So I am not an electronics guy so I have no idea what we are looking at here, I did notice a few points where some resisters seemed to be hand soldered on after the fact, but it looks really clean inside there.

I did not downres these photos, they are huge, so they may take a few moments to open.

Enjoy and thanks for being a SatelliteGuys Member!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Scott, will we see pictures of guts your 942 soon ? Curios what CPU, RAM, disk installed there.

Just posted. Look for the Inside the 942 thread.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Scott I did not see you mention a very important thing, how about the PQ? SD and HD? OTA?

Thx.

Looks as good as the 921 did.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Hey guys.... I have something to admit....

I SCREWED UP!

The 942 DOES include a HDMI to DVI Cable! The only time you use the adapter is to go from HDMI to HDMI! (I am using the DVI Cable I already had which is why I used the adapter.

Here is what my 942 came with.
HDMI to DVI Adapter
HDMI to DVI Cable
RCA Audio Cables
Component Cable
Composite RCA Cables
Phone Line
Coax Cable
DishPro Plus Seperator
Manual
Channel Guide
2 remotes with batteries
UHF Antenna

Sorry about that, in the joy of getting it all hooked up the DVI - HDMI Cable fell on the floor and I didn't see it until tonight.

 

[ScottChez]

Darn they had to put a sticker on it not to remove the Hard Drive.

The million $$$ question is did they put a bigger hard drive in, bigger than whats advertised to support the Video on Demand or those $4.95 PPV movies like the 625 is going to have.

Or are they going to do the On demand like they do today on the HD Direct Tivo for Starz on Demand. On my HD Tivo Starz movies are recorded at night, they take up all the Hard Drive space. Any time one of my recordings need the space, they are instantly deleted from the HD. In other words the On demand PPV on Dish would always be the first to go and would not count as any HD space used on the list.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I can't be sure without seeing the hard drive. And I don't want to void the warranty for the unit I PAID for. (No I didn't get it for free)

If I had to guess I would say it does have some extra room for the VOD stuff.

Speaking of that the 625 started shipping to warehouses today and will be available to the public on Monday.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Ok we found a problem with the 942 that is now driving us crazy with the 942.

We were watching a show we recorded last night. The phone rang so we paused the show. (Caller ID worked and looked good!) after my wife got off the phone she unpaused it, and it started playing however the audio and video were way out of synch almost a 1 second delay between the picture and the sound. The lips moved first then you heard the sound a second later.

Lets hope this was a fluke.

 

[BFG]

haha I told you what the cables were...

 

[Cyclone]

Dude, your link on the front page to this thread is wrong. Its doubled up on the http:// prefix. (remove this post once fixed)

 

[fkostyn]

One thing I did do on my D* H10 was use an HDMI-HDMI cable with a HDMI-DVI converter on the TV side. Looks much bettter IMHO.

 

[Pepper]

...the audio and video were way out of synch almost a 1 second delay between the picture and the sound. The lips moved first then you heard the sound a second later.

I suspected based on the photos of the interface that the 942 is running 522 software with HD capability added in. This confirms my suspicions.

 

[Pepper]

One thing I did not like is when I go to bed at night I fall asleep with a certain channel on, my TV automatically turns on in the morning and I am woken by the morning news. This morning when I woke up my TV was on, but the morning news was not, instead I was greated by a screen saver telling me to push select to continue, this was kind of annoying and I need to figure a way to not have this happen.

We accomplish this on the 522 by setting an "auto" timer for the desired program, when the timer fires it wakes up the box. Probably the same thing will work on the 942?

 

[ScottChez]

Maybe some one can "steam" the do not remove lable off or something and take a look someday.

I bet its a 300 GIg SATA. Im just guessing by the two power cord ports that we can see. It looks like my SATA.

They also make a 320 gig and a 400 gig

The extra space is needed for the VOD advertised in the manual as a future software upgrade.

 

[Foxbat]

Thanks, Scott! You're a brave man to open up your brand new SotA Dish receiver just so the rest of us can peek inside.

Let's see... The grey cable coming from the front of the PCB to the walled-in section of the power supply, I'm going to guess that's the DishComm cable. The two B/W twisted pairs of wires going along the front of the main PCB would be going to the front panel USB jack.

The SATA drive looks interesting: it appears there are daisy-chain connectors for data and power on the drive. Too bad you can't peak under the drive bracket, it might be a SATA-PATA adapter plugged into a regular IDE drive.

Edit just read the previous post. Not having any large SATA drives, I was guessing about the connectors.

Also, hey! Post #301!

 

[Smith P.]

Having deal with SATA disks at work, I can say - it is SATA disk. I'm positive, 100%.