Vip 622 to Vip 722 upgrade and external storage

[NickA]

I recently had my Dish ViP 622 die on me -well its hdmi port anyways- and they allowed me to upgrade to to the 722 for a small fee and crazy long commitment. I have an almost full 500GB external drive I've been using with the 622 and I'm wondering if I will lose my recordings if I hook it up to the 722? I also think I read that DishOnline might offer HD movies with the 722, is this true?
I appreciate any help and sorry if this has been asked before
Thanks

 

[Jim5506]

The external HDD is tied to your account, not the receiver, so when they swap you to the 722, just plug it into the 722 and it should be fine. You can only do this 3 times currently.

I have also heard that they have opened the 622 up to HDD thru DishOnLine by using different compression on download, but it has less capacity.

 

[NickA]

Thanks very much for the info and I'm very glad to hear it. I looked through my 622 and I don't see any HD movies available on DishOnline yet. I'll update if there is any change with the 722. I have an original 622 capable of only 30 hours of HD btw, not sure if that makes a difference.
On a side note, I have noticed that they are lowering image quality quite a bit on HD movies, probably to save space.
The movie I first noticed this on was "Chinese Ghost Story" which plays on KungFu HD here and there. I had it on my external HD and it was at a little over 10GB. I re-recorded it by accident the other day and noticed it was only 3.5GB and it looked like poop compared to my much earlier recording. The smaller sized version has tons of scenes with lots of black dots everywhere. Not sure how else to describe it but it seems like they are removing pixels?
Anyways, thanks much for the help