Vip622 and USB port

[neftv]

I have a 622 and in the past couple of months I seen in my billing statement pay $39.95 and activate your usb port to use an external drive bla bla bla.
I was wondering if its worth it? What can I do with the external drive? I like to offload a bunch of shows and burn to DVD for my own use and doing that would eliminate a couple of transcoding steps. Are these files MPEG2 TS files? I am just curious what everyone else is doing with the USB port? Thanks.

 

[RandallA]

You can copy your recordings from the receiver to the USB drive and play them back from the USB drive but you CAN'T burn the recordings to a DVD. The recordings are encrypted.

 

[navychop]

Was the one time fee worth it to activate external USB storage? Absolutely, for me.

If you want to burn DVDs, hook a burner up to the TV2 outputs. DVDs are SD anyway. Record while you play the program.

 

[neftv]

Was the one time fee worth it to activate external USB storage? Absolutely, for me.

If you want to burn DVDs, hook a burner up to the TV2 outputs. DVDs are SD anyway. Record while you play the program.

I wondered about that and I wanted to avoid the two hop transcoding. From PVR TV2 output is analog then back to digital in a DVD Burner makes no sense. Anytime you have a media change you lessen the quality , digital to analog to digital in this aspect. Thats why I asked why not get the digital file directly but if its encrypted then its not worth it for me to activate the usb port. Oh well.

 

[LER]

Blame "Big Media". They don't want you to be able to get your hands on the digital bits.

 

[neftv]

Blame "Big Media". They don't want you to be able to get your hands on the digital bits.

I don't want to start on that. I just have to say that someone has to teach dish network that normal program video resolution is 720x480 and I know that DVB S is actually 704x480 and if the res was close to that there would be a big difference in quality there as well.