LG Smart TV and External HDD

[The Natural Philosopher]

They will in general riun AT MOST five to eight yuears without prpblems

Start doing 24x7 massive reads writes and seeks and you will be lucky to get a year out of them

[Jethro_uk]

(goes green ...)

[The Natural Philosopher]

My experience of wifi and powernet s**te is that NOTHING is as reliable or as fast as 100Mbps cat5, or indeed gigabit if you have it.

I can stream some videos over wifi - allegedly 65Mbps - but it stutters on HD sometimes.

[Jethro_uk]

Pretty much my experience.

It's one of those cases where the stats *look* good, but the reality just doesn't bear it out.

I might end up running a cable through the loft ....

[Harry Bloomfield]

alan_m submitted this idea :

I am not sure at the moment of anything at all. The set came new, but with no instructions. I managed to download 'some' instructions from the LG site, but they seem to only cover the remote buttons and the use of a serial data connection to the unit. Nothing detailed for the normal user, or the spec..

[Harry Bloomfield]

It happens that Brian Gaff formulated :

A weekly rewriting is a lot different to a constant rewrite that would be the case in a TV.

Having said that, I have a stick in a raspberry pi which I am using as a weather server, which is being constantly written to. This it has been doing since mid-summer.

[RJH]

I've no doubt - but it's not a part of the spec they seem to plug.

[whisky-dave]

I have a 43" Smart LG and have used USB sticks I';m not sire if I tried a sub 1GB.

I had a problem with an external HDD, it was unrelaible I think due to using the TV to power it, I tried external power and it was a bit more relible but not much. After finding out I couldn;t record some channels to USB I haven;t found a use to use it in recroded mode but do use it to watch things using a SD card in a USB adapter.

Perhaps they HDD needs to access itself evey so often.

[Jethro_uk]

Hence the advice to use a USB hub to protect the TVs connector ...

[Brian Reay]

I tend to use USB sticks, HDDs can require more power than I'm convinced the USB ports in our TVs (at least some of them) are designed for.

As a rough guide, allow 1G/hr on record so, even a modest 32G stick will hold a far bit.

We have an older LG which doesn't record but other TVs which do. Some use the ts extension from memory but, if you charge it to mp4, you can play the files on a PC or other TV. The other TV uses a file system (not just file extension) I can't identify.

[John Rumm]

I suspect they aim for "good enough" on most sets in a hope of not getting into a needless pissing contest with other makers.

You only tend to notice the difference on relatively recent sets when using the web browser since its easy to make comparisons to a PC.

[John Rumm]

You will probably find it has help built in as one of the preloaded applications when you push the home button.

[Johnny B Good]

A Terry Pratchett reference? No, not really; I was getting Porlock (a Somerset village) confused with Morpork. Turns out to be a Samuel Taylor Coleridge reference to an unwelcome visitor from Porlock whom he claimed had interrupted his writing of the poem "Kubla Khan" (in 1797), only 54 lines long, which was consequently never completed.

Nice to know that there's a literary reference which pre-dates a phenomena, which those of us in our ignorance would regard as only having arisen with the advent of wireless broadcasting of radio and television dramas, by well over a century.

I suppose we could make the literary allusion to having our listening/ viewing pleasure interrupted by unwanted intrusion a little more snappy by naming it the "Porlock Pest Intrusion" (or PPI for short). :-)

I guess that's the main benefit of using a computer to watch TV programmes using Kaffeine as a PVR and VLC to watch the resulting media files after or even during the recording process. Kaffeine has its own built in 'live viewer' but I rarely use this feature when it's recording, preferring instead to use a completely independent media player, namely VLC, to view the resulting *.ts media file(s) as they're being created on the fly by Kaffeine (there could be as many as six on the go during the overlapping padding periods whenever I happen to have back to back programmes being recorded on BBCs ONE, TWO and FOUR)[1].

Such PPIs have long since stopped being the show stopping events they once were in the bad old days pre-dating the advent of DVB-T and HDD based DTVR technology (certainly true for the past three years since I discovered the joy of using Kaffeine as my PVR software of choice after being forced to ditch win2k and DTVR for a Linux Mint setup on the upgraded hardware that had effectively relegated win2k to a VM setup).

The only time we (the wife and I) recreate the old fashioned 'Live TV Viewing Experience' is when we sit down to tea at 6 O'clock to watch "Eggheads" (currently displaced by the "Letterbox"[2] until the disruption to the normal BBC2 programme schedules imposed by that unwanted intrusion known as "Strictly"[3] is mercifully terminated at this year's end when normality will finally be restored in the new year until the next 'unpredictable' sporting events begin to take their toll once more on the Beeb's 'precision planning' of their TV programme schedules).

Most (but not all) of the scheduled recordings are archived for posterity into a 20TB 'black hole'[4], aka my NAS4Free server box, for later viewing at a time of my choosing independent of the time limits imposed by iPlayer whose servers have effectively become my source of 'half HD quality' programme recordings.

Nowadays I only use Kaffeine to record 5 minute snippets to act as reminders and provide named place markers for get_iplayer's downloads - I'm compensating for the profligate wear I'd imposed on the Samsung SSD last year to keep below the paltry 75TBW warranty limit that would otherwise trump its 5 year warranty.

There aren't many programmes that only get recorded off-air in full by Kaffeine to be viewed just the once before being discarded. Notably, I can name three off the top of my head right now. These are Eggheads episodes of which all but the ones where the challengers win are discarded, "The Graham Norton Show" which allows me to skip the musical performance section and cut to the chase of "The Big Red Chair" of which only one or two notable episodes from the last two series have made it into the archive and Sunday's PoV nonsense so I can keep abreast of the Beeb's latest excuses in response to viewer complaints[5].

Kaffeine might seem a dated application for implementing the functionality of a PVR compared to the flashy looking "Home Theatre" ten foot interface driven offerings of NextPVR and their ilk but compared to the flashy alternatives, it's a joy to schedule recordings with, all the more so since 'padding and programme conflicts' simply don't exist beyond that of tuner resource conflicts (which for the Beeb's SD content, simply don't exist even when only a single DVB-T tuner is available).

When I last tried NextPVR (in its GBPVR guise) on a winXP box that had been set up in order to make use of my KWorld dual tuner DVB-T PCI adapter (no win2k drivers) back in the day when I was using DTVR on a win2k box, I found trying to schedule a whole week's worth of recordings so excruciatingly ponderous, it made the routine of hand entering the channel numbers/date/start and run times into DTVR's recording schedule entry box (even after the mental arithmetic gymnastics required to capture two or more back to back programmes into a single file for later slicing and dicing) look slick by comparison.

*THAT'S* how crap such PVR programming efforts were, cursed as they were with their ten foot interface, not in the least bit helped by that incompetent programmer's crutch of Dot.NET that they all seemed to rely upon for their ill conceived offerings. I suspect they're still the same except you don't notice the performance shortcomings so much by virtue of the circa 500 fold increase in processing power available since then.

I might seem a bit of a stick in the mud for staying with Kaffeine to satisfy my PVR requirements but I have good reason to do so, plus, it's a system I'm entirely familiar with and it gets the job done without needless fuss over padding/programme conflict resolution strategies.

[NOTES] [1] JOOI, I once ran a test involving for a change, the use of *both* tuners in my KWorld DVB-T PCI adapter to record a total of 12 TV channels to the SSD all of which I could monitor at will with VLC with no disruption to any of the ongoing recordings. Considering my being able to record 3 BBC TV channels at once with back to back padding 'conflicts' (6 TV programme streams going to an IDE 250GB 4200rpm laptop drive on my now 13 year old Acer 3600 laptop with single core 1.6GHz clocked Celeron mobile CPU), this result wasn't in the least surprising - however, it was impressive nonetheless. :-) [2] A not so informative/educative 'quiz' based time filler since the obscure 'famous person' password names were rarely explained as to what they were supposed to be famous for - a rather serious omission imho. [3] The rather dubious 'entertainment value' of this programme (which has always escaped me - it's never been one I'd watch voluntarily) must have taken a real nose dive since even the missus now has a low opinion of its merits (I wouldn't have noticed the "drop in quality" otherwise). [4] The trouble with having near endless storage capacity for TV recordings is that one tends to "Throw Money At The Problem" of culling the examples of TV broadcasting less worthy of preservation for posterity rather than actually trawl through the collection to decide which can stay and which won't be missed after being sent to the bit bucket.

Since "Procrastination" is virtually my middle name, I've recently chosen to chuck another 290 quid at the server by way of a Western Digital 10TB tiddler (the 12 and 14TB options are just a bit too 'Bleeding Edge' for my money, besides which, they're (totally f***ed and clueless) Seagate Offerings). It's the easy way out and besides, I'll be needing the extra capacity when I finally get round to setting the system up for the dual tuner DVB-T2 PCIe adapter purchased last year when I do my 5 yearly major hardware upgrade and start recording full HD content on a regular basis.

[5] Thanks to PoV for explaining why the Beeb had moved "Eggheads" into its temporary weekday slot at 16:45. It's unsettling but I do appreciate their efforts in immunising it against the "Strictly" induced disruption that's currently only effecting a low rent "quiz based" placeholder they call the "Letterbox".

[AnthonyL]

I bought a LG49uj670v TV just before the World Cup and as I wanted to be able to pause Live Play I had to go the hard disk route as this feature is not supported by a USB stick. I bought a cheap USB drive (250Gb for ~?20 from MyMemory) and stuck it on.

It is constantly recording so it is possible to pause and rewind at any time. However it is also possible to stop this by pressing the Play button and choosing the 2nd option (Live play or similar it's called) and this stops the disk access and of course stops the option to pause play etc though I suspect they reactivate if the buttons are again pressed.

A tip, if you have not disabled the Live Play then you can rewind and record from the point you have wound back to. Mine buffers to 1hour.

As far as the flashing light is concerned the drive sits in an empty tissue box.

I also use the drive as a backup for all my photos and videos. I tend not to clutter it with recordings and bear in mind that the recordings cannot be used on any set other than the one they were recorded on which is a bit of a disappointment.

hth

[BillD]

Mine have lasted a lot longer than that. I?ve only had one failure in a really old RLL Miniscribe.

[Harry Bloomfield]

John Rumm expressed precisely :

Oh, it has, in the form of pop-ups, but very brief none tech. information.

[Harry Bloomfield]

AnthonyL has brought this to us :

Thanks, yes that works - but it still leaves the disk running, but not Read /Writing.

[alan_m]

More like 2G/hr for HD. For instance, recordings of Dr Who on BBC1 HD range in size from 1.4G to 2.4G bytes

[John Rumm]

On mine there is also a quite detailed manual. If you bring up the multi coloured stripe at the bottom of the screen:

vis [1]:

Scroll along the list, and one should be the full manual... (ISTR its orange on mine)

[1] Yes I know its an old page, but I just wanted an image of the menu, and that one came up on the search with a more attractive screen "border" than many ;-)

[John Rumm]

It does seem to vary a bit IME, but its probably not a bad figure to use for estimating storage requirements. The .ts recordings for the last three episodes from my setup are coming in at between 1.2, and 1.6 GB