Thumb drive -> HDD

[Administrator]

I just set a computer to display what I want to record and use screen capture software to record. I save to Divx or Xvid.....perfect every time.

[Paul]

I almost hate to bring this topic up... because as a consumer, there is very little you can do which is practical. And does not involve winning at a lottery attempt.

This can partly be blamed on the difference between devices with RMB = 1 (USB flash sticks) versus RMB = 0 (hard drive on USB adapter). RMB is the Removable Media Bit.

The LG TV set has decided to check for this.

"I bought a 32 GB USB Flash Drive specifically for using it for recording on my new TV.

Alas, this TV (and, I think, all LG's Smart TVs) only records on external HDD (40 GBs at least); USB sticks are only for playing contents.

This was unmentioned both in the manual and in the built-in guide [On-screen help guide].

The TV's recording feature (Time Machine II) just ignores the USB stick and asks to connect an external HDD."

"...NOTE: SanDisk is beginning production of flash drives configured as fixed disk in 2012 to meet new requirements for Windows 8 Certification." ???

"Cruzer [Blade] USB Drive shows as Hard Disk Drive (Fixed Disk) in Windows Explorer"

The Cruzer Blade is available up to 128GB, but it is also a USB2 stick and the speed is not stated (and the crappy sticks Sandisk makes, write at 3MB/sec, because I have a black one with red slider right in front of me that is that poor). A TV set can record at around 2MB/sec (7GB per hour) for digital TV at HD (and the data content doesn't even need to be transcoded - it writes out the packets almost exactly as received).

Sony (which likely didn't even make the sticks), also released some with the RMB bit flipped from the normal value. Because some USENET posters note that the device is being treated differently when they use those.

But since USB flash is such a poor product family, there's no guarantee they won't change out the controller chip inside and use something else. Maybe with the RMB bit set to the normal value.

USB3 sticks with unstated speed, read at 100MB/sec and write at 10MB/sec.

USB2 sticks, there is no such thing as "hitting bottom". The slowest USB2 stick, wrote at 0.8MB/sec, and that's the figure to beat today, for rock bottom writes. That would piss off a TV (assuming it was even recognized).

Note that some multimedia devices, the USB connector is "cosmetic", and some of the really old sets, they couldn't make up their minds what to do with the connector. It's likely missing firmware to put it in the correct mode(s) for its intended purpose. And of course, crusty sets don't get firmware updates (because they fumbled that feature too!). Modern equipment is light years ahead of the old equipment.

Paul

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Sony are Android, as far as I know. I was told that many older thumb drives are simply too slow to be used, but I've never tried my Samsungs apparent similar feature. It will, I'm sure use its own bespoke system since its probably anti piracy. When I think about the old days of VCRs it does seem everyone is being over paranoid these days. Brian

[Andrew]

My LG TV will happily use a USB drive to record programmes but refuses to use it for timeshift recording. I have always interpreted this as as a concern that large amount writes involved in keeping the timeshift buffer up to date would soon knacker the device.

[Andy Burns]

My samsung needs to do its own performance test and format on any newly inserted device, but then it'll either do timer recordings or chase-play even on a 16GB USB2 stick.

[John Rumm]

Whilst that will work, it does not really fulfil enough of my basic requirements for a PVR solution to work for me.

I.e. I want to be able to do multiple unattended recordings (possibly more than one at the same time). I need a decent program guide, and the ability to record all episodes of a series. I don't want it to interfere with what I am doing on a computer while it does it, and lastly I want standard format files that can be played back anywhere.

[Sysadmin]

I probably have the advantage, because there are not many TV programmes I want to watch anyway, but do like to record some of the BBC documentaries, provided they keep the background music down low enough to hear the commentary.

[Roland Perry]

In message <se9m90$1ufb$ [e-mail]>, at 21:58:07 on Mon, 2 Aug

2021, Mart>>

PVR "Assembled in Czech Republic" in probably 2015.

My question was a generic one. How to make a thumb drive (that my PVR describes as a "USB Device", and is happy to write photos to, play videos and photos) look like what it separately describes as a "USB HDD" upon which it's also prepared to write videos [with some copy-protect restrictions, but the ones I'm interested in aren't off-air recordings].

The objective here is to work around that by spoofing the thumb drive into "looking like" an HDD.

I've been conducting a wide range of tests this morning with amongst other things a virgin 500GB external HDD, and have concluded that Paul has nailed it with the "Removable Media Bit" thing, for which I doubt there's a gadget to solve (nor a setting in the appliance to address).

There are some associated issues with minimum storage capacity, acceptable sector sizes (but not acceptable file system) and data transfer rates; but none of them are pertinent to resolving my original enquiry.

I'd like to thank everyone for their helpful comments.

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail]>, at

11:56:21 on Tue, 3 Aug 2021, John Rumm [e-mail] remarked:

I agree with all that, having largely unsuccessfully experimented with various TV-on-a-PC- expansion-card and video digitising dongles over several decades.

[Fredxx]

I only made a cursory glance of this page, but:

solve your problem.

[Theo]

I've done it with a Pi and XBMC, the current guise being Xbian, which integrates the EPG and scheduling into a standalone PVR package. The main issue being that setting up a DVB-T stick (via TVHeadend) isn't super straightforward (or it wasn't for the £8 Astrometa stick I had lying around). There is an offical Pi TV HAT which might be a better starting point.

That's what I did when I couldn't get the Sony TV to talk to external storage.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

It's a walk in the park compared to mythTV.

[Roland Perry]

That describes a "BootIt" utility which might re-flash the USB stick so it 'fixes' the RMB reporting. I'll try that later.

[Martin Brown]

OK. Now I understand what you are after. I tried something like that to attempt to configure some cheap identical USB drives as a RAID array way back. Only partially successful and was out evolved by SATA 3 SSDs.

This isn't a bad place to start but expect a steep learning curve and some casualties along the way. I can't remember the details as I never quite got it all working satisfactorily and eventually gave up.

I think you are going to have to hack its USB media descriptor table to make it pretend to be something other than removable media.

[Roland Perry]

In message <sec8r3$24g$ [e-mail]>, at 21:27:15 on Tue, 3 Aug

2021, Mart>> In message <se9m90$1ufb$ [e-mail]>, at 21:58:07 on Mon, 2 Aug

Yes, someone has suggested a particular utility, which goes with one brand of thumb drive. I've ordered one (the easy part) but delivery quoted as 4-10wks (which is a bit of a wide window).

<thread convergence from another group> and they've charged me VAT, despite it being under £30.

[Chris Green]

That's standard now we've left the EU, *all* overseas sellers now have to add VAT to the price they charge you and send it to HMRC. This applies to anything up to £135, above that VAT is handled separately.

It means that small overseas sellers have simply stopped selling to the UK. Umbrella organisations such as eBay, Amazon and aliExpress do handle this for sellers though so that's one way to do it.

[John Rumm]

I did it with Plex server running on my NAS[1], and a HDHomeRun dual DVBT2 tuner sat on the network. Plex takes care of all the EPG stuff and the scheduling of recordings. You can also use it to playback if you want, but the files are also available as bog standard media files in a network share.

[1] Works well on the moderately more powerful NAS boxes - but would also be fine running in the background on a PC, or on a micro server somewhere.

[Andy Burns]

At which country's VAT rate?

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail]>, at 21:24:18 on Wed, 4 Aug

2021, Andy Burns [e-mail] remarked:

UK. Which is the correct thing to do.

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail], at 07:36:15 on Wed, 4 Aug 2021, Roland Perry [e-mail]> remarked:

They say they've shipped it Airmail and should arrive in 2-3wks.