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Ultimate TV (UTV) Hard Drive Upgrade
BubbaJoeBob writes: "I just read this thread over at the AVSForum that jeffm7 was able to upgrade his UTV 40GB drive to a WD 100GB drive. Other users are reporting that they were also successful using the WD 120GB drive." And aside from ending up with an apparently useless original drive, this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades; according to posters on this thread, it's nearly plug-and-play (with a necessary download step in the middle).
is that link correct or is it slashdotted onlu minutes in to its posting?
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The UTV upgrade is, unsurprisingly, not unlike the DishPlayer upgrade. In fact, it is pretty much the same. Surprised this was not found earlier, unless it is drive specific, and early attempts tried the wrong drive type.
The upgrade itself is pretty painless. I do not have a UTV myself, nor have I upgraded one, but I do follow the forums. It is pretty much just putting it in and letting it download software. Only catch, from what I see, is the drive cannot have anything on it. At all. Not even an unused partition. While (In theory) slower than the TiVo upgrade, it is easier, and harder to end up with useless hardware. But I believe there is only space for one drive in UTV, so you can only get half the space of a TiVo.
As it is, the TiVo upgrade these days is pretty painless, and is only likely to get less so. If you can swap drives in the unit, it is only a little harder to do the necessary PC work. Of course, it does require a PC. And with the drives that come prepared for TiVo upgrade, it is actually just as easy to upgrade TiVo, and much quicker to boot, involving only a few seconds to add the new drive, instead of hours to download software to install.
This just must be illegal!
Kind of like chewing a pencil. That was not the intent of the maker, therefore reverse engineering the wood is a violation of the DMCA as well?
I give this a week before you hear about DMCA implications.
--
CodeRed, the lower user #. No relation to SirCam.
I tried to upgrade my VCR as per the instructions, but it didn't work. Can somebody help me?
I upgraded my replayTV a few months back, and I've since noticed that the 120GB drive I put in (Maxtor 5400rpm) makes a very audible clicking noise as it writes/scans... I'd just warn anyone considering an upgrade to definitely ear-test the drive first if possible... What is perfectly acceptable/quiet in terms of in-computer use, can be deafening when watching a tense moment of (intended) silence on-screen.
http://www.shonenjump.com The world's most popular manga, now in English!
Why not just put the extracted drive in a computer?
Where does one get started with DVR's? Is there a difference between Ultimate Tivo and Replay?
This is an awesome hack! The high prices and small capacity of the M$ UTV bundled drives is what has kept me from buying just yet. I want at least 100 GB for plenty of standard TV shows as well as for high quality audio and/or HDTV for my movies and such. This is what I have been waiting for!
I wish HDs had DIMM slots for its cache, imagine HD with 512meg cache, no more seeks galore.
If not DIMM, then a SO-DIMM
Here is a link to Western Digital's utility that allows you to low-level partition their ATA drives (the WDC seems to be popular in these devices):
http://www.wdc.com/support/download/dlg/dlgdiag.zi p
has provided much more in-depth information regarding this upgrade, including a complete step-by-step on (what's currently) Page 4 of the board... (posted 12-29-01 01:02 PM)
this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades.
Where is this guy coming from? I just upgraded my Tivo and was amazed at how painless the process was. Yes you do have to bless the new drive, but with the availability of utility boot disks and CD's it is trivial to do.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
And for the record: "checking the link" does not mean clicking on it. In case you don't know, just hovering the mouse over it displays the complete URL in the browser's status bar. Note that I said "browser" and not "Internet Explorer".
Would be a lot nicer to make them faster. Ie. 5000rpm -> 10 000rpm. Think about that. There is only a simple electric step motor and a bunch of controller chips... I would like to get 15k rpm IDE drives, cheap ones *:)
>...this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades...
It doesn't take 10 minutes to upgrade (add a second hard disk) to a TiVo. What's so painful about that?
This xmas, I found five 20-hour TiVo's at Wallmart for $129 each, added $100 40GB drives (making them 72-hour). They made excellent xmas gifts, and they don't require much work at all.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
For hackers wanting to build their own DVR out of PC parts, what is the best card for hardware framegrabbing/encoding? Mpeg is alright, but I would really prefer direct to Divx encoding.
I can go straight to Divx in software, but it really takes an 850mhz+ CPU.
I suppose the current best method is using hardware to get the video and store it in mpeg format, then re-encode anything you want to save to CD in Divx.
If you think upgrading a tivo is hard, perhaps you just need to keep the lid on.
All it takes is 20 minutes and a linux boot disk. I've done several and the process is a cakewalk.
Great, go support Microsoft, they are soooo customer friendly and supportive of open source, yeah, let's give Bill some more money.
Idiots. Who do you think wants to own everything you do? not Tivo.
Who is more likely to let security slip and somehow publish you like to watch "hot oily studs in heat" (remember, these things remember everything you watch, every button you press on the remote, etc)
Hmmm, the track record says MSFT
But go ahead, everybody's doing it. . .
what are you talking about? I run my own Maxtor drive with the noise level set to quiet.. it really works.
For those who are trying to decide between UltimateTV and TiVo, or who (like me) own one type of unit and are thinking about switching to the other, here's a pretty comprehensive TiVo vs UltimateTV comparison.
In a nutshell, TiVo beats UltimateTV in almost all areas.
One other bit of information that may be significant: UltimateTV requires that you have a DirectTV satellite dish -- it will not work with standard cable TV.
Not totally useless, but not all that useful either.
80+ GB drives are quickly becoming the norm, and the typical "power user" has several. Still, a 40 GB drive could be useful in a low-use machine, such as a DNS server or a PC built from scraps for a newbie.
Might need to low-level format the drive after yanking it from the recorder, but that's easy with any decent disk utility software. Do a google search, this is nothing new.
None of your links talk about /.
So what's your deal?
If you've been here a while you would see that scientology gets crushed here.
I know it's fun to tweak things just to see if you can, but this seems worthless to me.
Instead of wasting your mod points on downgrading ACs, would you please use them to upgrade good posts? Remember that ACs start at zero, and most trolls are already at -1, so if the average uesr views at +1 (default) then they don't normally see this crap.
/. great, rather than wasting mod points on reducing tuesdaytroll to -4.
I post this because I metamod a lot, and I get more dumb negative mods than good positive mods. Why waste points on obvious dreck? I have seen some great AC posts with great content, but no upmods at all. Look for those, that is what makes
Yes, this is off topic, and I'm going to get blasted out of my +1 bonus, but fuck it, maybe somebody will listen to me. Then I may get to read a nifty AC post with some info, rather than knowing mr. goatsex is buried 15 layers down.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I suppose you are now unaware of the UNIX base in OS X. Sorry to say this but you have lost your open source battle before you started it by slamming the Mac Users. Pay attention and show your contempt to who deserves it.
But it does not seem that anyting like that is coming to Scandinavia anyday soon. I have heard someone talking about a similar thing on the drawing board, but who knows.
for the younger folks: the grandparent post was a joke. Once AOL connected to usenet, there were some clueless statements, but even more trolls like the above. They would invariable end up swarmed with posts with nothing more than "me too" from aol.com addresses. Some offered porn, with instructions to post the request. Others offered improbable upgrades, such as impossible compression or speed, or, as the above pointed to, vcr or sattellite "enabling" for pay channels.
hawk
-- Mr. Goatsex