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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).
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.
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CodeRed, the lower user #. No relation to SirCam.
Works fine here. Although this link is a little shorter and has what appears to be a session ID removed.
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!
Of course there are differences. Pop over to the TiVo forums - http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/ - where there are plenty of people who have multiple PVR's of different makes. They'll be happy give you a feature comparison.
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!
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
A lot of people who upgrade their PVR / TiVo keep the spare / original drive around instead of putting it into a computer. If something happens to the drive(s) that you hacked with, you always have a suitable backup on hand.
The people who read/mod the AVSForums are very big on backups... good group.
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.
>...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!
what are you talking about? I run my own Maxtor drive with the noise level set to quiet.. it really works.
you always have a suitable backup on hand.
I nicer alternative, is to backup the drive from one of these units prior to usage, so that the data on the drives are in their most compressible state.
Just dd the whole drive, piping it through some compressor to a file on your PC. Hopefully, this will leave you with a file small enough to burn onto a CD.
I have assorted images for various OSes in my home, which I use for various testing purposes. You just have to remember to mark the partition type with fdisk (might not be required for all OSes to boot?) and then reboot to that OS with a boot manager like Smart Boot Manager (which seems to remember your many labels for the *same* partition, based on the type, but only one per type). Works nicely, and any OS, from QNX to W2K installs quickly without any fuss at all.
I'd like to just use these with VMWare, but it is so bloody expensive! I *might* have considered it, if it were half the price it is, but the current price is just outrageous.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
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.
All this applies only to the TiVo, which are the only PVRs I have experience with.
Faster drives are contraindicated due to the heat that the drives give off. The extra speed doesn't help the TiVo write or read the mpeg data on the HD, and wouldn't help anyway.
The bottleneck's the processor and lack of RAM (PPC603, and 16MB, IIRC), and, of course, the lack of a second tuner.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
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.
It is useless because it uses ATA Passwords (same as xbox) and the drive is *invisible* to PCs (including linux's fdisk tool). To use this drive, you would have to hack the password which I believe is 4 bytes and has a maximum of 2 fail attempts per power cycle. You would have needed to use a logic analizer to catch the PW exchange between the UTV and the drive to hack it.
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 did this with my TiVo before even firing it up (was able to pull off the "warranty void if seal broken" sticker in one piece), but that produced a ~2.5GB backup that spanned five CD-Rs. Utilities are now available that can get your TiVo backup down to 150-200MB...they zero out any video data on the drives. Using one of these utilities would be better from a standpoint of making a small backup than doing a "virgin backup."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I built a homebrew DVR under Linux. I used a Brooktree-based tuner/grabber (bt878 chipset) because AFAIK that is the only chipset with a good Linux driver (bttv.o, by Gerd Knorr). This grabs mpeg nicely on an old PentiumII-300MHz CPU. Why the preference for Divx?
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mgatny@umich.edu
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.
Could I trouble you to provide a bit more ifo re: the Brooktree-based card? Im in the process of building my own Linux based DVR and have been struggeling for weeks with Matrox g450 etv vs. Radeon vs. whatever else. Finding a decent video capture card that works well with Linux has been a struggle. Thanks in advance.
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