The drive was pre-formatted in NTFS. So I dropped the partition (the only partition) and created one 2TB partition. I gave this partition a drive letter (D:) and formatted with a program called fat32format (http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm).
Then I plugged the drive onto the T1020 STB. The STB had no problem detecting and initiate the drive. So I press the record buttion to record something for a minute or two. It was sweet, and the playback seems fine.
However, when I use the EPG to book and record (record the whole series) of One News at 6pm and Shortland Street at 7pm on Monday (both programme ran for an hour), it recorded fine. But when I play them back, the jitter was bad. Sometimes the picture pixelates, sometimes the audio skips for a second or so.
From another thread of this forum, someone suggested that Dish TV does not seem to support a 2TB harddrive/partition, so I dropped the 2TB partition and created a 1TB partition, and formatted it using fat32format again.
This time, I still have problem playing back One News and Shortland Street, but Fair Go seems to be playback fine (all of the programmes are booked using the EPG). Also, it seems to me if I record the programme using the record buttion when the program was live (i.e. not using the EPG), the play back seems to be fine.
Another observation is that the playback seems to jitter if the recording is in HD format and the length of programme is 1 hour. The resulting file is about 3.7 to 4.2 GB in size, and it looks to me the STB struggle to play it back. However, it seems to play smaller recordings OK.
FYI, I did updated the STB with the v1.0f firm ware (Released 9 June 2011).
It will be great if you can share your experience and tell me what kind of external harddrive you are using with this STB, e.g.
- Brand of the harddrive
- Model of the harddrive
- Capacity in GB or TB
- Is it a 2.5" or 3.5"
- Partition size and file system used
- Playback performance
FYI, I have returned both the STB and the hard drive for a full refund (I got it from Bond and Bond so have to return it in 7 days, so I did not have enough time to do more testing). However, I really want to record some programmes so I can watch them in another time.
It will be great if you can share your experience, so I can go and buy a compatible hard drive and setup my own PVR.
Cheers!