Now we're at the end of the next month - with still no word what so ever - I (along with others) have been doing some investigating into the problems that seem to be going on. For those interested the HDR and HD have very different structures to their underlying flash programing, despite this giving the same results, and a very similar file system structure at the end.
Basicly the HDR contains all of its file system in two flash files, which write to two different memory locations when flashed to the box. One contains the main file system, and one contains the database(s) - Hence the databse does not get re-written every time it is updated etc.
The HD on the other end, has what appears to be four/five sperate flash memory areas, and the the HDF file contains a seperate update for each of these areas. The 'TVS software' - which is compiled into a file called HumaxTV is in one of these memory blocks on its own, and is then mounted into /usr/bin on the root file system (which is in another block)
The reason behind such a difference when they were designed remains unclear (at least to me anyway) - however it may have something to do with how memory is addresses with the different chips in the boxes - This needs some more investigation if anybody is up for doing this????
Anyway the bottom line is that while on the HDR you have what seems to be 16mbytes of flash to get the whole file system into you have lots of smaller blocks (that when combined add upto 16mbytes) on the HD - and hence you can't shrink/ remove code from one bit to make room for a bigger bit in another area without splitting your program up into lib's, and putting these into other flash areas.
So - to conclude it dose seem that there may well be some sort of technical problem with the portal on the HD which is delaying things, and this may well be due to the size of the flash memory, and how it is devided up (or not in the case of the HDR) - While this is only pure speculation, which happens to some degree to fit the avalible facts, much more research is going to ben needed to come up with a solution/answer to this problem ourselves.
One other interesting bit of information to consider is that there were quite a number of long drawn out negotiations with the BBC and Sky about the security etc of the portal system, and this may well have increased the size of the software beyond what humax was expecting to need when the designed the box.
One solution which would seem sinple is to move the 'TV Software' onto an external hard drive, and then mount this into the root file system instead, and this is one area of research that may well develope over time. - However the only real way of getting the portal onto the HD would be to copy the 'TV Software' from the HDR onto the HD - this obviously will have a number of issues as for example the HDR has two tuners - but I suspect with some work, and the creation of dummy devices etc it would be feasable - but would have some issues.
