List of things you can and can't do with the HD-FOX T2 and content sharing?

Yup, de-crypting is proceeding well - about half way I reckon. Typically seems to be about 6 MB/sec.
I have disabled power saving so hopefully the HDR will go at it all night... Thanks everyone!

One of my motivations for all this is that the internal disk on the HDR has been showing signs of distress for a long time - lots of errors / scrambled programmes and now the CFW is warning me of escalating errors.
It has had a hell of a bashing - maybe 12+ hours a day for the last three years or so! A lot of telly gets watched around here.
But... I cannot get my most valued viewer to dump all the recorded stuff, so now I am working towards replacing the drive with a new one. Hopefully the CFW will allow me to copy the (de-crypted and SD) content off onto an external USB drive, fit a new internal drive and copy it back again.
Are there any tips that cover this exercise on this forum? I searched in vain. However I did find a tip for a good drive and have ordered it tonight from eBuyer:) I hope I got the right one: Seagate 1TB Pipeline HD Hard Drive - 3.5" SATA-II - 5900RPM 64MB Cache - ST1000VM002 - £55
 
Mikethemix said:
Are there any tips that cover this exercise on this forum? I searched in vain.
Click to expand...
http://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/2TB_Disk_Installation_Blog is useful reading (although not strictly necessary for a 1TB drive).
However I did find a tip for a good drive and have ordered it tonight from eBuyer:) I hope I got the right one: Seagate 1TB Pipeline HD Hard Drive - 3.5" SATA-II - 5900RPM 64MB Cache - ST1000VM002 - £55
Click to expand...
Yes that should be fine unless you want the 2TB model.
 
I reckon I have enough trouble keeping the the family down to a recorded content of about about 500+gb through constant nagging, so having "only" 1TB seems like a help! Also it should still be possible to return the HDF to "standard trim" if I had to:)
Thanks for the thought and the suggested reading too.
 
Foxlink all sorted.... THANKS THANKS THANKS everyone.
The de-crypt was all done by 5am and I have just done a test drive of the new setup on the HD Fox T2 - browsing, playing and managing files remotely on the HDR Fox T2.
I am STUNNED by how well this works. Not only does the HD Fox T2 perfectly replicate the user interface of the HDR in terms of ability to play, fast forward, resume watching, delete etc etc, it is also very fast too.
Maybe this is a side benefit of the de-crypt, or the clever clean-up routines that the CFW runs, but the result is certainly amazing.
Of course, THIS is how the products should have worked in the first place:)

Meantime the HDR's disk errors have risen again...
Disk realloc sector count is: 1021 (was 995)
Hopefully it will hang in until I can do the backup and restore to a new drive!

I'm looking forward to demonstrating this new world to my viewing team!

As soon as we can sort out some more USB disks I will tackle the other two HD Fox T2s to see if this setup will work with multiple clients:)

Updated 14/1/14:
The second HD Fox T2 has now been setup in the same way and links to the HDR just fine.
Very easy install, no problems - I just had to give it a few minutes to get all the various modules loaded and find the files on the HDR and it was away! Being a little patient is needed!

Many thanks everyone, the Foxlink is a huge success!

The replacement disk for HDR is now here, so the next task will be the disk replacement - as covered in the following posts...
 
Mikethemix said:
Not only does the HD Fox T2 perfectly replicate the user interface of the HDR in terms of ability to play, fast forward, resume watching, delete etc etc, it is also very fast too.
Click to expand...
The Foxlink mount makes the HD-FOX "think" the files it's playing are on a local USB drive, so there is absolutely no difference in the user interface from local recordings. Your network bandwidth is the only real potential bottleneck, but it only needs a few megabits per second. Prior decryption is necessary because Humax machines do not share decryption keys.

Mikethemix said:
As soon as we can sort out some more USB disks I will tackle the other two HD Fox T2s to see if this setup will work with multiple clients:)
Click to expand...
It will. I don't use Foxlink though, because I have multiple servers. network-shares-automount does it for me (and also SMB rather than NFS because the samba package shares external drives as well as the internal one).
 
Many thanks, very helpful. We have recently installed CAT6 cabling throughout the house with a TP-Link Gigabit switch and BT Infinity modem with several wireless access points. This has been a great success. We took the chance to also route TV antennae cables everywhere with a Quattro LNB, driving a Satellite Multiswitch feed and quadplex modules in each room. This means that is possible to pick up Terrestrial and Sat TV, together with FM and DAB radio signals in every room. My seem OTT, but whilst rewiring, running cables was pretty easy and the switching kit is amazing value these days. It has been a steep learning curve designing and installing this lot, but very satisfying to get it all working:)
 
Mikethemix said:
Meantime the HDR's disk errors have risen again...
Disk realloc sector count is: 1021 (was 995)
Hopefully it will hang in until I can do the backup and restore to a new drive!
Click to expand...
Yes definitely time to be thinking about a replacement although we have seen reports of people using drives with 3000 plus reallocated sectors. Rather than backing up, have you considered mounting the old drive in a USB to SATA adapter or housing and just copy the content back to the new drive.
 
@Mikethemix: the replacement drive you have ordered, is advanced format (AF). To get the best performance it will need to be aligned and the Humax won't do this. There has been a lot of discussion on this forum about how to do this, I recommend having a look before you format the drive.
 
"I recommend having a look before you format the drive."
Many thanks, for the tip Monty. I would have just banged it in! Would it have worked but at slower performance?

"Rather than backing up, have you considered mounting the old drive in a USB to SATA adapter or housing and just copy the content back to the new drive."

Thanks Martin, having looked at the posting on changing the hard disk, I can see that the caddy route is much easier and saves one stage.
So it seems that the process could be:
1. AF Format the new drive in a caddy from a PC / Mac following the process in the posts referred by Monty - which I have not yet read!
2. How about then connecting it as an external USB drive to the HDR, and copying the entire content over (including the CFW stuff)?
3. Now physically put it into the machine and reboot - and keep the old disk as a backup in the drawer!

Will that method work? What have I missed?

How are the files actually copied, using the web-if, or using the file management system of the Humax with the remote control, or using an ftp package such as filezilla?
 
Mikethemix said:
"I recommend having a look before you format the drive."
Many thanks, for the tip Monty. I would have just banged it in! Would it have worked but at slower performance?
Click to expand...
The Seagate drive has firmware that claims to overcome the problems associated with misaligned partitions. You will get best performance by having aligned partitions. Also some versions of the Humax fimware will automatically create aligned partitions.

1. AF Format the new drive in a caddy from a PC / Mac following the process in the posts referred by Monty - which I have not yet read!
Click to expand...
You can do it on a PC but the af123 blog explains how to do it on the Humax and includes a few extra minor optimisations.
2. How about then connecting it as an external USB drive to the HDR, and copying the entire content over (including the CFW stuff)?
3. Now physically put it into the machine and reboot - and keep the old disk as a backup in the drawer!

Will that method work?
Click to expand...
Yes;I did it the opposite way, formatted new drive on the Humax and copied from old drive attached via USB.
 
"Also some versions of the Humax firmware will automatically create aligned partitions."
I am now running 1.02.32 with 2.20 mods - will that do it?
 
I think it may be down to pot luck with the drive.. the important thing is to check for alignment before starting to record things and fix/reformat manually if necessary.
 
Looking at the various blogs on this AF subject is seems a bit above my technical job grade! To put things into perspective, I am a lowly (& retired) marketing man, not a coder:)
How serious is the impact of these "few extra minor optimisations"?
Will it "just work" out of the box (maybe at less than optimal performance)?
I'm very worried about the consequences of messing up when trying to input parameters that I don't understand!

Going back to my earlier question:
How are the files actually copied?
1. using the web-if, or
2. using the file management system of the Humax with the remote control, or
3. using an ftp package such as filezilla?

I know this sounds a basic question, but it illustrates my knowledge level!
 
  1. Install the new hard drive and get it working with the normal Humax stuff;
  2. Use a USB to SATA interface kit (not expensive) to hook the old drive up to the USB port;
  3. Use the normal Humax interface to mark things for copy (red button) and bulk-transfer them (you can just leave it running) OR just watch the stuff off the old drive without transferring it;
  4. Reinstall the custom software packages from the web install page (no need to reinstall the CF from USB).
 
I know very little about Linux, but recently I have been having a play with Ubuntu. I made a bootable USB drive with the Ubuntu operating system on it. This is very easy: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-your-own-Ubuntu-LiveUSB/?ALLSTEPS. The Ubuntu user interface is user-friendly and easy to get on with if you are used to Windows. I'm mentioning this because if you boot a PC into Ubuntu and attach the drive using a caddy or USB to SATA, it should be straightforward to create the three EXT3 partitions using the inbuilt Disk Utility. I used Ubuntu 12.04 (not the latest, but mature and stable) on the bootable USB drive. I think that this version of the OS will identify that it is an AF disk and automatically align any partitions created.
 
recursive auto de-crypt error - any idea what this means:
file is already decrypted but the HMT flag is wrong.

the error is generated every 10 minutes, and always relates to the same file.
It comes up on the main web-if screen, like this:

!! WARNING !!

You have pending system notifications:

09/01/2014 07:50 - /media/My Video/Great British Garden Revival_20140107_1931.ts - auto-decrypt - file is already decrypted but the HMT flag is wrong.
09/01/2014 08:00 - /media/My Video/Great British Garden Revival_20140107_1931.ts - auto-decrypt - file is already decrypted but the HMT flag is wrong.
09/01/2014 08:10 - /media/My Video/Great British Garden Revival_20140107_1931.ts - auto-decrypt - file is already decrypted but the HMT flag is wrong.
09/01/2014 08:20 - /media/My Video/Great British Garden Revival_20140107_1931.ts - auto-decrypt - file is already decrypted but the HMT flag is wrong.
 
You could fix this from the command line with this :-
Code: 
hmt -encrypted "/media/My Video/Great British Garden Revival_20140107_1931.hmt"
 
Disk change
Black Hole said:
  1. Install the new hard drive and get it working with the normal Humax stuff;
  2. Use a USB to SATA interface kit (not expensive) to hook the old drive up to the USB port;
  3. Use the normal Humax interface to mark things for copy (red button) and bulk-transfer them (you can just leave it running) OR just watch the stuff off the old drive without transferring it;
  4. Reinstall the custom software packages from the web install page (no need to reinstall the CF from USB).
Click to expand...

Many thanks, I followed BH's simple instructions above and all this worked a treat, the Seagate 1TB Pipeline HD Hard Drive (3.5" SATA-II - 5900RPM 64MB Cache - ST1000VM002 - £55 from ebuyer.com) went in and has worked perfectly. I have no idea if the AF stuff was sorted out by the firmware or what, but it seems to perform very well now:)

I copied across the old content without trouble and will now consign the old drive to the drawer for a few weeks, and then will dump it as suspect.
No more disk errors and Foxlink is working nicely on two HD Fox T2s, each linked to a shared HDR Fox T2. Brilliant stuff. I hope to get the third HD Fox T2 linked as soon as I find another spare disk drive and USB caddy.


Amazingly the HDR seems able to serve simultaneously two linked HD Fox T2 units each streaming HD video from files stored on the HDR, as well as playing a third recorded programme directly on its own TV. Three HD streams at once... so that disk seems to be working pretty well!

Many thanks for the superb support.
 
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