As I don't use USB drives it would make more sense for me to have the network and local drives both under Network.
Yeahhhh.... I thought you didn't like the DLNA way of things? That's what you get by selecting
Media >> Storage >> Network.
To anticipate your next question: why not put all USB (and virtual-USB) content under
Media >> Storage >> HDD? This
can be done, but I definitely don't advise it. To playback video the files have to be located under My Video, but the Humax firmware doesn't expect mount points to external storage to be created in My Video and will see them as internal storage - thus corrupting the free space calculations and also making it search the mounted external storage for DLNA indexing and shut-down housekeeping. Also, if somebody didn't realise what they were doing and decided to delete (what appears to be) that particular folder, it would proceed to delete the entire contents of the remote NAS.
Having NASes mounted (using
NSA) as if they were USB drives achieves the best compromise, and adding a mount to the internal storage makes it available on the same menu. Bring up the USB list, pick which machine you want to browse (give them appropriate names - in my case HDRFOX1,2,3 etc, but could be "Bedroom" and "Lounge"), and Bob's your uncle. The user experience will be seamless.
If you don't have any physical USB drives plugged in, you will need to install
virtual-disk2. The Humax firmware doesn't even look for mounted USB drives unless there is a real physical USB drive present -
virtual-disk2 gets around that, and
NSA won't work without it (or a real drive).
NB: in case you didn't realise, installing
samba or
nfs-utils to have it share the file system over network storage protocols SMB or NFS respectively, makes the HDR-FOX into a NAS, just the same as your PC or a dedicated NAS could be. You could even have a large separate NAS and dump recordings onto it - some people are doing that.
The last tidy-up is to make the Media button default to USB. I figure a boot script can be configured to send commands through
ir (but it will be a little clunky in that the actions will appear on-screen).