You may remember that I’m quite a satellite TV fan, having installed it in 2004 and compiled a FAQ. Over the holidays, I replaced my 4-year-old Digiquest receiver (terrible website) with a FortecStar FS-4400 PVR from Maplin.
I’d love to build a MythTV but how am I ever going to build such a small, quiet receiver for anything like that price? The FS-4400’s decoder gives a dribblingly clear picture and (one firmware upgrade later) the recorder works flawlessly. I can even watch other channels on the same transponder while recording. It has a couple of small niggles (the file manager that appears every damn power-on, the pidgin English on-screen displays and it’s too easy to activate the motor), but it seems pretty good value on the whole.
Now I’ve a dilemma. I put a 4Gb USB stick into it, just to see how I got on with the recording. I like it, but 4Gb is enough for only 2 or 3 hours and I don’t want to get into swapping sticks around like video casettes. I still don’t know what’s where on half my tapes.
I’ve seen a few places report things like Solid State Drives Getting Ready to Take Over (by Jaymi Heimbuch) with much larger capacity just around the corner, but the best rate I found today is around 1 Gb/pound for SSDs up to about 32Gb, compared to nearly 10 Gb/pound for USB-powered hard disks from around 300Gb. On the flip side, SSDs are silent and I don’t know how noisy or power-hungry the HDDs are. How would you play this?
By the way, if you care about UK TV, BERR.gov.uk is consulting about reducing Sky’s control of itv – what’s to consult about? Sky’s doing all they can through the courts to drag their feet, but we need to put the independent back into independent television! Tell them by Friday 23 January 2009, please.
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6 comments so far
1 Andrew Savory // Jan 15, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Take the opportunity to try out SSDs. MemoryC seem to be reasonably-priced, my recent purchase weighed in at £2.87/GB. Sure, the capacity is typically lower, but the speed can be higher (depending on what type of SSD you get and your interface speed, buyer beware). Pay close attention to the read and write speeds when you buy.
2 Henrik // Jan 15, 2009 at 1:45 pm
FWIW, I have never met an external HDD that isn’t loud to the point of being annoying. If you can afford it, I’d recommend an SSD.
3 Anthony Kirkham // Mar 28, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I’m using a 2.5″ 250gig HDD in a USB2 enclosure. I formatted the drive via the FS4400. It is silent and works fine. There is a slight delay when calling up the EPG since fitting the drive.
SSD’s are too small and expensive. My HDD & enclosure cost about £50.
4 MJ Ray // Mar 28, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Thanks Anthony. Which HDD and enclosure are you using? I’ve upgraded to a bigger flash stick for now, but the receiver reboots when it’s inserted, which definitely rules out swapping them around like tapes!
5 Ozz // Mar 1, 2010 at 10:41 am
i have just bought a FS4400 and am tryin to update the firmware. I have downloaded the ugrade file but am having .bin match erros when trying to install.
Could anyone please post a detailed description of how to upgrade from downloading the file through to reciever upgrade.
6 MJ Ray // Mar 1, 2010 at 12:40 pm
@Ozz – if you are getting as far as having .bin match errors, it sounds like you’re probably doing the right thing. The firmware I am using at the moment is
4194304 2008-12-16 17:03 product_glass_sky29e_sdk.abs
has an md5sum of d2a064697e214ba9c7f7a17fd4ecbad7
I think I copied that file (and maybe the config.inc from the same zip) to the root of a USB stick, plugged it into the receiver and then picked something like Tools: Upgrade by USB from the menu.