local drive on hd200

[jason22]

Hey all,

What is the best way to get media files onto a usb hard drive attached to the hd200 locally. I can browse the directories, but I am unable to write to them. Detaching it in order to load files seems pretty cumbersome

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by jason22

Hey all,

What is the best way to get media files onto a usb hard drive attached to the hd200 locally. I can browse the directories, but I am unable to write to them. Detaching it in order to load files seems pretty cumbersome

Did you enable sharing on the HD200?

Gerry

[jason22]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Did you enable sharing on the HD200?

Gerry

I enabled Windows File Server, but I believe that just let me browse the attached drives. Are you able to copy files onto a drive with this option enabled or is there another setting I may have missed? I am running the released firmware BTW and not the newest beta.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by jason22

I enabled Windows File Server, but I believe that just let me browse the attached drives. Are you able to copy files onto a drive with this option enabled or is there another setting I may have missed? I am running the released firmware BTW and not the newest beta.

Changes for beta version 20090128 0 include the following:

Core changes:
Updated chipset driver
Updated playback engine (various file compatibility fix)
Fix vorbis sound decoding
Fix bug when switching between audio tracks of some types
Improve audio support in m2ts (might need content reindexing in extender mode or clearing flash in standalone mode)
Fix b-frames issue with some mp4 files
Improve network shares compatibility
Fixed issues with case sensitivity on network share subdirectories
Disabled HD200 from becoming the SMB Local Master Browser if the Windows File Server is enabled
Fixed bug where playback of files in the Filesystem browser from authenticated shares did not work properly
Fixed issue where MPEG1 playback didn't work on the HD200
Fixed bug where the format parser didn't always deal with multi-program transport streams properly

There's been some fixes in the latest beta.

Gerry

[jason22]

I have tried this again after installing the beta. i am still not able to write to the drive. Also, when I use the copy to library function on the HD-200 itself, the copy fails with a java.io.FileNotFoundException. After listing the path of the intended target file it has (Read-only file system) printed. I am not sure why it would say it was a read only file system.

[jason22]

I tried posting this to the media extender forum but have not gotten much of a response. I was thinking here might be better because people might not be using this feature much if they are streaming.

I am basically just trying to get media onto a usb drive attached directly to the HD-200. Although I am able to browse the attached drive from my laptop, I am unable to copy files onto it. It gives the impression that I do not have write access to the drive.

Also, when i am using the HD-200 and browsing my network with the remote, if I select the "copy this file to the library" option, it will throw a java.io.FileNotFoundException on the target and fail to perform the copy.

I was curious if other people are using this menu option successfully or were able to write to a usb drive successfully from another computer in the house.

the windows sharing seems to be Enabled, and i can browse but writing is out.

BTW, if I were guessing, my worry was that this might be related to the drive being formatted to ntfs though I had thought that people considered that to be a good option for media drives.

thanks,
Jason

* merged *

[jason22]

I have opened a help ticket for this though I would still be interested in hearing from anyone who might be experiencing something similar. From reading through the forum, I'm not sure if others are attaching drives directly to the HD200 very often, but if you are and copying files to a usb hard drive works fine for you, it would interest me to hear about your setup.

thanx

[kemputer26]

I wanted to use an external USB HD attached to the extender so that I could push movies to that device over the network, and watch them from that drive. Effectively keeping a "current" list of movies (for us, not watched)... the full movie library with our older (watched) movies is accessed over the network.

I can see and browse the drive from my home PC, but i appear to have ReadOnly access to the drive. I cannot write a file to that drive while it is plugged in to the extender.

My suspicion is that this was done as a precaution, removing the ability to write to an attached USB drive prevents some freak occurrence of scrambling the data or accidentally messing up somebody's library. If the extender only ever hosts a connection in read-only mode, then there is very little risk that the software/extender will mess something up on the drive.

I had chalked it up to a limitation, as I verified it is permissions related and have no way to change those permissions (AFAIK).

Would LOVE to hear if it's a feature request, to have the drive attached available to write...that would be a very nice feature, especially for very-high-bitrate files over a slower wireless connection (I'd push the file to the drive first, then play it when it was moved over).

Cheers

[jason22]

Originally Posted by kemputer26

I wanted to use an external USB HD attached to the extender so that I could push movies to that device over the network, and watch them from that drive. Effectively keeping a "current" list of movies (for us, not watched)... the full movie library with our older (watched) movies is accessed over the network.

I can see and browse the drive from my home PC, but i appear to have ReadOnly access to the drive. I cannot write a file to that drive while it is plugged in to the extender.

My suspicion is that this was done as a precaution, removing the ability to write to an attached USB drive prevents some freak occurrence of scrambling the data or accidentally messing up somebody's library. If the extender only ever hosts a connection in read-only mode, then there is very little risk that the software/extender will mess something up on the drive.

I had chalked it up to a limitation, as I verified it is permissions related and have no way to change those permissions (AFAIK).

Would LOVE to hear if it's a feature request, to have the drive attached available to write...that would be a very nice feature, especially for very-high-bitrate files over a slower wireless connection (I'd push the file to the drive first, then play it when it was moved over).

Cheers

Thanks for the reply. At first i had thought that this might be deliberate(and it still might). However, the menu option to copy to library made me wonder. It seems like copying from the network to the usb hard drive would be the intended use for that function. Actually, I could live pretty easily with not being able to write to it from another computer if that menu item would work.

Your point about the wireless is my situation. I'm in a rental and can't go the wired route without it looking pretty bad. It pretty much eliminates the problems with wireless if you could just drop things in at will.

[kemputer26]

Originally Posted by jason22

Thanks for the reply. At first i had thought that this might be deliberate(and it still might). However, the menu option to copy to library made me wonder. It seems like copying from the network to the usb hard drive would be the intended use for that function. Actually, I could live pretty easily with not being able to write to it from another computer if that menu item would work.

I suspect that "copy to library" is all about moving a file from the "recorded TV" section to a folder in your media library, which I assume would be on the machine where your SageTV Server is running. That is, wherever you have all the other videos that Sage scans and presents...older movies, divx files, etc.

Originally Posted by jason22

Your point about the wireless is my situation. I'm in a rental and can't go the wired route without it looking pretty bad. It pretty much eliminates the problems with wireless if you could just drop things in at will.

I upgraded to Wireless N, so i'm in pretty good shape now...still would love to have the option to push files to the drive attached to the extender. Perhaps somebody can tell us if this has been a past submitted feature-request?

Cheers

[jason22]

Originally Posted by kemputer26

I suspect that "copy to library" is all about moving a file from the "recorded TV" section to a folder in your media library, which I assume would be on the machine where your SageTV Server is running. That is, wherever you have all the other videos that Sage scans and presents...older movies, divx files, etc.

Makes sense though I'm in standalone mode currently so my library is on the usb drive. For standalone mode I had thought this would be a common setup?

i saw you could telnet in so i did poke around a bit. It seems the drive is mounted read only so changing permissions on the folders won't be possible. I might try to see if i have better luck with a thumb drive in FAT32 if I can find one lying around.

[jason22]

I have had some questions about this so figured I should probably post back to this thread with the results of my support request in case someone happens along. From their response it appears that writing to an attached ntfs drive is not supported at this time. They were unwilling to give me an if/when on full support for ntfs.

They did seem to indicate that this would work if the drive was formatted in FAT32 or ext3. I'm leaning towards attempting to reformat in ext3 given the limitations associated with FAT32 though I realize this might not be a widely used configuration. I'm not sure how soon I'll get around to this, but of course would be interested in hearing about anyone who has attempted something similar. At least then I'd know that I'm not the only one!

[HelenWeathers]

All the drives I use with the HD-200 USB port (and my network attached drives as well) are NTFS formatted and work with no problem.

[jason22]

Can you write to them with the copy to library function or drop files onto the usb hard drives by finding the HD200 from another machine and moving files onto it? Mine works for reads fine but fails for writes.

edit: this would only apply to the drives attached directly to the unit. Any other drive on the network I can write to fine.

[HelenWeathers]

You're right, I havn't tried to write to them. I missed that in your post. Did Sage say that you could write to them if they were formatted other than NTFS? EXT3 for example. (FAT32 would be a waste for me as all my recordings are > 2g I think)

[jason22]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

You're right, I havn't tried to write to them. I missed that in your post. Did Sage say that you could write to them if they were formatted other than NTFS? EXT3 for example. (FAT32 would be a waste for me as all my recordings are > 2g I think)

I asked if they had a recommendation and they responded with fat32 or ext3. My wireless works pretty well for standard definition, but I doubt it will be able to handle HD. This makes FAT32 a waste for me as well since it only seems to handle the situations where I wouldn't have problems anyway. I'm a little worried about ext3 and support for my windows machines. There appears to be solutions out there for this, but it is not something I've ever tried.

[hingepin]

I'm in the same boat as you. I've been extremely frustrated and tried to figure it out on my own after a six pack or so, hence the incoherent past few posts. I have an Iomega 500GB USB drive I'm not using. I'll try it out on Monday and see what I come up with and post the results.

For now, nothing I have is HD so wireless N is working in standalone. Extender mode hangs for me too often. Even with all updates for both bios and software. Still, I wouldn't give it up for anything. The only thing I wish I would have done was stick with my original plan of a NAS vice USB for my particular setup. My PC is wireless and my HD200 is wired. My next house will be 1 story so I can run cat5 through the attic/walls!

[jason22]

Originally Posted by hingepin

I'm in the same boat as you. I've been extremely frustrated and tried to figure it out on my own after a six pack or so, hence the incoherent past few posts. I have an Iomega 500GB USB drive I'm not using. I'll try it out on Monday and see what I come up with and post the results.

For now, nothing I have is HD so wireless N is working in standalone. Extender mode hangs for me too often. Even with all updates for both bios and software. Still, I wouldn't give it up for anything. The only thing I wish I would have done was stick with my original plan of a NAS vice USB for my particular setup. My PC is wireless and my HD200 is wired. My next house will be 1 story so I can run cat5 through the attic/walls!

After looking into this some more, I'm not sure there is going to be a silver bullet for writing to a local hard drive. The 64 K cluster size that I see frequently recommended appears to be a strike against ext3 as well as FAT32. Ext3 seems to have similar limitations on cluster size if I'm understanding what I have been reading correctly. I believe block size in ext3 is similar to cluster size and the resources I've seen indicate that the only options are 1024, 2048 and 4096 in Ext3. Short of hacking the HD200 in some way to install ntfs-3g, I'm pretty much out of ideas. I don't think I'm going to attempt that.

At this point, I'll probably either format FAT32 and hope I don't get stuttering from disk read speeds or detach the usb drive when I want to load media. Good luck with your wireless pursuit though. At least if you have a six pack you've accomplished something one way or the other.

[hingepin]

When I was researching to buy the HD200 or PCH, one thing I learned was that in order for the PCH to write to a local HD was to format it ext3. If you formatted NTFS, you could only read it from a PC. Both units are Linux based, so I would think it would work.

The main reason I didn't go with the PCH is the difficulty in installing a better GUI than the default and the fact that I had a SageTV license already; wich I don't even use anyway because it hangs the HD200 too often with wireless. Hopefully in the future, a better TV tuner solution will come down the road and I can go back to SageTV and and get rid of the Comcast DVR and have everything combined. I give it at least 5 years or so, unless you have the cash laying around for the HD PVRs, extenders, ect.

[_Demo_]

Originally Posted by jason22

After looking into this some more, I'm not sure there is going to be a silver bullet for writing to a local hard drive. The 64 K cluster size that I see frequently recommended appears to be a strike against ext3 as well as FAT32. Ext3 seems to have similar limitations on cluster size if I'm understanding what I have been reading correctly. I believe block size in ext3 is similar to cluster size and the resources I've seen indicate that the only options are 1024, 2048 and 4096 in Ext3. Short of hacking the HD200 in some way to install ntfs-3g, I'm pretty much out of ideas. I don't think I'm going to attempt that.

At this point, I'll probably either format FAT32 and hope I don't get stuttering from disk read speeds or detach the usb drive when I want to load media. Good luck with your wireless pursuit though. At least if you have a six pack you've accomplished something one way or the other.

This isn't an issue with ext3 since it has better handling of blocks and we haven't seen it have issues related to block size.

_Demo_