I recently added an ext. HD to my Dish 722, and have been generally pleased with the way it works. It is my understanding that the formatting which Dish does is proprietary, and that the data on the HD cannot be accessed except thru the 722. Has anyone confirmed that, or found a work around? I'd love to be able to on occasion simply hook the HD to my computer and play back from there as well....

Yes, it is confirmed. And no, you cannot hook it to your computer. Dish Network uses a proprietary filesystem and the recordings are encrypted.

Yes, it is confirmed. And no, you cannot hook it to your computer. Dish Network uses a proprietary filesystem and the recordings are encrypted.

And by proprietary, you mean ext3 which is actually an open source filesystem. However, the recordings are still encrypted. The real danger is that DISH has apparently put in code to detect whether the disk has been mounted by a non-DISH device and will require you to re-format the disk before you can use it again. So, just mounting the disk on a Linux box and poking around is enough to lose whatever you have recorded on the disk.

Ted

PVR disk formats are very different from data system disk formats since PVR formats and recording can have a small error rate which is not permitalbe for data recording. PVR's use these these error tolerent formats sinmce the improve the transfer rate and recording capabity.