Moxi HD DVR - Page 84

I already have an external HD, so I don't need any more recording space. BUT I would love to be able to replace the internal drive, since it has always made too much noise. We are always distracted by the noise during silent passages.

Odd, that's exactly how I'd say it SHOULD be, at least from the hardware side. Are you streaming the clips from the net? If so, what d/l speed do you get? THAT could be an issue...

That is EXACTLY what I thought of when I read the post! Sounds like this "re-install application" COULD be the ticket... because it also implies it comes from Diego (Arris).

I think we are putting the cart before the horse here. We need to figure out how to get back to the screen. Anyone want to do a couple of reboots and post back what you tried?

This is great, I can now disable my backlighting on my remote when I don't need it. The buzzing sound wasn't noticeable until the remote was right next to my head, but this is great now that I have the option to turn it on and off.
Thanks.

Have been using an older Moxi through Charter with USB 2 connection to a Western Digital external HD. Had a sudden power outage last night that lasted about 10 hours. When the power came back on the Moxi reset itself but most of our recorded TV was gone and the Moxi no longer sees the external drive. I've cut the power to the external drive and disconnected it from the Moxi then hooked everything back up. Get an error message that I am either hooking up to the front port or not using a USB 2 drive. Any help appreciated. Not sure if the problem is the drive or the usb port on the Moxi. I'd prefer not have to buy a new drive unless I'm sure that's the problem. If it's the Moxi I'll take it back to Charter but I'm not sure if they still offer the Moxi as their DVR solution anymore or not. Thanks in advance.

Jim

If you're using a Moxi issued by your cableco you need this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=412846

The retail Moxi is different hardware.

When I had the Charter Moxi and this happened to me, it once took over 40 minutes for the Moxi to scan the hard drive (1tb) and mount it.

The fact that I spent about 20-30 minutes Saturday evening pushing sequences of buttons on my Moxi speaks more to my sex life or lack thereof but my curiosity was peaked when Acaocao posted that picture of the Moxi's menu. (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2486)

I'm embarrassed to say that regardless of the sequence of buttons press I could not bring up the screen. More specifically, this was restricted to, after invoking a warm reboot, keeping depressed either the Reset or OK button depressed while pushing the arrow or OK buttons in a variety of combinations. I limited myself to sequence that went up to a count of ten. E.i., press Left arrow once or twice or 3x ... 10X I won't bore you with the sequences suffice it to say that I kept rolling snake eyes.

Undaunted, I tried again tonight but depressing sets of of buttons for a number of seconds.

VoilÃ*!



To get this screen you:

1. Press Reset button to invoke a soft reboot
2. Simultaneously press Up, Down, Left and Right navigation keys on the right side of the front panel for approximately 20 seconds.

nb. at about 15 seconds into it the screen flashes very briefly which may startle you and you may react by lifting your fingers off the keys. Keep them depressed for the full 20 seconds. You should get the screen depicted above.

What I'd like to know is what happens when a new SATA drive is inserted in the Moxi and the re-installation is allowed to continue.

J

Heh, I knew someone somewhere would be clicking buttons.

So now ...

what happens when you press OK?

Operon, bravo to you. And thank you.

So, does this mean the Moxi basic software is embedded on a chip on the motherboard?

I, too, want the answers:

1. If you just plop in a brand new empty SATA hard drive and bring up the restore screen, will it work?

2. If the answer to number 1 is yes, would an SSD conceivably be successful? (Yes, I know the SSDs of today are too small in capacity and expensive, but I'm thinking maybe next year when the prices for SSDs drop and the capacities increase.)

Anyone have an educated guess?

You have to figure that to expedite repairs and keep costs low a basic OS has to reside in the hardware. That way replacing the hard drive can be done with any part they have in stock and the software added when needed.

The alternative would be to need a stock of drives on hand that have already been specially preloaded with Moxi OS.

If this does allow for a manual drive replacement you can guarantee it would void the warranty. It would be easy for Digeo to keep track of where their software is reloaded and by what units in addition to acitvation on reinstall.

The more interesting question is, can you plop in a 2TB HD and have the Moxi use all the space after the init? My guess would be no.

Operon. Thanks for your hard work! I was able to replicate getting to the secret screen using your steps. I want to caution everyone when they try to do this. IF YOU HIT "OK" YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DATA. So be careful.


It seems like MOXI either have

1. Super basic OS installed on the EEPROM
or
2. They have some bootstap booting method embedded on the hardware that allows it to recreate the OS? and harddrive

Either way, this piece of code can be activated using the steps outlined by Operon that pulls down software to reinstall the complete software on to the harddrive.

As for the requirements for the replacement harddrive. I am not sure. Can it be blank? Does it need to have partitions and formats? But our attempts G4L did not show any partitions. I think we just need to put in an empty SATA drive and see what happens

As for SSD, they are going to be pricey. I am not sure if the price/capacity point is there yet.


Yes, I think this is an easy way for Moxi to do repairs...won't this be more time consuming than having a stock of ready drives?

As for warranty, I am sure this will void the warranty. HOWEVER, from what I am told, Arris/Diego only keeps diagnostics logs for a week or so. So I think if you keep your original drive in place and do not strip the screws while doing this, you should be okay.


I am going to disagree with this. I think this will be quite the possibility.

Imagine if you are a digeo developer who created this tool. Would you make the tool take a predined amount of space of a harddrive for storing shows? Or would you make the tool take the whole drive to store shows. I am thinking latter since drives are getting larger and cheaper everyday.

However, this is all speculation now.

Now the steps to the secret screen has been establish.

Lets play.

Here is a list of things to do...

1. Put in a 500GB or smaller (if we do not have anything larger than 500GB drive) I assume this would be to test the recovery features of the secret screen

2. Put in a larger blank drive (640GB, 750GB, 1TB, 2TB, etc).. to get a larger recording space

In both cases, use the secret screen and see if it will work.


If any of these two things work, it would be a huge accomplishment for Moxi and a great benefit for Moxi owners.

In the Tivo world, if you drive fails you have to connect a replacement drive to a computer(assuming you have an image) and run some programs to build a replacemnt drive... or buy a replacement drive from weaknees or ebay at a premium cost.

If this works for Moxi replacement/expansion, this bode well for Moxi users. In essense Moxi is trying to make it easier for owners to upgrade/recover from failure....

Who has spare SATA drives... my fingers are crossed for you.

Somehow I doubt they have the OS in some EEPROM... if so they could run it from there and not the HDD (an interesting way of doing it).

My GUESS is they have a very basic bootstrap in silicon, enough to make the box barely alive and enough to d/l from it's network connection. BUT that may be more what I'd LIKE to see than what is true.

Somebody needs to drop a bigger HDD in and see what happens.

Very wise advise!


We are on the same wavelength in terms of experience, I said pretty much the same thing in response before I read you're steps!


Don't think anyone has found out exactly what kind of disc format they use... logically one would think THAT software was in the EEPROM I mentioned above.


Thus we need some experimenting going on. Of course, someone needs to simply open the box and see if they employ any "anti-tamper" mechanisms... like tape over the screws securing the drive... or if they gift us with "security" torx screws, which are waasy to open with the right tool (Samsung does this on their 3090)!

I know the Tivo uses Torx screws.

I opened the Moxi box several times. Moxi has nothing like that. All you need is a Phillips screwdriver and some courage. There is 4-6 screws holding the case top on. and 4-5 holding the harddrive to the bracket.

I think the biggest positive here might be for Moxi users in a situation where the warranty has expired. The warranty is one year, right? When that years is up, as the Moxi ages, the largest risk of failure will be the hard drive. Once the drive fails, one would need to pay Moxi for both the new hard drive, the labor involved, and the shipping fee.

If after the warranty we could simply buy a new drive and put it in ourselves, think of the money we'd save. (We most likely would get the new drive cheaper than what we'd pay Moxi.)

Regarding SSDs, I brought this up because potentially in perhaps two years when our Moxi hard drive might fail, SSDs will be much cheaper. It might be an option.

With ReplayTV, one had to connect a new hard drive to one's computer to partition it and then copy over the ReplayTV operating system. You cannot put an empty hard drive into a ReplayTV. If Moxi allows the insertion of an empty SATA hard drive, this would be great news. If my Moxi was out of warranty, I'd of course test it out. Hopefully, someone here has a test Moxi box they already opened and an extra SATA drive laying around.

I have the 3-tuner model. Moxi has a USB attachment box for $129 to get analog signals. Evidently my ISP (Charter) sill has many channels that are not in digital, such as ABC Family channel. Is it worth buying this gadget now or will everything be converted to digital shortly anyway making it a waste of money?

Midas, help me understand more why you would want an SSD used in this application? This seems like exactly the wrong drive to use for an always on DVR, especially when it doesn't seem particularly disk-bound right now.

Jon, I have had two Moxi 3-tuner units with defective hard drives (both were replaced). My third three-tuner Moxi is exhibiting hard drive issues. (Can you feel my frustration?)

As everyone knows, an SSD is less likely to fail because the SSD has no moving parts.

I have an Intel SSD in my laptop and let me tell you that laptop boots and is ready to surf via IE in 17 seconds.

SSDs will only get faster and cheaper in time. I know SSDs are too expensive right now and their capacity too small. I am thinking for the future. They already have a blazing fast SSD for sale, but it is way too expensive right now.

Oh, and all the years I owned my two ReplayTVs, I had to replace crashed hard drives on those about every two years. Hard drives in DVRs take a pounding because they are on 24 hours per day, as you know.

As I suspected, the Moxi is using an embedded Linux as its OS. It probably isn't that thin. When the Moxi was being developed embedded Linux was all the rage and people were predicting that Linux was going to inhabit every device in the home from hair dryers to clothes dryers and everything in between. I'm not sure what chip the OS is using however, the OEM Moxis apparently use a 733 Mhz C3 Cyrix x86 CPU.

The interface is written in Flash but quite frankly I wish it was a bit jazzier in terms of performance considering what is now available in consumer electronics. I don't know what drives the poor performance issues of the interface I encounter daily. Though notwithstanding the Moxi lens button, I find the logic of the interface very slick once you get used to it.

Furthermore, I have reason to believe that drive is formatted using the Ext3 file system though the partition may, in fact, be hidden. That will take some digging around once I get my hands on a drive to play with. Regardless, it just makes so much sense that pressing the OK button to initiate the software re-installation application simply formats the drive and writes the directory structure to support writing the video containers to the disk. The partition size is another issue though the easiest route would be to simply use the entire disk regardless of size though there may be a switch in the formatting script to designate partition size.

If one was hell bent on preventing the user from upgrading the disk size, then this is what would be done and if the decision was to use a larger disk then a simple change in the script is all that's necessary to increase partition size. [Just speculating here.] One additional thought is that if the Moxi uses a database for video container storage, then there may be db specific stuff written to the disk during this prep process.

Finally, for those legally-minded folks, I've included copies of a random assortment of patent applications that describe the Moxi which Diego has filed.

1. Patent 1
2. Patent 2
3. Patent 3
4. Patent 4
5. Patent 5
6. Patent 6
7. Patent 7
8. Patent 8
9. Patent 9
10. Patent 10
11. Patent 11
12. Patent 12
13. Patent 13
14. Patent 14

I hope all this helps the curious or the adventurous Moxi owner.

J

dickmiles,

I think your decision will depend on what your cable provider decides to do. Do they plan to get rid of analogs and when?

I think you can get that USB attachment on your own. Maybe it can be had for cheaper than $129?

My question is similar to dickmiles' . . .

We are very, very close to ordering, but I've remained confused about what analog & what digital channels we've got. Someone suggested I check my cable co's (Time Warner in eastern WA/northern ID) Web site, and I did, but I'm still not sure because there are so many channel levels, and none are called "analog." I tried calling my cable co, but the person I spoke with was singularly unhelpful -- he said that as long as we have a STB or CableCard, it's all digital and we don't have to worry about analog channels??? I tried to explain the situation, but either I explained very poorly or he just didnt' understand.

We currently have five ReplayTVs in four rooms, and three cable boxes -- we get the premium channels, so STBs are required.

We do get quite a few channels when hooking up the coax straight to the TV, but someone mentioned "stealth," so I don't know if all those channels are analog or not. And, I couldn't find a diagnostics section on our TVs (doesn't mean it's not there), and the signal strength is greyed-out when selecting cable as the signal source.

Any other suggestions on how to tell what channels are digital and which are analog?

Assuming we do have some analog channels, this part of the FAQ on the Moxi site confuses me:

The Moxi HD DVR is optimized to work with Digital Cable service. For the support of analog cable channels, you would need an accessory called an analog dongle available here. It plugs into the USB port on the Moxi HD DVR. Using this, you will have full DVR support, as well as the other features that the Moxi HD DVR provides, but would only be able to record a single analog show at a time. The HD channels will be discovered by the Moxi automatically, and you would have the capability to record two shows at a time.

I get that we'd only ever be able to record one analog channel at a time per Moxi, but does it also mean that even when we're not recording/watching an analog channel, we'd still only ever be able to record two digital or HD shows at a time???

I've got to be clear on this stuff because the last thing I need to do is to have convince my totally change adversive dh that this is the way to go (we're currently a ReplayTV family -- we've got five) and then run into problems. I've managed to pretty much convince him that what we need to do is go with two 3-tuner Moxis and two Mates, and keep one cable box (for OnDemand access). As crazy as it seems, there are times (particularly Friday evenings thru Tuesday PM) when all five of the RTVs are busy recording and we need more.

I guess the crux of the issue is that we need to figure out which channels are analog and which are digital, but I'm stumped on how to find that out since the cable co wasn't helpful . . .

I bolded one of your assumptions above, which I feel is significantly inaccurate at this point in the SSD world. It's anecdotal at this point, but the consensus at tech oriented sites like anandtech are that SSDs are significantly more prone to failure than mechanical drives. Also, SSDs have a limited number of times they can rewrite data on a memory block before it will be unusuable. Finally, performance on SSDs drop significantly as the drive is filled without using a TRIM function on it (it's not the same, but you can think of it like a defrag) or realigning the data.

Honestly, this isn't the thread to get really into this, but my feeling is that you are at least 5 years out, if not more, before SSDs would have parity to a mechanical HD today. But, I hear what you are saying and I would hope that in the future that would be a reasonable option as well.

OK. Step by step.

Plug the incoming cable DIRECTLY into the TV (no STB.) Scan for channels. WHAT channels does the TV find? What are the CHANNEL NUMBERS? If you just get the local HD channels and not all the channels listed in light blue or dark pink at

http://www.timewarnercable.com/north...t/clu/clu.ashx

then you DON'T have analog cable. List the stations and channel numbers you receive by this method HERE.

Even if you have analog channels, those channels MIGHT be simulcast as "stealth" digital channels for reception by the cable STBs that DO NOT have analog tuners. Does your cable company use ANY of these STBs or DVRs ?

Cisco/SA Explorer 8640, 8642, Explorer 4640, 4642, Explorer 1640, 1642, Explorer 1540, 1542, Explorer 8540, Explorer 8240, 8240HD, 4540HD, 4240, 4240HD, Explorer 3340, 3240HD, Explorer 940, STA1520, or DTA50?
Motorola DCH70, DCH100, DCH3200, DCH3416, DCT700, DCT3400, DCX700, DCX3200, DCX3400, DTA100?

If so, any analog signals are also sent as "stealth" digital signals for these boxes, because these boxes DO NOT HAVE AN ANALOG TUNER! Moxi DVRs *should* also be able to tune these same digital signals, and *should not* require purchase of the additional analog "dongle."

So, check your cable boxes and your friends and neighbors' cable boxes. If ANY of them have ANY of the above cable boxes, the Moxi DVR *should* be able to map and tune all of the (non SDV) channels.

The easiest way to tell for sure if your cable system is using analog channels is with your TV's diagnostics. Perhaps if you posted the make/model number of your TV, someone here could assist you with that.

I dunno about that. All the Moxi models have 32MB of flash memory. But the mate doesn't have a hard disk. This implies that the entire OS runs from flash for the Mate. Perhaps there are additional modules that the DVR's load onto harddisk, but I would wager that the lion's share of the OS runs out of the flash module on all models (with some sort of bootstrap OS in EEPROM).

As for the filesystem used, I agree with Operon in that as major contributors to the ext3 filesystem, it would be odd indeed if they used something else for the base filesystem. The fact that G4L can't detect any partition *could* be an indication of the use of some sort of volume manager (eg LVM or something else) which is abstracting the partitions. The use of LVM would also make it trivial to concatenate physical disks into a single large filesystem (like the LaCie expansion drive), so it would be the solution that *I* would use..dunno if they did. It's also possible that they are using a whole-disk encryption scheme with the LVM/ext3 partitioning fully encapsulated within the crypto.

In any case, I'm looking forward to the first person trying out the 2TB upgrade thing. Who knows..it might be me if nobody else gives it a whirl in the next month or two If successful, I guess we don't have to worry about having a "virgin restore image" except as an academic exercise.

Speculation: You know how when the Moxi reboots, if a problem with the hard drive is detected, all recorded programs are lost after a ten to twenty minute whatever Moxi is doing?

Could this mean if one puts in a blank SATA drive, Moxi will detect the empty drive automatically and do a restore without one having to do the four button newly discovered press?

Thanks, Domino, for your help. Ugh -- the bad news is that I think we've got lots of analog channels. Rather than listing all the channels we get with the coax hooked directly to the TV, it would probably be easier to say that we get all the channels in the light blue & dark pink tiers, plus digital and/or HD for some of them (i.e., ch 2 - KREM and ch 2-1 KREM-DT). It looks like just over half in those two tiers also appear in the higher HD tiers, which is great. But, the bad news is that some very important channels seem to be analog only.

With respect to cable boxes, most of my friends have satellite. We have Motorola DCH6200 cable boxes, as do the friends I've heard back from with a few Morotola DCT6200s thrown in. No one seems to have any of the Motorola boxes you listed the would make it clear that we don't have any analog channels.

Since it seems pretty clear that we do have some critical analog only channels, I don't know that posting our TV makes & models would be helpful, but just in case, we've got three Samsungs: LN46B750, LN40A650, and LN32A550.

So, now that I'm pretty clear we've got cricial analog only channels, I need to understand about the dongle. In a 3-tuner Moxi with a dongle, I understand from the FAQ that we'd only ever be able to record one analog channel at a time -- does that mean that one of the three tuners will always be limited to analog channels so that we could never record three digital or HD channels at a time?

We're fortunate that we'll have some flexibility, so I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do things. Since I'm 95% sure we'll be getting two 3-tuner Moxis & 2 Mates, maybe we can get by with just one dongle. And/or, since we'll be keeping one STB for OnDemand, we could also keep some of the RTVs in service.

Once I better understand how the effect of the dongle on the 3-tuner Moxi, I think I'll be set to go.

Thanks again!