Indigita AVHD IEEE 1394 Hard Disc Drive - Page 21

PM sent, sorry I haven't been here for awhile.

Agreed. Great points.

Thanks for making this drive available, my experience so far. Installed in RCA DVR2160, no go. Installed in Cinemavu DVR10, success. Difference? DVR10 has different Indigita board. It is marked PN: 720-063 REV L ©2005. DVR2160 is marked MODEL 720-063 ©2003. I have another Cinemavu DVR10 with the earlier board that I haven't tried yet, will report shortly.

Interesting, let me know what else you find out. I have tested it in an RCA DVR2080 and a DVR2160, both of which have identical 720-063 ©2003 control boards with the little white REV spot blank, and no issues. I have another DVR2080 that I have never opened, but it is from the same era as the others so I would not expect it to have a different control board.

I don't know what control board is in it, but I know the image is also working in another user's AVHD-40 unit.

Installed 500gb drive in 3rd unit with older board and it worked. Swapped back into DVR2160 that had initially barfed, and go figure, it's working. Might be my Toshiba TV, it gets confused easily. Next test, restoring ~14gb of spanned ghost images from BD-R to another Maxtor drive. http://shindigita.com/products/custo...ions/avpc.html

Was this AVPC board ever sold to the public?
Not sure what the use of it would be? Maybe they thought it could be integrated with Windows Media Center through MS DRM and allow the PC to see the protected content on the hidden partition? Intriguing. I though Indigita went belly up a couple years ago?

I would love to have one of those boards. The way I read it, it uses a hard drive on your computer to create a hidden, encrypted partition that would be available as an AVC device for your firewire connection, but in no way readable by the operating system. The part I find intriguing is how the sizing of the partition would be done, and the possibility of using other types of SATA devices to populate that connection. But I guess we'll never find out since firewire is almost as dead as Indigita .....

Anybody find a work around to put a larger drive in one of these systems without needing an image of a same sized drive? I'm interested in buying one of these but want at least 500gb of space. The largest ide drive is 750gb but I'm assuming nobody has gotten one of these to work??

I would also be interested in a way to easily do an image burn to a larger hard drive or purchase on (for a reasonable price).

Also, On my Mitsubishi LT-46231 the recorded programs don't show up properly all the time.


Once I record programs to my RCA 2160 Scenium HDD DVR it rarely shows the correct name of the show I have recorded. Sometimes it will show something like:

W 01/01 12:01pm

Or:

WMSM M 03/23 7.00pm ANT-1 Ch 21-1

When it should say:

WMSM M 03/23 7.00pm Antique Road Show

I can only find the Symbio 160HD4 and the RCA DVR2080 available online. I'm assuming to get one to be able to have 500gb of storage that I could only use the RCA DVR2080. I would then need to get a 500gb IDE drive. Would anybody be interested in hosting an image file for a 500gb Indigita/Cinemavu so I can get this to work? I'm hoping this isn't a total shot in the dark considering I'm more than 3 years late on this technology.

As I recall, it's fairly simple to clone an AVHD drive to a new drive of equal or larger size (using Acronis or whatever), but it will use only the amount of space used on the original drive. If anyone has figured out how to patch the partition table to enlarge the (non-standard) partition to fill a larger drive, I haven't heard about it.

When your LT-46231 doesn't record names properly in the AVHD directory, are the names showing up properly in the TV's PSIP list? It's been a while since I actually used an AVHD, but sometimes my LT-46131 seems to stop showing PSIP program names. I believe a soft reset using the front-panel button generally fixed that, although some recording issues required power cycling the AVHD unit. (I've been using a TiVo for a while, so I'm rusty.)

Well you could also import an AVHDD from japan where they have up to 2TB units.
http://auctions.search.yahoo.co.jp/s...erce&ei=euc-jp
OR
amazon japan - search for rec pot.
I have a 1TB unit. BTW-the new units wont be avaliable much longer, i'll see to that within the next 30 days.

Thanks for the info....

It is not possible because the hard drive's filesystem has the size of the disk baked in to its format and it is encrypted on the disk. The Indigita firmware is capable of formatting the disk itself but that functionality was never hooked to a user accessible interface. Sadly I believe the internal debug serial port (shh.. it's a secret) will not take input by default (though it may print interesting messages if you hook it up right).

Cloning a disk is the best you can do (easily) but even that doesn't work 100% of the time since sometimes OEMs insist on different HD encryption keys to purposefully be incompatible with the other OEMs.

~x

That's fascinating information. Thank you!

By "OEMs" are you referring to the manufacturers of the AVHD enclosures, as opposed to the manufacturers of the internal 3.5" hard drives?

Is Indigita (or CinemaVu or Intellasys or anybody) still selling and/or supporting these AVHD drives? Thanks again.

The AVHD OEMs. The 3.5 drives are more or less commodity--they have A/V firmware (which lets you limit the time error correction takes) but I don't think the A/V part is actually enabled. There's nothing magic about the drives.

Inidigita changed its name to Shindigita and then got sold. I'm pretty sure no more AVHDs are being made and I can't find any remnant of the company online.

1394 on TVs seems to have died out with DLPs...

~x