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November 18, 2004

ReplayTV Upgrades

I am a technophobe who enjoys my DVR but wets my pants at the thought of personally opening it up to upgrade it.  I am ready to upgrade two ReplayTV units in my house and put them on a wireless network but have no idea where to start.  Any suggestions?
-- RAZ

November 18, 2004 in Hacks, ReplayTV

Answers

If you have newsgroup access you might want to check out alt.video.ptv.replaytv (there is always Google Groups).

Also see:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/replaytv/
http://replayfaq.leavensfamily.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/replaytv/
http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/replayusers/
http://www.replaytv.us/
http://www.weaknees.com/replaytv.php

To put the units on WiFi you'll need an external WiFi bridge. You'd connect the units' Ethernet ports to the bridges - you can use one of the bridges sold as a wireless adapter for game consoles, etc.

Posted by: MegaZone at Nov 19, 2004 6:09:44 PM

Head over to Planet Replay - http://www.planetreplay.com

Go into the ReplayTV 5000/5500 series forum and do a quick search on wifi or wireless or usb and you'll get all the info you need.

Posted by: BadHoy at Dec 10, 2004 4:01:35 PM

Just plug them into some wireless adapters. The ReplayTVs are autoconfiguring and will discover each other. It's pretty simple.

If you also have a PC/Mac/Linux on the network run DVArchive - this is a Java program that impersonates a networked ReplayTV so you can control all your devices from a single console. You can also move shows between all the units, including the ones running DVArchive.

http://www.dvarchive.org/
http://www.replaytvfaq.com/

Posted by: meehawl at Dec 16, 2004 11:32:23 AM

How can I find other people to recieve shows from. I.E. if I miss a show and would like someone to send me an episode? Thank you

Posted by: Greg at Mar 30, 2005 2:22:27 PM

How can I find other people to recieve shows from. I.E. if I miss a show and would like someone to send me an episode? Thank you

Posted by: Greg at Mar 30, 2005 2:23:16 PM

Go over to www.poopli.com sign up and share.

Posted by: NIck at Jun 19, 2005 9:28:26 AM

y is tivo get more upgrade than replaytv as far as the guide and diffrent features.

Posted by: Isaac Roldan at Jul 17, 2005 10:09:40 PM

Is there a faster way to download shows other than the AWESOME DVArchive?

Posted by: Big John at Sep 17, 2005 12:26:09 PM

Hi All, I don’t mean to be verbose, but I want to give my comments and research the highest Googleability…

Caution: there does seem to be a hard drive size limit when doing an upgrade of the hard drive on a Replay TV (RTV, ReplayTV 5040). Long story short. It’s taken me over a year to discover why my recorded program guide was very slow to respond when viewed from another networked ReplayTV. I also had an issue with DVArchive (DV Archive) freezing up when starting, for as much as 10 minutes.

After viewing the DVArchive logs, It seemed to freeze up when interrogating my ReplayTV 5040 that I had upgraded to a 200GB Hard Drive. If it interrogated My 5040 that I only upgraded to a 160 GB Drive, there was no freeze up until it found the other 5040 with the larger drive.

When I removed the 200 GB 5040 from the network, DVArchive worked perfectly. With the 200GB 5040 attached to the network, it froze up every time (for somewhere between 3 and 10 minutes).

Thinking it might be a hardware issue with player itself, I swapped the hard drives of the two Replay 5040. (160 GB with the 200 GB).

NOTE: Both started normally, but needed to connect to Replay TV Service to function again. The serial number and KEY stayed with the unit, as well as the Internet Identity NUMBER, and of course the MAC address. Everything else swapped from one ReplayTV to the other, including the Internet Identity Name, Unit Name etc. (anything that you can set).

The problems with the slow menu and DVArchive Freezing up moved to the other machine, indicating that it was the 200GB hard drive or something on it. I scrounged another 160 GB drive and used RTVPatch.exe to copy from the 200 GB drive… NOTE: Even though I had deleted most of my shows, I was not able to move my remaining shows because the new MPEG partition is smaller. Note: RTVPatch.exe did give a warning that indicated this would probably happen. But, my scheduled record settings remained intact.

With the 160 GB drive now installed, both machines work perfectly including network functionality as well as DVArchive.

I can guarantee that a 160GB drive works perfectly, but a 200GB drive does not. I can not tell you what the threshold is, but I can tell you that a 200GB or larger drive in a 5040 will cause undesirable results when using the ReplayTVs network functionality.

Since reducing the drive to the 160GB, I no longer have streaming shows stop in the middle of playback. (an issue I experienced regularly when streaming from the 200GB 5040 to the 160GB 5040.)

Note: I experienced the same results with the drives run as CS (Cable Select) or as Master. All 3 drives are Western Digital, and now with the 200 GB drive removed and formatted for my PC, I ran a series of tests all with normal results. Note: I used RTV_Patch.exe version 2.5.3.

Based on my experience, while larger drives will work, my Recommendation is, when upgrading a ReplayTV 5040, limit the Physical Hard Drive to 160GB for best and full functionality of your Replay. Remember that was the largest size any production model 5000 series was sold with (5160). My research indicates that the 5320 used two 160GB drives, maybe there was a reason for this…

Good Luck,

--Liam Zimmerman--

Posted by: Liam Zimmerman at Oct 1, 2005 1:46:50 AM

Can anyone confirm that the size limit for a 5040 ReplayTV which is networked to other units is 160gb as explained another poster? I would like to use the larger drive, but do not want to have problems with the abilty to watch shows recorded on my other ReplayTVs. Thanks for your feedback.

Posted by: Larry at Feb 2, 2007 9:10:32 AM

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