Playing Dish TV recordings on PC?

[ScoutBird]

Hi everyone, found this site looking for some specific information about new features of Dish TV I recently ran across. This looks to be good site for generally chatting about A/V.

We recently got a receiver upgrade on our Dish TV, a 722 HD. The DVR has the ability to backup programs to external usb drive, but turns out (which I suspected when asked to reformat) the disk format is not PC compatible. As I travel a lot in my job, I was wondering if there was a player for Windows XP that can read that format, so I can watch programs in hotel while traveling? Primarily action movies and SciFi series episodes that my wife isn't interested in.

Thanks, and I look forward to participating in the forums here.

ScoutBird
Tongue tied and twisted... just an earthbound misfit... I

 

[Adam]

ScoutBird, welcome to the forum!

I've looked but haven't found anything, yet. Do you know what type of format is being used on the external drive?

Adam

 

[Adam]

The more that I look, the more that I think that you might need to wait a month or so for this to be available. It seems like this ability just got released last month. There will probably be a hack out pretty soon.

 

[ScoutBird]

Adams, Thanks

That's right, they told me when I signed up for the service it was just rolled out about 5-6 weeks ago. As for format, I just know it's about 4.4 gig for a 2 hour high def recording of a Fogerty concert per the system as it was copying to the drive it formatted, a WD Book 500 gig drive. Likely a form of mpeg. As for disk itself, DVR wouldn't accept the NTFS layout already on drive. It immediately asked to format for use with DVR. It isn't FAT 16 or 32 either as XP doesn't recognize the format when I used computer management tool. Just said unknown. I don't have any other tool that may tell what it is. Be my luck it's proprietary to Dish, or Carver, is that who makes the 722? Anyway, thanks for taking time to respond.