Dish Enables External DVR Storage

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My buddy Jason woke up to a pretty exciting discovery this AM. His ViP622 HD DVR is now enabled for external storage via USB. While he hasn’t called in to verify the one time $39.99 activation fee, he does intend to expand his storage. There’s only so many seasons of Smallville one can fit on that stock hard drive. You listening, TiVo? Hurry up and get us some official support for eSATA storage.

6 thoughts on “Dish Enables External DVR Storage”

  1. Jason just called in and confirmed there is a one time $39.99 activation fee. He got the sense that any USB drive of any (?!) size will work. Seems a little chintzy to charge for this particular feature and I hope TiVo doesn’t follow suit this fall. Though, like Jason, we’ll most likely pay up.

  2. So does this mean you can then take the drive to a PC and burn those shows to DVD. This would make the 39.99 well worth it for me.

  3. ZoNE, I haven’t tested it personally but I seriously doubt you can take that drive to another Dish DVR, let alone a PC, and access those recordings. However, Dish does offer Archos PMP integration…

  4. unfortunately it is really only set up to use a dedicated external hd as an “Archiving” device..meaning that you can only watch it on the machine you recorded it with..its a matter of time before someone creates or hacks a way to put it on your computer..its a matter of figuring out the way they encode everything…

  5. Dish misleads you to think you can set up individual drives to store different catagories of programming, or just archive stuff on any number of external drives. What they DON’T tell you is that if you connect/disconnect a drive more than 3 times, you are forced to reformat the drive, losing everything on the drive….

  6. Dish EHD service also has technical issues. I paid the $39.99 external hard drive fee only to find it doesn’t work. I’ve only been able to transfer to recorded programs to the EHD. Now when I try to move programming from the DVR to the EHD I get “an error occurred during transfer” message. I have contacted tech support 7 times. At first they admitted it was a software issue but still nothing has been corrected. Their last e-mail “fix” was simply a cut and paste job from their EHD FAQs webpage.
    This has been a very frustrating experience and certainly not worth the $39.99 (bogus) fee.

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