Dishplayer 501: smart card failure

[Souperdave]

Today the power went out when I was using my Dish501PVR. When the power came back on, I kept getting this "ERROR: Smart card not readable" or something like that. When I called Dish, they said that my Smart card reader must have been damaged in the power outage (which is bull**** since I have a power surge protector inline with the power and satellite cable) and that they need to send me a whole new unit (and are charging me $20 and $15 for shipping).

1) Anyone encounter this problem before and were you able to fix it?
2) I have recorded stuff on my 501 hard drive that I'd love to recover and get to VHS at least. Dish claims that there's NO way they can swap out the hard drive. Anyone else have any ideas on what to do?
3) I can't tell you how much I hate Dishnetwork.

Dave

[scooper]

SOuperdave - there ain't no such thing as a DishPlayer501 - What you have is a DishPVR 501

Surge taking out even though you have it plugged into a surge protector - YES it CAN happen - the surge could have been big enough to do it in one surge, or you may have had a previous surge that wiped the protection .

Getting your previously recorded material off the 501's harddisk - you're SOL. Dish in their infinite wisdom made it almost impossible for normal users to swap harddrives around in the PVRs. I think it was a dumb thing to do also - if they're concerned with us taking out the harddrive and copying the programs with a PC - put strong enough encryption on the recordings that we couldn't do that (using a hardware chip to decrypt on the fly), and let us swap them around. Being mechanical, it's only a question of WHEN will a harddrive fail, not IF.

[David_Levin]

That's not true. You can extract mpeg files from the 50x (and Dishplayer) hard drive. Problem is, to do it generally breaks the warranty seal which might cause problems for the exchange.

With the proper cabling, people have been able to open the 50x, unhook the hard drive power and ide cables at the motherboard, then connect to those. Obviously you're going to need a non-standard ide cable to connect to the end of the existing cable. Some people use a Ide to Firewire/USB2 mini adapter.

Once you get the files on your computer, you need to go through some hoops to get them to play (they non-standard DVD resolution). How much grief depends on your DVD player (the Apex players are the easiest because they can play the mpegs burned onto a 9660 DVD without any remastering).

You're going to spend a day or two just getting the process figured out. It may REALLY not be worth it.

Heres where you can read up and get the PC apps:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishrip

PS The procedures don't work on the 721 (& probably all Linux based - 522/921) which have the files encrypted on the hard drive.

[guruka]

Today the power went out when I was using my Dish501PVR. When the power came back on, I kept getting this "ERROR: Smart card not readable" or something like that. When I called Dish, they said that my Smart card reader must have been damaged in the power outage (which is bull**** since I have a power surge protector inline with the power and satellite cable) and that they need to send me a whole new unit (and are charging me $20 and $15 for shipping).

1) Anyone encounter this problem before and were you able to fix it? Dave

Dave - I don't think it's a power surge issue. Have you tried removing your smart card and than placing a regular business card on top of it (the printed side, not the side with the gold contacts) and then re-inserting the "sandwich" into the smart card slot? If not, try it.

.....G

[scooper]

If you can copy the MPEG2 files to a PC harddrive, getting them to play on the PC shouldn't be too difficult with the right hardware / software..

[jgoggan]

Indeed -- getting them to play on the PC is fairly easy. Getting them to play on DVD players depends on your DVD player -- or you'll have to do some conversion. They apparently aren't straight MPEG-2 -- at least, many players don't seem to like it.

- John...

[Roger Tee]

It's the resolution that the players don't like mainly.

544 by 480 & 640 by 480 are what I've seen... not DVD standard resolutions
second problem is non-standard GOPs. they're longer than DVD spec. Probably to get better compression.

Cheers