I also purchased the Accurian 3223 for $99. I have it hooked up to my dish network receiver. Anyone know of a VCR code that would work with this unit? My dish receiver can sent out a "record" signal to a VCR to record a certain show but without the three digit code, it's useless. The unit is great, BTW. Much better than a media PC for recording onto a disk. For the person previously mentioning about using a PC for recording, my media pc takes a lot longer to write to DVD, and finalizing the disc. It will literally take about 0.5 hr before an entire disc can be written. Mind you this is a PC purchased about 6 months ago with dual layer capability and lightscribe. I only wish this DVR had multitasking capability. It sucks to have one recording and not be able to watch another previously recorded show.
I doubt You will be successful in finding a code that will do what you want I to have Dish Satellite and liked the feature to turn on A VCR Dish, Direct, LiteOn, ilo Radio Shack, etc will not provide one, In fact Dish and Direct prohibit it and will only provide such for there own DVR units Should you find one please post it, I gave UP a long time ago and just flag a program on the Dish Receiver, to start the selected program as with the VCR Than set the timer on the DVD about 10 min ahead and after the Program, than edit what is not wanted out
Kasitrol---I have the same problem (actually the only problem I have had with the unit.) The timer works great most of the time, but some times the timer has a mind of its own. Sometimes it records when it is not supposed to, and doesn't record sometimes when it is supposed to. I think it may be a problem with how we set up the timer, but have not had time to check it out completely. I am not certain just how you are supposed to use "restricted" and "non-restricted", and I think that may be some of the problem. I think the manual is not too clear about this.
I've had timer issues as well. For me, I think it has to do with at times I set up weekly and daily recordings and then change them to different days to not interfere w/another show and then change it back and I think this confuses the unit and it tapes the old days as well as the changed days. The little thing that cheeses me is that there are no firmware updates or support. The quirks of the unit are what we're stuck with as is. I bought mine for $199 a long time ago and other than the few annoying bugs (as well as sometimes it records with a high pitched whine) it's still good.
Timer Issues--I tried the midnight changeover recording and it went fine this time -That was only my second time to try soooo it may mess up down the road. One thing I did was to erase all previous record requests and started with a clean menu in the timer section. I think the advanced menu lets you set a limit on the number of repeats that occure in the once, daily and weekly choices. When I attempted to use this advanced feature it inserted the date under the Once window. I did not understand why but after selecting that feature the OK button to exit the timer function did not function (It was grayed out). I reset that item and did ot try to use it. I will play with it in the future and post results. Anyone know about the USB question I posted earlier? I also have the recorder fed by Dish Network reciever. The remote code would be great. To fully utilize the VCR feature in the Dish 311.
I guess with the DISH receiver issue, we can always get a remote that can set off the timer and the DISH at the same time. Not necessarily a great solution....
Anyone else have the problem where the piece of crap says "reading dvd" and then kicks it out and you can never transfer anything you have on hard drive because it's stupid and i want to smash it with a hammer.
japutie--Never had this problem. Love my unit. Transfer from HDD to DVD on a daily basis with no problems. Have you tried a clean up of the HDD (Described on page 42 of operator's manual)? May have a glitch that clean up will correct. Good luck.
No, I'll try that and hope it helps. I bought some dvd-r's and after the 5th try i got one to read and record. It says reading for a long time, and then it says preparing disc and then ejects it after making lots of weird noises. I don't know, maybe just defective but I'll format the hard drive and defrag or whaever i need to do. I stil have the instructions so i'll take a look. thanks.
It could be the media or the drive itself. I had a unit that the dvd drive itself went bad and it took two trips to repair to get them to actually replace the defective part instead of saying it was ok. I love the unit and really haven't found a comparable product at the $200 range when I bought it (missed nabbing another one when they went to $99)
Ibuts it possible to connect BOTH - a Radio Shack marketted RCA DishPro Satellite System, AND, a Cablevision provided Explorer 4200 cable box? If so, how? Any recommendations will be greatly appreciated. I have the manual for ASR 3223, but it shows how to connect EITHER the Satellite, OR the cable Box. Not both. THANK YOU. ...Bob`
Hi Bob Sm, my thoughts are that you would need a 2-way video switcher ($20-$30) and another set of A/V cables (composite or S-Video). Most 2-way switchers have composite, not all have S-Video so take note when shopping. These switchers are reversible so plug in your satelite and your cable box in ports A and B of the switcher and send the other end (even though it might say "input" like I mentioned, the switchers are reversible) to the appropriate recorder input (S-Video or composite dependant on your flavour). I have my cable box and a dvd player hooked up in this fashion myself using S-Video and audio cables in my ILO HD04 which has the same inputs as the Accurian, they are both rebadged Liteons. Hope this helps. CC
Hi, Everybody: I bought this almost a year ago, have used it pretty heavily and encountered quite a few problems that I don't know how to solve or avoid. I am glad I found this forum. Maybe someone can teach me a few things. The way I use this machine is to record multiple sessions of a TV program onto the HDD. Then I try to cleanup each session by stripping away the Ads. Also inserting bookmarks and re-write the titles. When I have enough sessions built up, I'll copy them one by one onto a DVD-R or DVD+R or DVD+RW. The problem I often encounter is when it shows 1 or even 2 hours of empty space with 9 or 10 1/2 hour SLP sessions already copied, it will refuse to let me copy another file with a "not enough disk space" message. Even if I try to copy a very small file (30 sec), I would still get that messsage. Sometimes the machine wuld lock up. The on/off button would not even function. I have to pull the plug and re-connect to re-nitialize the machine. Sometimes the DVD disk would become un-recognizable and my whole effort would go down the drain. This does not seem to happen with +RW disks. So I try to do this on DVD+Ehttp://login.afterdawn.com/activate.cfm?uid=1102D37B155A2C222598121D3D08D33FRW disks and then make a copy of the +RW on a DVD+R or DVD-R with my PC> (using Nero 7, DVD copy). Quite a few times the resulting DVD is all but unplayable with the sound and picture broken up. I wonder if any of you have had that experience or not. Youyin
We use our unit exactly as you described with no problems storing 40-50 hours before transferring to a disk (assume we could record more but haven't had the need). However, on the disk transfer, we only use +RW disks because we use them over again. We do have a problem with lock-up occasionally, I think because we try to feed information from the remote too fast. When this happens we just unplug for a few seconds and plug it in again, with no loss of data. We had a Philips before and had the same problem with lock-up. Hope this helps.
Youyin-- another note, I may have misunderstood where you are having problems with recording space. I thought you could not store more than five hours on the hard drive, but reading you post again, maybe it was on the disks. We consistently record a full six hours in SLP mode, and again we only use +RW disks.
With +RW disks, I have no problem transfer things from the hard drive to the +RW disk and fill it up. It is with the +R or -R disks that I often have problems. As I mentioned, I would see that there is still empty space of 1 hour or even 1.5 hours but when I try to transfer a 3 minute session to the +R disk, I ould get a message of "not enough spce". Then there is the problem of making a good copy of my +RW disk (onto a +R or -R disk) Youyin
Ok guys, I know this has probably been answered before, but could someone that has upgraded their hard drive walk me through what they did? I have an ADR-3223 and am thinking about changing out the drive but dont want to mess anything up in the process.
Hi untrsb the steps I took to upgrade my recorders 4 ILO HD04s (2 x 250GB, 1 200GB and 1 160GB) 1) to extract the system files off of the current HDD onto your PC. - Back-up all your recordings you want to keep on disc. - Do a full erase of your HDD while still in the recorder - Remove HDD and plug into your PC and copy the system folder most likely called LITEONFAT, it's around 5 GB in size, give or take. 2) to format new HDD - Plug new HDD in PC and run FDISK to the largest size, set it "active" and unformated. - Download fat32format from http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/do...fat32format.zip. - Unzip and save .exe file on your c drive. - Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to where you extracted the fat32format.exe file, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\ - In DOS Prompt, type (respect the spaces) this for 64k cluster size, fat32format -c128 f: (replace f: with your appropriate drive letter) You'll get a warning notice saying "Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)" answer yes (y) and in a flash you will see results similar to these, Size : 250GB 488392002 sectors 512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size bytes (65??? for 64k cluster) Volume ID is 1bdb:2c1d 32 Reserved Sectors, 59604 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats 7629261 Total clusters 7629260 Free Clusters Formatting drive f:... Clearing out 119304 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster... Wrote 61083648 bytes in 0.988463 seconds, 61796609.106193 bytes/sec Initialising reserved sectors and FATs... Done 3- Copy LITEONFAT file onto new HDD and install in the recorder. Now some more info, because your recorder's system recognizes only 80GB, if ever you do a full erase with the larger HDD, it will only reformat your original size (80GB), if that happens you would need to go over this process to get the full size again. That means from now on, erase individual titles and not the whole HDD. If ever in the future, by some sheer bad luck, your HDD completely fails and you have no back-up files, do step 2 (without LITEONFAT) and install in your recorder, do a full erase, this will write the LITEONFAT file on the HDD (but only to 80 GB) but at least you can backup the system files and then repeat steps 2 and 3 to get the full size of your HDD. Good Luck
CrazCanuk: thanks for the detailed instructions, too bad no one has come up with a firmware upgrade to allow larger HDs by default. Two questions: 1. Since you cannot format the larger drive in the unit, will defragging it internally work? 2. What happens if the power ever goes out on the unit when on - does it now think it has an 80gig drive again?
Hi v1nce, I used to defrag in the past, before I supersized my HDDs, it always give me problems so I don't anymore, so never did on a larger HDD, don't know how it would react, I know I won't bother with it myself. No problems with power outages or if you have to unplug because the unit froze, it only scans the hdd, it does not reformat. As long as the HDD is formatted as one partition, FAT32 and very important, at 64K size clusters, no problems. I've tested this out. Another test I've done was when a HDD is not properly formatted (32K size clusters), and the HDD goes through a scan, all projects bigger than 1GB will crap out (about 15 min. in a HQ recording, 30 min at SP, 45 min. at LP and so on). good luck
