birddogger5150

I know there's no OS on the hard drive, but I wrongly assumed that I could simply plug the hard drive into a PC and view the contents with their convenient 3 or 4 character format designations. Whether or not that format would be usable is another story. But it sounds like the PC may just look at it as an unformatted drive, in which case I'm SOL. Guess I didn't think it through. I just assumed that in the world of digital media, everything was designed to be compatible with all the major operating systems to ease transfer, storage and editing.

A few weeks no, but even with the slow baud rates I figured I could set it up to copy the DVR drive contents to my PC overnight or something. Either way, you just made one of my points - why is a modern day DVR depending on such antiquated and therefore largely incompatible technology to communicate with other devices? Not sure what format the files are being stored in. I guess I'll have to direct connect the drive to my PC and see what it "sees" in there.

So even with the RS-232 port, you would need an ethernet connection and addressable interface in order to access the video on a local PC, whether you're viewing streaming video or direct-access data files? And if someone wanted to use their PC keyboard to control the DVR via the RS-232 port using the ASCII keystrokes listed in the manual , they would then need both an RS-232 software interface on the PC, and a separate video monitor in order to watch the video, since the PC monitor wouldn't be able to do this without the Ethernet connection required by the remote access software? It seems like someone would've thought to design the software to allow local control, monitoring, and backup to a direct-connected PC, for those of us who don't like screwing around with front panels. As it stands then it sounds like the only way to really back up this video locally then is via videotape. Stupid.

My DVR is an AVC-776: http://www.ostwholesale.co.uk/multiplexers9ch.htm Do you know based on this if AVC's Wavelet Compression Format proprietary? Meaning no way no how would the contents of this HDD be directly accessible on a Windows-based PC without the DVR there to process it? It does have RS-232/485 serial communications capability, for what it's worth. It seems ludicrous to me to even offer a hot-swappable HDD without the ability to access the data on anything other than a second DVR.

I was looking for info on this exact subject myself. So even if your standalone is network addressable and you can view the wavelet compression format recorded video over an Internet connection, you can not simply take the hard drive off site, connect it to your off site Windows PC, and use that same "remote access" software to view the video and back it up (either by capture or direct copy) to your PC's hard drive? So the standalone's HDD is formatted solely for the DVR, and you can't simply open a window and browse the HDD's content on a PC and see convenient media files saved as familiar format extensions like AVI, MPEG, etc. to be copied and pasted at will? It would seem that if you have the remote access software on your PC, you could still use it to access the video non-remotely somehow, at least by setting up the hard drive with an IP address locally, and then use a video capture application to save it in a PC-friendly format. Also, regarding wavelet compression format - is there a unique filename extention for these files? Or are they actually saved as AVI's or some other familiar format? Any information would be helpful! Thanks.