Anyone running GB-PVR+Windows from flash drive?

[Mysteryman]

I was thinking about this on the way to work today. Would it be possible run a complete WinXP installation with GB-PVR booting from a USB flash drive (say a 1 or 2GB unit)? You'd still need a hard drive to record shows to, but that could be spun down while not recording or playing back.

[pastro]

I was thinking about this on the way to work today. Would it be possible run a complete WinXP installation with GB-PVR booting from a USB flash drive (say a 1 or 2GB unit)? You'd still need a hard drive to record shows to, but that could be spun down while not recording or playing back.

pBS was. Check out this thread.
Edit: It was for a client. No capture card etc.
Still probably worth looking at the work he did though.


http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...lash+drive

[pBS]

can't do it on a flash drive unless you can make it hardware read-only, cuz the .net 2 plugin won't work unles it's run from read-only media...
which may also be the case with software read-only utils, it has to be a switch on the dongle itself...
i ran a bartpe from usb thumb and it's slow as a dog compared to the dvd or cd version of same..

actually writing or reading from usb drives is very disappointing for performance..
but the 'hard disk' types are much faster and dont suffer the limited write life of a memory stick...[they will die on you after about 100,000 accesses,not just writes]

gbpvr will run with a full capture solution from a dvd tho...but you'll have to install your cap card drivers and tweak everything before burn..
plus you'll need space to write the epg updates, and logs..and mpeg files!

but yea, it's doable..as long as you have hardware read-only ability on the stick or its interface...

watching live tv would suck as well cuz watching a Recording stream that's on a network share or non-local drive is not really doable...you'd have to record the files to a local drive...streaming client doesn't have this problem...

EDIT: oops, skimmed and hadn't noticed you said Full win XP...which i know does work..[with tweaking]
on that you should be able to do it easily...mine is bartpe or winpe..
a regular xp will act like a regular xp..

[soccerdad]

I tried just running GBPVR from a flash drive. It works well except you need to manually start the recording service when you stick the "stick" in and you have to stop the service before you remove it. Also, if you reboot the system without the stick in, the installer looks for GBPVR and tries to reinstall it. Does anyone know how to shutoff this autoreinstall feature? Also, is there a way to have it automatically start the recording service when you insert the drive?

[bgowland]

Does anyone know how to shutoff this autoreinstall feature?

According to MSDN it's not possible to do this on a per-application basis although you can disable the installer by adding a DisableMSI DWORD value to the registry. See here...http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368304.aspx

Also, is there a way to have it automatically start the recording service when you insert the drive?

Can flash drives have an "Autorun" file in the same way as CDs etc.? If so you could simply autorun a batch file with...

NET START "GB-PVR Recording Service"

Might be worth a try.

If it isn't enabled by default, I seem to remember there is a registry key for which drives will 'Autoplay' on insert - can't remember what it is though and it might not work for flash drives anyway.

Cheers,
Brian

[pBS]

ya don't have to install it to use it...just make sure the registry entry is there...
[it needs to know where it's files are,that's all]

just copy the files from a good gbpvr installation, then import this into registry..
[adjust as necessary]

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Devnz]
"LastKnownVersionInUse"="GB-PVR v0.99.5"
"ClientReadBlockSize"=dword:0000c000
"GBPVR InstallDir"="c:\\Program Files\\devnz\\gbpvr\\"

remember to put double slashes for singles in reg files..
EDIT: oh yea, it also needs to register the .ax's in gbpvr also..just run re-registerfilters.bat from gbpvr dir..