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Dear all,
New here so thanks for the forum! Have been using Foxsat HDR incl. all the custom firmware etc. for a while though.
I have a question on the Humax titling of recordings, and am wondering whether anyone here can enlighten me?
As observed in a couple of posts here already, for some recordings the Foxsat HDR appends “i7” to the beginning of the recording title in the data file which accompanies the recording. This is also added by the HDR when setting a reservation. But it’s not contained in the freesat EPG data. The HDR strips this out again when displaying the recording name in the media list and also in the info panel at the bottom of the screen. So unless using the custom firmware the “i7” is invisible.
From a quick google and search on this forum this seems to be around since 2006 at least and not confined to this box:
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=10909956
My assumption is that this is a Humax-specific flag, and that it must have some purpose/meaning. But I don’t understand what this is, nor do I understand the logic for which recordings it is applied to (though this is clearly systematic, ie. applied to the same recordings/reservations across multiple HDR boxes).
Any information / ideas which would help?
Many thanks in advance
I think it’s a weak attempt by the broadcasters to make copying files harder.
Thanks for the quick response Graham.
Though I’m curious how you get to this conclusion? For freesat the “i7” isn’t in the titles of the raw EPG data streamed from Astra 28.5E. And I understand that this also occurs with Humax Freeview machines (Fox T2). Also the “i7” prefix doesn’t stop copying via FTP, samba etc. – it is just a string of two characters at the beginning of the title.
Indeed in non-freesat mode there are sometimes non-printable characters added to the recording title; that seems to be what you had with the Royal Wedding recordings. But not sure that that is linked to the “i7” issue?
The strange characters embedded in the filenames of non-freesat recordings are unicode control characters.
† Dagger 0x86 (134) – control character: START OF SELECTED AREA
‡ Double Dagger 0x87 (135) – control character: END OF SELECTED AREA
With regard to the ‘i7’ text. This occurs only at the head of some text strings within an .hmt file.
Although I must say, I’ve never seen a recording made on the HDR with an ‘i7’ included as part of the filename, only as a string header embedded within the .hmt file.
Text strings in the .hmt file are preceded by a header byte. This is usually 0x15 (21). However if this header byte is 0x10 (16) then two extra characters are prepended to the text string.
These characters are 0x69 (105) and 0x37 (55) which equate to the ascii text string ‘i7’.
And they don’t just occur at the beginning of the recording title, they can also precede the channel Name for i-Plate, channel name for media list, and the program synopsis text in each EPG block.
However, it’s a simple matter when parsing text strings from the hmt file, to test the value of the header byte and adjust the read offset accordingly.
The reasons why these unicode characters appear in non-freesat recordings filenames, and why some text strings in the hmt file have an additional two characters prepended is known only to Humax, and unfortunately they are not telling.
Raydon, thanks – everything you say is also consistent with what I’ve seen (sorry if i was imprecise with language; I have also never seen the i7 in a filename, just at various places in the .hmt file as you say but also in reserve.info for the same events).
Agree that for parsing it is no problem to strip this out as you and Adrianf36 have done with the AV2HDR and web-if v2. It’s just that for testing setting recordings by writing to reserve.info it would be nice to understand if there is a specific need to append the i7 to some event titles, so I thought I would also ask here to see if anyone has understood this…… anyway no worries, looking like some empirical testing coming up 😯
I definitely used to see this on some of the files on the 9200t though don’t recall now whether it was just files transferred via e-linker or whether hummyreadfiles and humaxrw strip it out.
It was always prepended to the programme name but never found the relevance of it.
You can see the i7 prefix in this blog re 9200 transfers, para 6 first picture:
Thanks Barry, and in that example the i7 is actually part of the file name. Curiouser and curiouser.
raydon – 1 day ago »
Thanks Barry, and in that example the i7 is actually part of the file name. Curiouser and curiouser.
On the 9200 ‘i7’ is only included in the file name when the recording is instigated by pressing the record button on the remote.
I only have series link timers set from the EPG and pressing OK on my 9200, the i7 prefix is annotated to numerous file names.
Barry – 2 months ago »
I only have series link timers set from the EPG and pressing OK on my 9200, the i7 prefix is annotated to numerous file names.
Are you referring to my post (#9)?
I learnt what I reported from hummy.org a few years ago. Until that discussion I had not connected pressing the record button while watching a live programme with the I7 appearing on the file names. When this happens timers are not updated and anything that is in the schedule does not haved any effect on the recording.
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