yes, it was Scientific Atlanta. never heard tell of them. i have heard of cisco. they make my vonage voip router. that company is highly innovative from what i have seen. i was reading back earlier on this forum and saw where someone was complaining that motorola has produced bad boxes before the 530. someone said it took them 2 years to fix a box. before i bang my head on the wall could someone tell me why starchoice continues to deal with motorola if they have had past experience with them like this? i just don't get it. any business that wants to stay in business surely would find a solution, one would think.

Does anyone know if Motorola owns the rights to some part of Star Choice's decryption sceme (DigiCypher II) (or anything else) preventing others from making Star Choice-compatible receivers?

Motorola, like all major manufacturers on the leading edge of technology, have their issues. Similarly, Cisco has had a number of issues of its own.

You should have seen the headaches we faced the first time we installed Cisco's Call Manager platform. It's a solid product now, and we've had great success with it. I'm sure the same will be true with the 530 in due time.

Does anyone know if Motorola owns the rights to some part of Star Choice's decryption sceme (DigiCypher II) (or anything else) preventing others from making Star Choice-compatible receivers?

Digicipher II is Motorola proprietary technology originally developped by General Instruments. It's also the technology that has kept StarChoice from being hacked.

But does Motorola own the rights or something to that technology preventing Star Choice from going to a different manufacturer to produce their boxes in the future?

What about MPEG4? Will that still be encryped with Digicipher II?

But, to be fair, the engineers likely didn't expect that users would be able to mess things up by pressing buttons that would not normally be included in a normal test.

On our (Motorola) radio products we put a team of testers on new products specifically challenged to break it any way they can. Commonly know as Alpha testers who test all functions in a live or simulated system and random actions ("Monkey testing").

I have been on an Alpha teams for radios so I know how to break equipment and the 530 was an easy target. Some one didn't do their job right and it won't go unnoticed in this company. Unfortunately we the consumer got burned.

But does Motorola own the rights or something to that technology preventing Star Choice from going to a different manufacturer to produce their boxes in the future?

What about MPEG4? Will that still be encryped with Digicipher II?

StarChoice couldn't use a different manufacturer unless Motorola licensed the Digicipher II technology to that vendor.

...before i bang my head on the wall could someone tell me why starchoice continues to deal with motorola if they have had past experience with them like this? ...
The other factor is that Starchoice exists as a result of all the signals being up on F1 & F2 provided by Cancom for most of the Cablecos in Canada, which happen to use the very secure Motorola/General Instrument DigiCipher II protocols.
Thus the set tops are made by Moto and will likely continue until such times as some set top vendor figures they can turn a profit, make a better box than Moto and still pay a licensee fee if/when Moto lets DCII out to others.

MPEG4 is a compression method in the same way MPEG2 is rather than a form of Conditional Access like DCII, NDS, Nagravision and others.

Digicypher II is available for licence. Several 3rd party cable box manufacturers use the technology on Motorola-based networks (Pace being the one that springs to mind). I think starchoice's issue is a bit more complicated in that they are so firmly entrenched with Motorola for their entire operation. The SAC, which you may have heard TSR's refer to, which is the system that controls all outgoing authorisation transmissions to the receivers is located in San Diego at a Motorola facility.

The second issue is undoutedly that the 'Shaw Empire' is deeply in bed with Motorola and I'm sure they leverage the combined set-top-box ordering for both companies to reduced per-unit costs.

A few people 'in the know' have suggested Motorola want out of the satellite side of things and the current generation of receivers might be the last they produce. Whether this means the next boxes will come from 3rd parties or Motorola will just outsource design and manufacture, but still brand them is not known. Personally I'd love to see a new company get a shot of bringing the Starchoice receiver line up-to-date.

The only thing I'd be concerned about is if Starchoice keep handling the firmware programming in-house (Motorola do mostly the core programming -- drivers etc.), as THAT is where the real issues are.

The only thing I'd be concerned about is if Starchoice keep handling the firmware programming in-house (Motorola do mostly the core programming -- drivers etc.), as THAT is where the real issues are.

That's interesting, I didn't realize Starchoice did any of the firmware programming in-house. I thought it was all Motorola.

What you say is correct, however most of the faults with the 530 are low level type stuff and handled by Moto.

The local built stuff is mostly higher level window dressing and other than a few items, is not holding the bulk of the bugs.

Sort of the paint job versus the engine.

I agree, I've been quite disappointed with Moto on several occasions.

But like the elementary school teacher used to tell my parents, he's not working up to his potential.

I personally believe that the 530 is flawed in its hardware and they are just trying to patch it up with software but it looks like its impossible to completely fix the machine.

I disagree. Its a hard drive, some MPEG decoding chips, tuners, and a few other pieces. There shouldn't be anything physically wrong with it, its software that doesn't make it work together properly.

I agree with satellite, most of the bugs I've heard reported sound like they're related to software.

.. is flawed in its hardware and they are just trying to patch it up with software but it looks like its impossible to completely fix the machine.

I miss read your post, I thought maybe you were talking about all the 0551 fatal hard drive errors on the Bell HD PVR box.

Seems with the finned heatsink laminated on the DSR530 drives, even with the fans off, they are running more reliably than the Bell Toasters.

Never heard of a dead disk on the 530 though, but lots of software crashes that might confuse the uninitiated.

This has nothing to do with the HD, I am talking about the random lockups.

This machine crashes for no reason. Software can't be the only blamed for it.

Definitely Dual Recording

Searchable Listings is a must

Since direct access to the internal HD is not ever likely to be supported it would be nice to have a FireWire (1394) port (like the Moto 6412 Cable HD PVR box) so that the digital TS can be routed to an external device (such as a Mac/PC or hi-def VHS) or an external BluRay/DVDHD Recorder could be used to 'back up' recordings.

Minor details:
Page-up/page-dn would be nice when viewing the guide
The ability to turn off (via setup menu) non-subscribed channels (in the guide)

Does anyone know what the USB (presumably 1.1) ports on the 530 are/will be for?

Page-up/page-dn would be nice when viewing the guide

Use the channel +/- button. All receivers already have that functionality.

I dont believe we will ever see a proprietary DVR that will allow to copy to thrid party device content.

We might hope for an HD add on to increase the recording capacity, but thats about it.

...Does anyone know what the USB (presumably 1.1) ports on the 530 are/will be for?
Only the DSR500 had USB 1.1 ports, the 505 & 530 are USB 2.0.

They are disabled at the moment, but I can envison them being used one day for external disk drives, external data exporting, home media networking, keyboards for 'applications', etc.