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cfb said:

I suspect that the model is to eventually have one big box with lots of tuners and storage, and small inexpensive set top boxes spread around the house.

The problem with a dvr in every box is that you have to run a coaxial cable to all of them, they make noise, they're sensitive to heat and vibration, and they're more failure prone than a simple STB like a Roku player.

So directv can solve the problem with a big box with one coax wire coming into it and going to the dish, and powerline or wireless networking from that to a series of stb's.

Its cheap, easy to install, easy to fix, and unless the big main box goes out, its pretty fault tolerant. You could fix some of the fault concerns in the main box by putting in a pair of mirrored 1tb drives and having a red light "I need a new drive, call for service" indicator if one goes out. Past that, some level of fault monitoring to measure power supply, fan speeds, etc would solve most other pending failures before they happen. All pretty standard stuff for many years now in a run-of-the-mill PC.

I can actually see a DLNA equipped television set being able to play shows from a central dvr without a set top box.

Certainly the ability for the boxes to talk to each other wirelessly, via powerline networking or via coaxial networking (MOCA or DECA) is there today, even without a customers network being involved. My two dvr's have a wire between them, nothing else. Works fine.

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Building said:

So you can get the MRV working without a Network connection? You're only hardware connection is Cat 5 between the DVR's and you can get MRV to work?

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cfb said:

Yep it works. If you leave it like it is, after the DHCP piece times out the boxes will start asking if there is anyone else on the network and configure themselves to a 169.x.x.x address and start talking directly. I found that takes too long so in advanced settings I manually configured them to 192.1.1.100 and 192.1.1.101 and set the dns and default gateway to 192.1.1.1, which doesnt exist, then plugged them together. Blam, it works.

On the receivers that have two active network ports (not the hr20-100), you can daisy chain them one to the next to the next and from what I hear that works fine. One end of the chain can be plugged into a switch or router and they'll all talk through each other. Traffic is switched in the box (not routed, as far as I know) so if you've got three of these daisy chained together with the last one hooked to your home network, the traffic on the wire between the boxes becomes additive, so I wouldnt recommend daisy chaining for more than 3 receivers.

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