# HR10-250 Worthless?



## Tasaran (Jan 16, 2010)

Tivo Community,

I have an HR10-250 Direct TV HD DVR, but Im no longer a Direct TV customer. I have a HD dish on the side of my house and a regular HD antenna. My television is HD, but does not have a digital tuner. I do not have an analog converter.

My question is can I use my HR10-250 for anything functional?

-	Can I use it as a digital converter to produce analog local HD channels for my TV?
-	Can I hook it up with the dish and receive local channels without service?
-	Can I put data from my pc to the hard drive and use it as offline DVR?
-	Any services out there which still would use this receiver?
-	Any suggestions to hack for functionality or break down for parts?

Any help is appreciated and thank you in advance. This was obviously a bad purchase.

-T


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## litzdog911 (Oct 18, 2002)

Yes you can ...
1. Yes, you can use your HR10-250 as a very nice dual tuner ATSC TV Converter box for your TV. No satellite connection or DirecTV subscription is required. You just won't have any Guide Data information.
2. No
3. No
4. The HR10-250 still works fine with all DirecTV SD channels. Check eBay and you'll see there's still a market for them. 
5. Check out the Tivo Underground Forum here for that sort of information.


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## whitepelican (Feb 15, 2005)

Related to #1 and #2:

You can hook up your HR10-250 to the satellite dish, and then you will also receive the guide data for your OTA stations. Also, whether you hook it to the dish or not, you will still have two tuners for OTA plus the ability to pause/ffw/rew in the 30 minute buffers.


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## Wil (Sep 27, 2002)

litzdog911 said:


> 3. No


... Not trivially. I wouldn't go to the trouble unless I already had a source of ty/ty+/tfm files (discussed below) or had another series 2 on my home network that could take the kind of "data" files you're talking about and serve ty.ty+/tfm video to the HR10-250 through movieloader.

Requires the HR10-250 to be hacked (look for the zipper thread here).

Once hacked, there was a utility available here years ago called mfs_ftp_insert.tcl which will load tfm, ty and ty+ files into the HR10-250. Process can be made nicer with the movieloader front end. I believe movieloader is discussed here.

A full mfs_ftp.tcl would obviously be better, but that is discussed on another Tivo forum, not here.

All the above _is_ trivial for anyone the least bit computer literate.

But the ordinary mpegs you are interested in would all have to be converted with a special ty-enabled version of ffmpeg. That's a pain, though you can set up a batch process routine. This limitation to mfs_ftp.tcl/movieloader is a huge disadvantage of the HR10-250 compared with other series 2's, which support programs handling a much greater variety of file inputs.


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## litzdog911 (Oct 18, 2002)

Wil, I usually just say "no" to that question when asked in this forum because it's generally way over folks' heads.


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## Tasaran (Jan 16, 2010)

I wanted to thank again everyone who took the time and came in to post. It was very helpful for me and Iv'e been enjoying the NFL playoffs in crisp HD and skipping commercials! :up:

It did take me a bit of time fiddling with the settings to work out the kinks. Please send me a PM if anyone reading this post was in the same boat and could use a bit of help. 

You guys rock!


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