Dish DVR

[oldblindguy]

First of all I am new to this site but very savey making things work. I am an old blind guy just passing time. I have an old Dish DVR that I bought along time ago and tried to hook up a outside surveillance camera to it hoping to some how make it work. I have a couple of brand new versions so this one is not hooked up to dish anymore. Problem is to that ( I read ) that the incoming signal from the satellite dish is different then what a camera would input. I am not a electrical wizard but I get these ideas sometimes and some work and others dont. Is there some kind of flash utility that would let me use my camera to record to it like a normal dvr. I bought these connectors on line that convert a cable input to a rca hoping that it might work but nothing. I dont feel that I am wanting to do anything wrong because I own this unit that I paid cold hard cash for. Dish dosnt want it and I am not going to use it for any kind of dish programming, I just want to hook up my camera without having to go and buy some expensive DVR that I already have, I was hoping somehow someway that I could make it read the signal from the camera and all would be good. Maybe its not possible but I can believe that I am the first person to try this. Thank you in advance for for any guidance

[usually_quiet]

Forget it. Unless you have a Dish Network subscription, and pay a monthly fee to have the receiver on your account, and have it hooked up to a satellite dish, one of their receivers is only useful as a doorstop. Even if you have all of the above, the device is only good for recording satellite TV from Dish Network and digital over-the-air TV from an antenna. http://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/threads/using-a-vip-722k-dvr-without-subscription.202277/

[sum_guy]

It's not going to work, the dvr is looking for a satelite signal, most likely via coaxial connection. I don't see a way to do it.

[usually_quiet]

You can transfer photos from a camera to your DVR via USB, but you still cannot record video from a camera that is connected via USB.
From the 722k user guide:

USING MULTIMEDIA
Photos
Copy photos from select digital cameras and storage devices to the receiver’s hard-disk
drive for viewing on the connected TV (options vary by receiver model). Now you don’t
have to pass photos around or have a crowd of people hover around your digital camera.
Transferring Photos to Your Receiver
1 Connect the receiver to a digital camera or other USB device using the USB connection.
2 Press MENU and select Multimedia.
3 Select the option under External USB Devices.
4 Under Photo, select Get from Device.
5 Select the pictures you want to send to your receiver.
6 Select Send Photos.
7 After the transfer process is complete, select OK.

For the above to work, someone must still have a Dish subscription, the DVR has to be on their account, and needs to be connected to a satellite dish.

[oldblindguy]

Well I figured as much and mr quiet you also have to pay 50 bucks (1 time fee) to use the usb port as a dvr software controlled external hd. I just cant imagine why nobody has never written a flash to make that hardware tuner more user friendly. Ok thank you very much.

[usually_quiet]

Even if someone found a way to hack the receiver and install custom firmware, there is still a problem recording the output from a camera with a satellite DVR which was not built to do that.

There are only two connections that might be used to accept input for recording, the USB port and the RF connection for the tuner. The tuner hardware only accepts ATSC over-the-air TV signals and satellite broadcasts. An encoder-modulator for creating either type of signal and transmitting it over coax costs between ~$800 and thousands of dollars. To use the USB connection, someone would need to install device drivers for either the camera itself (assuming it outputs a digital signal over USB) or for a capture device. That would mean finding or writing compatible device drivers and including an installer in the firmware.

Almost nobody wants to re-purpose their old satellite receiver as a security DVR, so there is little financial incentive for doing all the work required for making that possible. People with the skills necessary to do what you want have better things to do with their time.