Several Netgemwiki comments were added in regard to USB peripheral devices. This works, this works, this works etc. So we learnt that USB devices like digital cameras acted as storage ie their internal storage or storage cards. We learnt that USB card readers could have these cards inserted and thus the USB port could recognise the storage and display the pictures and the Menu, Media Centre could also provide a slideshow. We could also use upto 2 images as email image attachments eg via the EMAIL POP account setup. We could upload our images to online photo albums like the Tripod website etc.

Every flash drive was delivered as unformatted. The PC helped to format each one, so I never worried about these. However, I checked google and found results for "preformatted flash drives"...

http://www.jigsaw24.com/Results.aspx?KD=kingston%20usb

The Kingston brand name is one you could search for on websites and perhaps filter results by brands or 1 GB upto 2 GB storage sizes.

I bought several cheap bargains from http://www.aria.co.uk and couldn't find the PC drivers till an aria forum reply mentioned where to get the drivers from. I have a Windows 98 SE PC which needs these, but the XP PC seems to accept them without problems.

Some flash drives may get better access using the 4-way USB port hubs. The IPlayer lets you select a file and copy it and then move the copy to another USB device eg from sda1 drive to sda2 drive... The FTP option helped me upload images one at a time to my websites...

Websites may offer a phone number so you can quote part numbers etc and order that way instead.

Shopping TV sites also sell storage cards and flash drives yet formatting is up to you.

I have bought the preformatted (FAT32 standard) Freecom XS 1 TB external USB drive for the Fetch TV Smartbox Freeview recordings for just a few minutes or a few hours. With a voucher code, and the sale price, at £70 it was good value. Now it's as high as £80! Maybe the 1.5 TB is better value... The Freecom exports these Freeview recordings far easier than flash drives do, even the play.com 8gb and 16gb drives are hit and miss.

I've had to format the Sandisk and aria and play.com drives so I can't recommend these fully.

Erase and reformat is a quick way of destroying files instead of using the Eraser program on the PC. You transfer unwanted PC files to the specially reserved flash drive instead and then erase that drive by reformatting it.

The BBC Netgem won't really need an £80 investment for a 1 TB external drive, but Freecom produce smaller storage drives. It's just that some drives are better value, providing they don't botch up later and lose the lot. That's why I'm only using mine to store non essential Freeview recordings on.

If you find any preformatted USB drives at reasonable prices, test them and let us know eg are they recognised as 1 GB or as 2 GB or as formatted and maybe just 900 MB and 1900 MB storage? If viewing media files, which file formats work eg mpg or mpeg or mpg1 or mp1 or mpg2 or mp2 or avi, wmv, mov, etc. We know image formats like jpg and gif and png and bmp will display OK.

http://jennifersjpgs.shows.it


This is a full screen Netgem TV display demo. It's a click-a-pic slideshow version of what the Media Centre slideshow does. PC users press F11 key for a larger screen height and F11 again to reset it to normal...

http://netgemgifs.shows.it

This is another slideshow showing Netgem Tutorial and User Guides PDF files as gif images instead.

The play.com website lists this ebay seller as one of their sellers as well, and at the same price. Other sellers and product details are listed here:

http://tinyurl.com/sandisk-cruzer-micro-info

An unformatted USB pen drive or flash drive may work in the IPlayer and Fetch TV boxes and all seems to be going well. I'm wondering if one without any files on it at all will later work on the PC if trying to access various screen captures on the IPlayers or Freeview recordings on the Fetch TV box.

I noticed that when I first used the pen drives, it wouldn't work well if there was no picture already stored on it. It wouldn't recognise the picture format I was trying to add at that time. So from then on, I would start off with no pictures and then open an email with a previous screen capture email image attachment. I would then copy that image to the USB drive and it would fix that problem for me. Otherwise store a tiny start image called 00000.jpg so it would be the first to be accessed from the A to Z display. Less problems with a tiny file size as the first image loaded via the 957 Media Centre on the IPlayer.

The Fetch TV box loses the INTERNET LINK on the MENU options hence the need to create 0000-websearch.html and upload it here with various about: command links to help further access to about:cache and about:cookies etc...

The Internet URL for this webpage is here:

http://tinyurl.com/fetchtvstarter

I save that to the IPlayer with the copyfile utility eg

http://tinyurl.com/copyfile or http://tinyurl.com/copyfile2

Cheap pen drives? I prefer using the Integral play.com 16 GB for about £17. That's because I can use a PC to create files and files as well as move or copy files there.

When you download various freebies from the Internet, you can later move these onto USB drives once their installations have worked out OK. Different versions get updated and I get regular screen messages linking me to the latest versions.

I've used the IPlayer to get TV screen captures and used the PC to upload these to various Yahoo Groups as photos or files. Yahoo creates thumbnail versions as well as large and the original image sizes.

For Windows 98 SE I have to find the USB drivers and sometimes at a later time as well because not all USB drives get recognised. It's one of the reasons I tried VISTA which wasn't user-friendly and switched to XP which was tolerable.

I've started off a new topic to provide this info and confirm the changes for the Netgem and BT and Fetch TV set top boxes... Thanks.