66 replies to this topic

[Mantorok]

rpant, on Aug 26 2011, 07:34 PM, said:

- When recording 2 consecutive programs via the EPG, the second program starts recording before the first has finished, even though no padding was set.  I'm not sure how long but seemed like a couple of minutes. Therefore when the second recording starts both tuners are in use until the first recording ends. Conversly, when I tried recording channels 1 and 10 from the EPG at the same time, it seemed to only use one tuner so you could watch another channel but not record another channel.

Thanks for the review rpant.  I'm curious why you find the above a CON. It sounds pretty good to me...it handles it better than any PVR on the market that I'm aware of.

If it was combined with the Toppy Quad Recording feature the unit would be AWESOME!

[rpant]

Mantorok, on Aug 29 2011, 09:22 AM, said:

I'm curious why you find the above a CON. It sounds pretty good to me...it handles it better than any PVR on the market that I'm aware of.

These are my personal likes and dislikes. I don't expect everyone to agree with me.

I would rather that it just did a continuous recording from the start of the first program to the end of the second program using just one tuner leaving the other tuner available,
rather than have 2 separate programs recorded, each using a tuner when both programs are on the same channel.

[Mantorok]

Anyone know a place that sells these new Humax PVRs in Melbourne.  I'd like to see one first hand.  The only places I've found selling them so far are IceTV and SciTeq in WA.

[lex200]

rpant, on Aug 26 2011, 07:34 PM, said:

I went today and had a look at one of these at Sciteq Wangara.

Overall I quite liked the unit. Here's a few pros and cons from what I can remember.

Can you tell us more about the skip function?
Is it programmable for different skip amount both forward and reverse?
Is it limited to 2 keys or 4 like some other units?

[dddp]

lex200, on Aug 31 2011, 08:31 AM, said:

Can you tell us more about the skip function?
Is it programmable for different skip amount both forward and reverse?
Is it limited to 2 keys or 4 like some other units?

read the manual linked to earlier, or go to the humax au website and find it - it tells you about it in there

[rpant]

lex200, on Aug 31 2011, 10:31 AM, said:

Can you tell us more about the skip function?
Is it programmable for different skip amount both forward and reverse?
Is it limited to 2 keys or 4 like some other units?

Skip is only available on 2 keys.

The skip times can be set as follows.

 Instant Replay Time: 7 sec, 15 sec, 30 sec.
 Skip Forward Time:  30 sec, 60 sec, 120sec, 240 sec.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask as I bought one of these a few days ago.

If anyone in Perth wants a look at one or to buy one I can recommend Sciteq Wangara (WA). The guys there provide a very helpful and friendly service.

[diesel]

Review of the Humax 7500t from Smarthouse. Though I read everything from that site with a large grain of salt, this is about the only review that I have seen so far...

[rpant]

diesel, on Sep 6 2011, 07:30 PM, said:

Review of the Humax 7500t from Smarthouse. Though I read everything from that site with a large grain of salt, this is about the only review that I have seen so far...

The writer of this review seems to be biased against Topfield. (For a while so was I because of the never ending issues with the previous models).
Maybe the Masterpiece is Topfield's top end model but even the much cheaper Topfield 7160 is in my opinion a better featured product and can be found for under the asking price of the Humax so his comparison of price isn't justified,
although admittedly the 7160 does have Ice TV support.

Also his statement that the Humax has only one USB port is incorrect, it has 2 usb ports, one front and one rear.

I have no serious complaints about the Humax and it's a good PVR, but I still maintain my Topfield 7160 does most of the things just a little better than the Humax, plus it has TAP support.

Also the Australian Humaxdigital website has what appears to be new firmware available for download, but it doesn't give any indication of fixes or changes, nor does it explain how to update.
There's nothing in the user guide that I can find that explains how to update via usb and there's nothing in the menu's either apart from OTA upgrades.
I've sent Humax an email about this tonight and will be interested in seeing how long they take to respond and if they provide the necessary help, as their level of support when they were in Aus previously was abysmal.

Edited by rpant, 07 September 2011 - 01:07 AM.

[Paul55]

The Humax also misses out on user programmable skip times - a big negative IMO. The pre-set and (apparently) non-adjustable skip settings wouldn't suit me.
Both Beyonwiz (out of the box) and Topfield (after installing a TAP) give 4 user defined skip times.

[deangelj]

Mmm, just read that review - I have to admit I found it hard to understand exactly what made it so much better than anything else? If it's price, well I just did a web search on the 2400 price and Insane are offering it for $485+shipping versus the $499 quoted for the Humax (includes icetv).

And his suggestion about recording BACKWARDS in the EPG - well how is that supposed to work? Is it supposed to record every channel for a week just in case you want to go back? You are going to need TBytes of disk to store that much data... And I don't want to even think about the unnecessary power usage.

[CarlR]

[quote name='Mantorok' post='1735437' date='Aug 29 2011, 09:22 AM']I'm curious why you find the above a CON. It sounds pretty good to me...it handles it better than any PVR on the market that I'm aware of.[/quote]
I disagree. I think there are plenty of PVRs that do these things better.
[quote name='rpant']- When recording 2 consecutive programs via the EPG, the second program starts recording before the first has finished, even though no padding was set.[/quote]
If you want to record something on another network at the same time, you can't, because both tuners are being used. In my opinion, Not being able to record the other network is a much bigger negative than losing one or two seconds between the two consecutive recordings.

[quote]name='rpant']when I tried recording channels 1 and 10 from the EPG at the same time, it seemed to only use one tuner so you could watch another channel but not record another channel.[/quote]
The is also definitely a negative. If you've got two tuners, you should be able to record from both tuners. Only being able to view from one when the other is doing two recordings is very ordinary these days.

[pgdownload]

deangelj, on Sep 7 2011, 09:16 AM, said:

And his suggestion about recording BACKWARDS in the EPG - well how is that supposed to work? Is it supposed to record every channel for a week just in case you want to go back? You are going to need TBytes of disk to store that much data... And I don't want to even think about the unnecessary power usage.

Even in Oz (with or relatively few channels) it would be pretty unmarketable. You'd require 8+? quad tuners and terrabytes of storage.

I believe the PVR mentioned in the article is referring to the burgeoning IPTV industry. So it will be a standard PVR recording shows you request, but it will also have the ability to download any show broadcast in the last week (presumably for free) over the internet. Also presumably the PVR will have some sort of subscription / PPV options for downloading other content.

Regards

Peter Gillespie

[prl]

pgdownload, on Sep 7 2011, 10:07 AM, said:

Even in Oz (with or relatively few channels) it would be pretty unmarketable. You'd require 8+? quad tuners and terrabytes of storage.
...

For Australia, you'd need 5 tuners to capture all the national networks, not "eight quad tuners" (whatever that means). You'd need to be able to handle ~16 streams going to recordings. You would need a fair bit of storage. Each broadcaster is about 3.1MB/s total for all its services (25Mb/s). That makes a total of 1.4TB/day. A lot, but enough storage for a week wouldn't actually cost all that much.

[diesel]

prl, on Sep 7 2011, 11:32 AM, said:

For Australia, you'd need 5 tuners to capture all the national networks, not "eight quad tuners" (whatever that means).

That makes a total of 1.4TB/day. A lot, but enough storage for a week wouldn't actually cost all that much.

So you'd need about 10TB of storage. How would that work? 3x3TB and 1x1TB. That's be a big 'box' and I'm sure the manufacturer would charge an arm and a leg for that setup. Maybe better if they gave you the option to source your own external NAS/USB caddies to sort that one out. But I honestly can't see it happening. Certainly Peter's idea of 'catch-up' TV al a Iview, or Catchup7 etc would be a far easier and economical solution.

[prl]

diesel, on Sep 7 2011, 12:09 PM, said:

So you'd need about 10TB of storage. How would that work? 3x3TB and 1x1TB. That's be a big 'box' and I'm sure the manufacturer would charge an arm and a leg for that setup. Maybe better if they gave you the option to source your own external NAS/USB caddies to sort that one out. But I honestly can't see it happening. Certainly Peter's idea of 'catch-up' TV al a Iview, or Catchup7 etc would be a far easier and economical solution.

It'd probably be achievable on a HTPC with a 10TB RAID. Not commercially viable as a PVR at current storage costs, but they're still falling rapidly. My point is more that we're not all that "record everything, watch only what's interesting" is not really such a far-fetched idea.

The problem with the "catchup" TV services is that they're designed to run over IP connections with very ordinary bitrates, and their PQ is correspondingly ordinary.

[pgdownload]

prl, on Sep 7 2011, 11:32 AM, said:

For Australia, you'd need 5 tuners to capture all the national networks, not "eight quad tuners" (whatever that means). That makes a total of 1.4TB/day. A lot, but enough storage for a week wouldn't actually cost all that much.

Probably a misnomer but buy "quad tuner" I was just referring to the need of the PVR to be able to actually record all streams in each networks mux. But having said that I think even the old SD Toppy had a TAP that enabled it to record an entire mux with just a single tuner (You'd need to have the FW separate it out later presumably). So yes five dedicated tuners for the Oz market plus a couple to handle the 'normal' twin tuner recording needs - although again its possible recordings could be extracted from the dedicated mux recordings). Not sure how good your reception would need to be to drive 5-7 tuners....

As for cost, its relative. You'd need about 5 2Tb drives to make it work for a week (that's around $500 there). Then throw in the PVR on top of that. Can't see much change coming from $1000. Heat & noise & power drain would also likely be excessive. All this for what would actually be a pretty rare occurrence of someone saying "Oh, I forgot that show was on yesterday and I really have to see it". A PVR with series record functionality pretty much obviates it altogether.

Quote

The problem with the "catchup" TV services is that they're designed to run over IP connections with very ordinary bitrates, and their PQ is correspondingly ordinary.

Now and here, but that is changing rapidly. An HD episode of something is about 1Gb.

Regards

Peter Gillespie

Edited by pgdownload, 07 September 2011 - 12:41 PM.

[Paul55]

pgdownload, on Sep 7 2011, 12:36 PM, said:

Now and here, but that is changing rapidly. An HD episode of something is about 1Gb.

Roll on the NBN!!!     

[melmac]

diesel, on Sep 6 2011, 05:30 PM, said:

Review of the Humax 7500t from Smarthouse. Though I read everything from that site with a large grain of salt, this is about the only review that I have seen so far...

I find it really odd that he mentions more than once that it only has 1 USB port and pointing out that once you plug the wifi dongle in then you can't plug in an external harddrive and yet in the specs he has listed at the end of the review it clearly states one USB at the front and one in the rear ??? Perhaps the model he received to review was different to the one they are selling ??

[diesel]

Or maybe he was referring to it not having two USB ports on the rear. No one likes having cords hanging out the front of their PVR - right?

[dbothof]

Hi can anyone confirm you can play an ipod through the humax and whether or not you can record directly/or connect to an external usb self powered 1tb hard drive as well? does the humax also have a 7 day free to air epg?

Edited by dbothof, 11 January 2012 - 07:51 AM.

[dbothof]

does the humax also have a 7 day free to air epg?

[junkmail]

dbothof, on 11 January 2012 - 07:50 AM, said:

does the humax also have a 7 day free to air epg?

yes it does

[rpant]

If anyone's interested there's a new firmware available for download via the Humax Portal. (v1.05.10 from memory)

[swamprat96]

I've had one of these for a week now and the tv side works well. Great EPG ,good picture ,easy to use menu.

But there are issues. I've experienced the same flakiness with DLNA that cnet commented on in their review. Any large folders on the remote DLNA server give inconsistent results on the humax. Also I've experienced  frame dropping several times with avis stored on the internal hdd. A quick stop then restart fixes this.

I've reported both to humax australia

[swamprat96]

As I use this unit more I'm finding more issues. Looks like it was rushed to market.
As a media player it is poor. So far the only filetypes it seems to play is avi, vob and mp4.  It won't play Mkv . It as a bug where the screen ratio does not change always distorting the picture on playback
For music it only plays mp3.
Add to this the very poor DLNA performance and it starts looking shabby. I

If you want just a pvr it performs well. But for the price you can get similar functionality cheaper. Until the media capabilities are improved I can't recommend the humax

UPDATE - I've found the bug and a workaround for screen aspect. You have to change the screen ration under preferences and it then allows the aspect to work. Doesn't matter what you set it to- just change it. You have to do it each time you play a different file type. Bug reported to Humax
UPDATE on DLNA. I'm now using TVersity (free edition) as my DLNA server on my PC. Much better results. Dont use Windows Media Player - total POS

Edited by swamprat96, 23 January 2012 - 06:36 AM.