News about three boxes are coping. Here, we have people with Pace Twin,
Humax PVR and the Sony box...

The Humax copes badly, sometimes needing the power plug replugging to
recover.

The Twin copes well, though scrolling is a bit tedious/sluggish (scale the
X axis of the guide with vol +/-), and I'm not sure it's caching.

The Sony copes nicely, and seems to cache, and is thus happy (but afair,
doesn't have any recording medium, not really a PVR).

So, any bets on how soon Humax will come out with an update? The Pace
could do with some useability tweaks too (how about skip +/- one day, and
some caching?).


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"Ancipital" wrote in message
news
News about three boxes are coping. Here, we have people with Pace Twin,
Humax PVR and the Sony box...

The Humax copes badly, sometimes needing the power plug replugging to
recover.

The Twin copes well, though scrolling is a bit tedious/sluggish (scale the
X axis of the guide with vol +/-), and I'm not sure it's caching.

The Sony copes nicely, and seems to cache, and is thus happy (but afair,
doesn't have any recording medium, not really a PVR).

So, any bets on how soon Humax will come out with an update? The Pace
could do with some useability tweaks too (how about skip +/- one day, and
some caching?).


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http://www.buddhas.org is currently tqt- back soon.
[- ancipital attt hotmail dott cohm -]
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of spammers are genuine scumbags." -Sanford Wallace


In case you have not seen it yet the Humax PVR software amendment to fix the
EPG was posted on their web site on 17th May.

It is only worthwhile downloading this if you are in one of the areas where
the EPG test transmissions are being broadcast.

Initial reports ( radio& tele forums) indicate that it works well.

Incidentally I have changed the hard drive in my 8000T to a Seagate 160 GB.
Works like a charm :-)

Richard

On Fri, 21 May 2004 09:24:42 +0000, Richard wrote:

Incidentally I have changed the hard drive in my 8000T to a Seagate 160 GB.
Works like a charm :-)

Hooray!

In the interim, I bumped my Twin up to a mighty 60GB too, and ditto, like
a charm. Doesn't seem like much, but the ability to stash 30-odd hours of
video seems to be ample for me...

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"Ancipital" wrote in message
news
On Fri, 21 May 2004 09:24:42 +0000, Richard wrote:

Incidentally I have changed the hard drive in my 8000T to a Seagate 160
GB.
Works like a charm :-)

Hooray!

In the interim, I bumped my Twin up to a mighty 60GB too, and ditto, like
a charm. Doesn't seem like much, but the ability to stash 30-odd hours of
video seems to be ample for me...

May I add a warning here please? As a newcomer to this group but long time
user of the Hauppauge PVR with a 120Gb disk it is possible to have "too
much" video storage. You reach a point where it would take a week of solid
watching ten hours a day to see all the stored video which seems pointless,
and the library functionality is a little superfluous. FWIW I put the
larger files (films and long programs) on to DVD thereby gained several Gbs
each time.

What a larger hard drive in a PC with a PVR does do is enable you to record
the same material at a higher bit rate which is a plus, without storing yet
more in hours of video, although because I don't own one of the all in one
PVRs (Humax, Pace etc) I don't know if they offer a choice of recording
quality.

Paul

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 14:14:26 +0100, Paul Bird wrote:


What a larger hard drive in a PC with a PVR does do is enable you to record
the same material at a higher bit rate which is a plus, without storing yet
more in hours of video, although because I don't own one of the all in one
PVRs (Humax, Pace etc) I don't know if they offer a choice of recording
quality.

No, they dump the programme stream down at the bitrate at which it was
broadcast, as accurately as possible. This is why the MPEG doesn't look
like it's been put through a tumble-dryer unlike some other systems which
grab an analogue copy of a decode of something already compressed, and
recompress it (which naturally looks like hammered crap).

You can see this in action when recording channel 5, which is oddly set
up, and seems to be hogging its mux or something, and chews waaaay more
bitrate and looks a lot worse than e.g. BBC2.


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No, they dump the programme stream down at the bitrate at which it was
broadcast, as accurately as possible. This is why the MPEG doesn't look
like it's been put through a tumble-dryer unlike some other systems which
grab an analogue copy of a decode of something already compressed, and
recompress it (which naturally looks like hammered crap).

Is there anyway to get the streams off the box without going analogue?
From what I understand the Sky+ will has an optical out, so in theory
you can dump to a DVD recorder (not optimal because you mightn't
always want to waste a DVD to get your data off but at least you can
archive your favourite films to a medium).

On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 10:24:11 -0700, Microwave wrote:

Is there anyway to get the streams off the box without going analogue?
From what I understand the Sky+ will has an optical out, so in theory
you can dump to a DVD recorder (not optimal because you mightn't
always want to waste a DVD to get your data off but at least you can
archive your favourite films to a medium).

Not with the twin, unless you want to whip the HD out, and mount it in a
linux box... and then try to suss it out (as I recall it was a std
dos-like partition table, but I wasn't sure what the filesystems were, let
alone how to start whipping the data out of them). It probably isn't hard
for people who are more paitient and less lazy, but it's still a faff.
I'd want to modify the box to make the HD removable too, if I were doing
that on a regular basis...

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[- ancipital attt hotmail dott cohm -]
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