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Technika STBHD213 Freeview HD Digibox "Bargain"... wasn't
Kodaz
Posts: 1,018 Forum Member
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Anyone else have experience with the Technika STBHD213 Freeview HD receiver? I saw this reduced from £49 to £35 in Tesco and bought it on impulse. *ahem*
Immediate problem upon plugging it in for the first time:-
Didn't go straight to language-select setup menu as manual promised. However, pressing menu button brought up a confusing mess of what appeared to be part-mangled Romanian with entirely wrong and misplaced menu item entries. (*)
Swithered about returning it there and then as life's too short to **** about with Tesco's rebranded OEM tat. Eventually found out how to do a factory reset in the manual, and it seemed to work fine with English-language setup.
Then... more problems:-
This thing provides PVR functionality if an external USB drive is inserted.
Worked fine with an ancient 512MB pen drive and my current 8GB one, but I want to keep that for normal use (it's slimline and fits in my wallet). So bought a 64GB one, which wasn't recognised at all, even after its exFAT filesystem was replaced with NTFS (which system is meant to support). And shouldn't it at least *recognise* the device itself, even if it needs to reformat it?!
Tried 32GB one which seemed to work, but had problem with one recording stopping early, and since there's no on-screen recording indicator, it's not immediately obvious that it's stopped. (Doesn't even show a stop symbol when you stop, what abysmal design).
Now the system always appears to lock up when you come out of the "PVR" library section.
Didn't seem to recognise NTFS-formatted 32GB drive when inserted (though it should), so- again- didn't even have option to reformat it. When I reformatted it in FAT32 with Windows again, it wasn't recognised (even though PVR itself had previously formatted it with FAT32).
I'd previously had the media player working, and it seemed to support a good range of file formats, except that it left a message regarding clearing the menu in place at the bottom of the screen even when the menu was gone(!)
I can see why this thing was reduced. The Freeview HD picture quality is great, but since I do most of my viewing on an SD set, it's not worth keeping this annoying piece of tat just for that. (If I was using it all the time, I'd want something better anyway).
I wonder what random OEM hardware this thing is based upon? It seems to do that typical low-end Chinese-designed OEM thing of providing a *lot* of functionality for the price, but totally ruining it with a cheesy interface and shoddy software design and reliability.
I was willing to tolerate this given how cheap it was, but why bother? I think I'll take it back tomorrow. >:(
(*) Some words were Romanian, but had question marks in the middle, like computers have when they can't handle the extended character set accents. There were some English-language words in there that clearly didn't relate to what the menu was for, so it's *not* just like someone had just previously bought and returned it after setting it up in Romanian.
Immediate problem upon plugging it in for the first time:-
Didn't go straight to language-select setup menu as manual promised. However, pressing menu button brought up a confusing mess of what appeared to be part-mangled Romanian with entirely wrong and misplaced menu item entries. (*)
Swithered about returning it there and then as life's too short to **** about with Tesco's rebranded OEM tat. Eventually found out how to do a factory reset in the manual, and it seemed to work fine with English-language setup.
Then... more problems:-
This thing provides PVR functionality if an external USB drive is inserted.
Worked fine with an ancient 512MB pen drive and my current 8GB one, but I want to keep that for normal use (it's slimline and fits in my wallet). So bought a 64GB one, which wasn't recognised at all, even after its exFAT filesystem was replaced with NTFS (which system is meant to support). And shouldn't it at least *recognise* the device itself, even if it needs to reformat it?!
Tried 32GB one which seemed to work, but had problem with one recording stopping early, and since there's no on-screen recording indicator, it's not immediately obvious that it's stopped. (Doesn't even show a stop symbol when you stop, what abysmal design).
Now the system always appears to lock up when you come out of the "PVR" library section.
Didn't seem to recognise NTFS-formatted 32GB drive when inserted (though it should), so- again- didn't even have option to reformat it. When I reformatted it in FAT32 with Windows again, it wasn't recognised (even though PVR itself had previously formatted it with FAT32).
I'd previously had the media player working, and it seemed to support a good range of file formats, except that it left a message regarding clearing the menu in place at the bottom of the screen even when the menu was gone(!)
I can see why this thing was reduced. The Freeview HD picture quality is great, but since I do most of my viewing on an SD set, it's not worth keeping this annoying piece of tat just for that. (If I was using it all the time, I'd want something better anyway).
I wonder what random OEM hardware this thing is based upon? It seems to do that typical low-end Chinese-designed OEM thing of providing a *lot* of functionality for the price, but totally ruining it with a cheesy interface and shoddy software design and reliability.
I was willing to tolerate this given how cheap it was, but why bother? I think I'll take it back tomorrow. >:(
(*) Some words were Romanian, but had question marks in the middle, like computers have when they can't handle the extended character set accents. There were some English-language words in there that clearly didn't relate to what the menu was for, so it's *not* just like someone had just previously bought and returned it after setting it up in Romanian.
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Comments
Well, let's just say I know why it was £35 now.
Well if it isn't worth even £1 then I would expect someone to be disappointed, yes.
The Vestel model it replaced had it's faults, but generally worked fine for the basics, but I am pretty sure the model that replaced it was widely reported as being inferior with poor software.
I may have it the wrong way round, but I am sure Futuara will be along who is something of a Vestel expert.
Not that that info helps much, but to be honest if you don't have an HD TV there isn't much point in buying an HD receiver, even at that price. But then again buying an HD box does give you some future proofing and will come into it's own should you upgrade to an HD TV in due course.
Personally I'd be taking it back and buying a more respected box.
If it's recording functions you want there are a few options, although all more expensive.
You can pick up a second hand Digitalstream 500Gb HD PVR on Ebay for around £90.
You can buy a Talk Talk branded YouView 320Gb PVR on Ebay for around £60-£70.
That's the route I'd be going down if I was you, not only will you get a much more reliable proper PVR but it will also have dual tuners for proper two channel recording, recording one while watching another channel etc. etc.
I bought it for two reasons; Freeview HD and the fact that it could record onto a removable pen drive, which I thought might be useful for transferring stuff.
As I said, the Freeview HD picture was actually perfectly fine- and obviously miles better than the SD signal- it's just that most of my viewing is done on an old SD set (I'm not *that* much into TV, to be blunt) while the HD set- actually sold as a TV/monitor- is in use for the computer.
I already have an SD TVOnics PVR that does the job, has an HD inside and twin tuners. Despite an irritating glitch when I bought it and the fact it hangs at startup far too often, it's a good no-nonsense machine that the Technika model made me appreciate more.
If the recording facility on the HD box isn't reasonably reliable then I'm likely to not bother using that much. It's not that £35 was that big a waste of money, but I didn't see the point in having unused tat lying about. I'm not one of those "boys toys" types like my boss who bought a 3D TV at the height of the fad 3 or so years ago and admitted that he'd never even actually watched a 3D film all the way through.
The same company that bought up the Alba name in the 80s and plastered it over the first wave of low-end and questionable-quality electronics to come out of the newly-industrialised China? Yeah, that figures.
Since- I'm assuming- they probably design(ed) little of their own product beyond possible customisation and cosmetics, why wouldn't Tesco et al just deal directly with the Chinese OEM or distributor- like everyone does these days- rather than going through a bunch of sub-Alan-Sugars in Slough or wherever?
Anyway, see this image to see the graphics and play "spot the underlying model". I took those to record the confusing mess of menus *before* I figured out that "Always Timeshift" was actually the factory reset screen.
Edit; one interesting thing is that it had a network connection which- despite being apparently "unused" in this model- was obviously live and even acquired a DHCP lease from my router (but didn't yield any info to an nmap scan).
I wondered if it could have been flashed or upgraded, but I couldn't find any info on its true OEM background via the web, and I've returned it now anyway.
Tesco, like other companies, just tend to buy the (almost) off the shelf models made by the budget manufacturers. Normally the only difference is the badge on the box, usually the casing and remote are identical to others made by the same budget company. I am often amazed how some of these products get passed any quality control procedures. It's probable Tesco just accept it has passed the manufacturers quality standards, but as they tend to be based in China (or Turkey in the case of Vestel), they can't pick up issues that transmission standards/changes etc. may have here in the UK. So the boxes may work perfectly fine on the manufacturers test rigs in China or where ever, but have major problems when actually used by customers here in the UK.
I do believe Vestel now have some kind of setup here in the UK now for testing but not sure about the other budget companies.
Really I would think Tesco should be testing such products themselves too, but that would of course add to costs.
Yeah, it's still not clear to me how it was so obviously f****d up out-of-the-box (before I factory reset it) since this couldn't be explained solely by a previous buyer having used a different setup language. See the link image above for how mangled things were. In fact, the items and packaging all looked "fresh" anyway, not like it had been previously opened and returned.
The TV reception (i.e. problem most likely to be affected by local issues) was fine, ironically.
I wasn't massively keen on the interface and there were a few things that annoyed me (though some of that may have been down to unfamiliarity.) Still, it wasn't *that* bad.
To be fair, I didn't have any major problems with the 512MB and 8GB drives I tested it with (Mind you, I think it still locked up at least once with the 8GB). It's possible the 32GB and 64GB ones could have been dodgy, but they seemed to work fine with Windows when I copied files over and tried to retrieve them.