Tern,

Why you feel the need to insult people who are happy with their HDRs is beyond me. In your last few posts I appear to have been called a sycophant and subserviant?

And then you wonder why people are no longer posting favourable comments on the HDR?

Clearly some people feel differently towards their purchase than others but that's no reason to be derogatory.

Mike

To justify the comment in the above post (#74) regarding Humax being 'smug and unresponsive', the above quote is a perfect example.

Buying and installing a product such as a PVR is not a zero cost process even discounting the cost of the box. The product needs to be collected or delivery arranged, any product that it's replacing needs to be uncabled and removed and the new product put in its place. Then there is tuning and getting used to the product. In some cases people may have made a decision to go DSat rather than DTT and for them there will be the cost of the dish and cabling installation.

If the product needs to be returned there is a great deal more fuss, inconvenience and expense to go through.

To have a manufacturer market a product that is so full of bugs that people find it unusable and then, having done nothing that enables the users to rectify those bugs, tell them that if they aren't happy to return the product (in other words saying: "we wash out hands of any responsibility" is an attitude that is nothing short of appalling.

Bob_Cat said recently that some of his colleagues did not like him posting here. Probably they feel ashamed to be associated with a company that takes such a reprehensible line on its responsibilities towards its customers.

If this really is the official Humax line then, frankly, their attitude stinks.

The idea that you are being called 'sycophant and subservient' because you are happy with you box is just plain silly.

On that basis I would be calling myself those names.

The people I call sycophantic and subservient are those who tell people off for making perfectly valid complaints about the problems they are having with their boxes or Humax's lack of responsiveness.


No, I've never wondered that. Partly because they do.


I'm only being derogatory (or, at least, I'm only intending to be derogatory) towards those who try and stifle justifiable criticism.

Although it's not a perfectly satisfactory solution in that it involves you in extra expense and equipment complexity (and space occupancy) getting a cheap UPS (Uninterpretable Power Supply) is a pragmatic response to this problem. You should be able to do that for less than £50 which is a great deal cheaper than subscribing to Sky for two years.

To be fair to Humax they did a superb job on the standby power consumption - it's just a pity that the problem of power cuts got overlooked.

We have a V and a V+ box and use the iPlayer facilities occassionally (normally when I have missed the first episode of a program cause I didn't realise it had started) however on Virgin's cable system it has its own dedicated bandwidth and servers to provide a high quality un-interrupted stream. iPlayer via PC's (and the HDR) relies on a internet connection which may not be upto the job of providing a constant high quality stream.

It seems odd they are not going to allow iPlayer content to be pre-downloaded as I would have thought the market here would be those out in the "sticks" that have no access to cable services who are also likely to have problems getting a high speed internet connection to provide adequate streaming of the iPlayer content in realtime.

OK. I kind of got the impression that everyone who was happy with their box was being lumped together. Probably just me being over sensitive.

I have been very happy with the HDR but I only use it for watching HD so isn't it used that much. I have to agree it's nowhere near as reliable, convenient or responsive as the 9200 PVR I use for most TV. So I can certainly understand peoples annoyance.

I think the decision to lump the bug fix release in with the iplayer was probably a mistake given how long it's taking, but then hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Mike
Last edited by olderscot : 29-09-2009 at 11:16

Understood and the quality on my xbmc is lower than on Virgin. I guess they have to make the system available to all Freesat boxes not just the PVR hence the streaming only.

As I understand it the virgin iPlayer runs on the virgin video on demand system and is in effect run by virgin. It never even sees the internet.

Maybe so but if, as the I believe has been confirmed, the Humax HDR does not take advantage of its storage to cache iPlayer material, that's a serious oversight and, frankly, stupidity.

I assume the buck stops with the spec (thus Freesat) but I'd be delighted to hear who's decision it was.

If it is indeed a Freesat decision to ban caching (as opposed to storing in a named file) then it is, indeed, a decision of the utmost stupidity as Freesat should not be dealing with technicalities at that level.

If it is a Humax decision then it's just as stupid but maybe they couldn't manage to program that in the timescale available.

If it's a Freesat decision, we're probably stuck with it; if it's a Humax one, there maybe hope it'll change...

Yup in an effort to keep costs down and quality up. It helps if you own your own network


Wow there seems to be so much anger directed at this decision. I say lets get phase one in first and then see what happens after that.

Anger? Not at all. But if it is delivered without caching, then they have missed an obvious benefit over other devices (such as PS3).

Perhaps I'm too cynical but given the timescales to get "phase one" out (and we do not have even that yet), I don't expect a phase two at all... especially given the title of this thread.

Well, I'm thinking / guessing that £250 for HDR + £50 for UPS is less than £10 * 24 (the cost of getting PVR functionality enabled on a Sky+ box)...

...but then again, when Freeview arrives, I'll have to buy another box to be able to stop paying Sky at that point - whereas if I keep the HDR I hope it will still be working then(!), so they'll be no extra cost at that point.

So over the next five years the HDR would work out cheaper - and presumably get iPlayer straight onto the TV at some point, making the (hopefully few) missed programmes easier to watch.

Cheers,
David.

'Phase one' should have been ironing out the bugs in the PVR that people had bought, not faffing around coming up with some half baked implementation of something that that they hadn't!

Can you say power cut?

If it turns out that that the iplayer functionality will either (i) only be able to stream standard definition programmes which will look sub-par on most large HDTVs or (ii) can stream HD but will only work on 3.5Mbps+ connections and (iii) no download option is availiable to help those play HD content with below 3.5Mbps connections a lot of people are going to be justifiably annoyed since the long delay in the HDR update was attributed to getting the iplayer working properly.

I wonder if it won't be too long before the BBC have new wonderful HD encoders that output 3.5Mbps and call it HD and say it is even better or the same image quality as the 16 Mbps version used to be!! Which is what they are saying about their new 9mps? encoders, and I don't at all see that they are as good! ..........

Patrick

Ahh, their encoders already do that the big difference is that iplayer HD progs are not live encoded like TV, they are 720p encoded slowly with multiple passes which enables the very low rate, this is not possible with a live encoded channel like BBC HD.

Ouch. I have a 9200T and it's not very reliable. As long as a timer is in the list it's great (accurate record seems to work well for me) but it regularly deletes timers for no reason.

The current Formula 1 season is doing the same thing it did last year. Sometimes it correctly goes from event to event - most of the time the timer just vanishes. I lost the first half an hour of one of the new Midsomer Murders because the timer for that vanished. We actually have a pen and paper on the lounge table. Anyone that uses the 9200 runs through the list of timers and reinstates any that have vanished. We've been doing this for over a year now.

As for responsive - not during the first twenty minutes out of standby while it's populating the EPG. It can take many seconds to respond to the remote. The worst is when you want to resume from pause. You daren't press PLAY again in case until you are sure it's had enough time to respond otherwise you get chucked back at the start of the recording with no practical way to relocate until the machine has sorted itself out.

As a backup to the Sky HD box it's adequate but then quite frankly a VCR would be almost as good.

But:Note to Bob_Cat - iplayer on an STB would appeal to me. I would just want proof that you'd finally fixed the basic PVR functionality before I bought. Notwithstanding that I am still a potential customer. I'm just very wary.

Mike, that's interesting, I have gone completely the other way.

I do most, if not all, of my (time shifted) viewing on the HDR these days, due to the vastly improved AR performance compared to the 9xxx series. No more late starts, early cutoffs, or late running bug. I only really venture on to my 9300T about once a week to delete all my "backup" recordings.

Just my experiences, though

Rgds.


Les.

I agree with you Olderscot,

I too prefer to watch SD through the 9200T and just use the Foxsat HDR for HD.

On my flagship Panny 50", the SD RGB signal coming out of the 9200T beats the SD HDMI signal form the Foxsat every time.

The SD ITV channels are almost unwatchable via satellite, the quality is that poor on a 50" screen.

Ohh and just a small thing, the 9200T records every time...

Just ignore him - Tern is the über-troll

Unless you can come up with cogent responses to what I've written you come across as nothing more that a sad troll who doesn't have the intellectual equipment to argue his case and instead resorts to crude ad-hominems.

If you disagree with anything I've said by all means discuss it intelligently (as, indeed, did the person to whom you are responding).

Crude name calling just shows you up as rather weak.

Ohh come on....Tern has every right to express his opinions, just because some may disagree with them it doesn't mean he should be ignored.

Also after forking out £300 for a Humax product, he is entitled to expect the box to work to a very high standard, despite Bob Cat thinking this is somehow unreasonable...