I hope I can add some questions as I've just got a Foxsat too.

Can you record ITVHD unencrypted like BBCHD?

This has to be the saddest thread of the year.

No that honour goes to the death of Jade thread.

If I can determine that my box is faulty I will try and get my money back anyway. It was advertised as “full working condition” and the seller seemed very conscientious and communicative.


I know there are much better EPGs than that. The DigiFusion FVRT200 is better (this is the box I’ve owned for the last 5 years and I’m well used to). The DigiFusion shows 10 channel listings at a time, and you can instantly switch to single-channel mode which shows 10 listings for each channel. The cursor zips around quickly, and you can look through half a day’s TV listings in less than a minute. Looking through half a day’s listings (for 30 channels) on the Foxsat would take me about 10 minutes, I reckon.

I can’t find a pic of the DigiFusion EPG, but I just found this pics of a Mac-based EPG called EyeTV. This was the kind of thing I was hoping for from an HD box, but sadly Humax opted to keep the menu the same size for both SD and HD outputs, which is daft in my opinion. (No doubt more Freesat regulations!)

Seeing a PC-based EPG has made me seriously think about opting for a PC-based solution rather than a set-top box. It seems there is no HD box on the market that fully utilises the 1920x1080 resolution to show maximum listing information, and that is what I’m looking for.


As you say, the default Topfield GUI is absolutely terrible. I was disgusted with how bad it was, both visually and functionally, and it’s extremely buggy.

But, in my opinion, even that GUI is better than the Foxsat GUI. At least it’s very fast and the cursor never slows down, and you can easily see the listings for each channel.


I’d have gladly bought it second hand to save £10. Maybe even £5. The box is less than a year old so I didn’t anticipate there being any problems with it. It was advertised as being in full working order. That’s good enough for me.


I posted it on Christmas morning because I only got it Christmas eve. The dish was put up on Friday and the box arrived Christmas Eve. I’ve been thinking about getting satellite for a long time (and put it off) but I was prompted to get it in time for Christmas because I wanted to watch the new Doctor Who in HD (and I was keen to get it working which is why I posted as early as I could on Christmas day).


I made one positive comment, that it was nice to have all those channels. I honestly can’t think of anything else positive to say about it. There’s nothing I particularly like about it. It doesn’t have any features any other PVR doesn’t have, and in many respects it’s inferior to other PVRs I’ve owned.

Crucially though, I wasn’t posting a review. I was posting a request for help on 12 different problems I was having (and still am having).

Trolling is when someone tries to waste other people’s time at minimal effort of their own. A troll will typically post one message and leave the thread alone. I have been very active on this thread and clearly invested a lot of time here. That isn’t what trolls do.


If you suspect someone is a troll, the most sensible thing to do is to have a look at their post count, and see what other posts they’ve made. If you’d done that with me, you would have realised straight away that I am a regular poster here on DS and certainly not a troll.

Troll accusations seem to be everywhere on DS, and it’s just getting silly. I’ve only ever seen one genuine instance of trolling in 16 years on the Web, and that was over 10 years ago. Why is everyone so wary about something that hardly ever happens?


Sorry to be overly negative on Christmas Day! I was only being negative about a product though.

You have to see it from my point of view, my other PVR has been on the blink lately, and one of my family is ill and bedridden in the living room. She was counting on this box to make Christmas better, but we are really struggling with it, and can’t get it to do what we want.


In that case, Freesat sucks!


How come?


It’s just my opinion. Those things matter a lot to me. I would honestly rather never watch TV than use a box where I can’t rearrange the channels.

Since I was born, I have been able to arrange the channels on my TV into any order I please. I consider this my right as a TV viewer, and I’ll be darned if anyone is going to take that right away from me.


I’m starting to see it’s not really Humax’s fault. But my box is ridiculously slow, so that might be Humax’s fault, or it might just be a faulty box.


I definitely would like a Freeview/satellite all-in-one box. It would do things like automatically switch to the satellite equivalent of a channel if both Freeview tuners were busy. Or it would allow you to watch a third Freeview channel while two are recording, allowing a total of 5 simultaneous channels at once.


What is sad about asking for help with your new PVR? I think you will find several thousand threads just like it all over these forums. DS is the place to ask that kind of thing.

The only “sad” thing is that many of my questionst are still unanswered. And some of them were only simple things that every user should know, like how to record a programme you have just finished watching? (Which I still haven’t figured out how to do.)

Record a programme you've just watched?

Surely you have to record programmes while you are watching them?

I know there is a live pause buffer but I don't think it can be used to save a whole programme unless the length of the buffer is larger than the programmes length.

I think most PVR buffers are 30m or 1 hour long. So if you watch a half-hour programme on any PVR and press record during the end credits, it will save the whole thing. The Foxsat doesn’t seem to do that by default though, unless I’m doing something wrong here.

Hopefully Humax will add that option in a software update, it'll also be good if they have an option to change the live buffer length so that 1hr,2hrs or 3hrs worth can be used for films.

The menu system is a little complicated.

I figured out how to copy files relatively quickly but it isn't very intuitive.

Yeah you can rewind the buffer but not record it, bit pants, hopefully they'll fix that. But at least you CAN get it on iplayer on the HDR or soon ITVplayer.

Really, if you don't have INSTANT EPG population though you hyave either been sold a dud (unfortunately that does happen occasionally on ebay) or your reception of Eurobird (where the EPG comes from) is not good. Unfortunately unless you can prove the age of the unit Topfield will not cover you.

"I’d have gladly bought it second hand to save £10. Maybe even £5." Jesus (excuse me at Christmas) do you expect us to take this thread seriously after that ?

Glad you agree that the EPG is way way better than the Topfield one !

Yep, buying a £250 item second hand to save £5 = nonsense of the 'utter' variety.

I don’t see why anyone would pay £5 more, just to get it from a different supplier? What difference does it make? It just seems like throwing £5 away.

OK, you don’t have the same buyer rights on eBay, but a brand new item like that, you don’t expect it to be faulty, especially when it is advertised as being in perfect working order.

Anyway the RRP is £230.

There is no RRP for the Foxsat-HDR, the only time Humax have made any statement about price was the price point of £299.

Bob

What I meant was £230 was the cheapest retail price I could find.