I've recently ordered the new Humax HDR Fox Freeview HD box and am eagerly awaiting its arrival and future ability to receive I-Player.

I'm a bit new to streaming the internet to my Plasma TV and would be grateful for any advice:

1. I have a BT home hub next to my PC, but a few metres from my Panny TV, so don't want to use a long cable. I believe I can use home plugs, one near the BT hub and one near the Humax. Is this correct?

2. I have no idea what to look for in terms of getting a reliable pair of home plugs. There were several in Maplins in Bath today, ranging from about £39 to £129. I'd be very grateful if anyone can recommend a make they have purchased which have proved to deliver a reliable performance.

Many thanks for any advice.

No reason why it should not work as BT Vision supply homeplugs to do a similar job. Cannot recommend a make though as I have never used any.

Q1 is correct. You attach one HomePlug (Power line Connector) to your BT Home Hub and the other to the Humax, using the supplied Ethernet connectors.

Q2 The 85Mb/s ones are adequate for the job. eg. "TP-Link 85Mbps Powerline Ethernet Adapter Starter Kit - Twin Pack"

Please note. If you live close to a Radio Amateur or Short Wave Listener, you will not be very popular, as these devices cause a lot of interference in the 5Mhz - 21Mhz Short Wave Band. The faster HomePlugs (Gigabit ones) interfere right up to FM Radio (88Mhz - 108Mhz) and DAB > 230Mhz Bands.

Chris.

I've used home plugs with my set up and it works fine, my router is an orange livebox and is connected to 3 panasonic units, 2 connected through an ethernet connecting hub and the 3rd direct to a plug.
Dave

Don't use homeplugs, see post 3. The interference can go several hundred metres.

Do it properly with an ethernet cable. It's cheaper, neater, and greener.

I am a radio ham,and I do use home plugs,the move to try and stop them will fail,it's the future of home networking.

Likewise here. The proper Homeplugs as opposed to the ones which BT supply do have notches in their emissions at Amateur frequencies.

The correct ethernet cable will be better for you than the homeplug. In a home, the length of cable is not an issue.

It is worth noting that BT Comtrend devices are "Powerline" devices. Humax and Freesat are endorsing the alternative "HomePlug" technology, especially "HomePlugAV" because of some extra software which helps the transit of video over the network.

The best and most reliable technology to connect a product to a network is a bit of network cable (e.g. Cat-5 or Cat-6) but I appreciate that isn't always practical. Our experience with wifi in UK homes is that while it *might* be sufficient for browsing it doesn't always provide a consistent connection for prolonged viewing.

I know this isn't as plug and play as a homeplug would be but I use an old linksys cable router (WRT54G) running the dd-wrt firmware and set up with some simple configuration to act as a client bridge to my adsl router. So basically the four ethernet ports on the back of it have internet connectivity and it connects back wirelessly. Any wifi access point that can do client bridge mode will be able to do this. OK it's slightly less bandwidth than the homeplugs can probably do but I've streamed .mkv HD files to my TV without any buffering so it works for me.

I've heard bad things about these powerline plugs. That they run very hot and after a couple of months tend to break and need replacing, and also about the masses of RF interference that they generate. So I went with the wifi solution instead.

My original 14 Mb/s Homeplugs run hot and after two years or so developed a fault, viz. a failed electrolytic capacitor in their power supply. (If they didn't make these capacitors so small they would be far better - I've got some 40 years old which are still perfect). However, the Vesenet 85 Mb/s ones run far cooler and I've had no bother with them at all. Solwise acknowledge that they had trouble with the early ones but state that the latest ones are fine.

Many thanks for all the replies to my original posting, as always most helpful.

I've ordered an ethernet cable from Amazon which will be long enough to go from my BT hub to my new Humax HDR Freeview HD box when it arrives and will see how it goes for now. It's long enough to go over door frames etc.

And now another sign of my ignorance - I understand that BBC i-player will be added to the Humax box at a later date. In the meantime, when I have hooked up the ethernet connection, will I be able to use my Humax box to access contents from my PC hard drive and the internet and show them on my Panny plasma?

If the TV supports something called DLNA or uPNP then it'll stream video/audio from another PC yes. However my experience of using it on Samsung and Sony TV's is that it's very VERY picky about what it will and won't play. You need to configure the software on the PC perfectly with little tweaks so that the TV sees it as compatible and it'll need to be perfect filetypes, resolution, codec etc against what it supports.

If the TV comes with some software to do this (like samsung's do) then chances are it'll work without too much fiddling with files like .avi xvid's or .mkv HD videos. However the Sony that I've got doesn't have any software and I've struggled to get it to stream anything other than .ts files recorded from freeview onto a PVR from my mediatomb server that I use. As a result I use my Samsung bluray player instead to do my streaming as this supports mediatomb much better.

You'll have to try it and see what you can do with it.

xtaz & bathsat,

The Humax HDR-Fox T2 plays a wide variety of file types, more than I have seen from most other consumer devices. It has a media networking client and will be updated with a server later in the year.

Bob

The PDF spec sheet on the humaxdigital website lists only MP3, JPG and XVID files for playback. Are there more?

Also, will there be a user manual available for download?

We've not warranted much in the way of formats because we can't be assured of the quality of the encoding from third parties. We are compiling a separate document which we hope might help know what can be done, but I don't know when that will be ready.

The manual will be available online.

Bob

Thanks Bob

Has there been any testing on networking with a Mac?

A bit of a selfish question but I would like to access the content from my Mac on the HDR and even better, access the HDR from the Mac itself.

Additionally, has there been any testing with a SlingBox?

I placed my order minutes after the 'Add to Basket' option was available @ Humax direct and I cant wait for delivery, hopefully before next weekend.

Cheers

Michael