Several people commented on the Homechoice set-top box, and comments range from "very stylish" to "sometimes showing slow response".

I find the HC STB is ill-designed to an extend that renders it a bad joke, and wonder why nobody else seems to be picking up on that. So, let me present my case:

The box is very stylish indeed: nice appearance and nice size, combined with a stylish remote. That is the beginning, and the end of it.

Appearances have been put over functionality. The STB sports a single light in the front centre, indicating the DSL modem connect status. I cannot even tell whether the TV service is on or off, let alone which channel it is tuned into - remember, the package also provides radio channels, and I just hate the idea having to turn on the telly just to tune into the right radio channel. Besides, switching the telly on and off is not good for the telly's lifespan, and not good for the electricity bill (read: environment).

When I do switch a channel, or make any similar request, that request is not being honored immediately - fair enough. The technology requires some conversation with the server, and I am happy to make an allowance. I do find it unacceptable, however, that the box provides no indication no whatsoever about pending activity. The equivalent of the Windows hourglass mouse cursor, maybe in form of a flashing LED in the STB front panel, would be very appropriate.

The rear of the STB is, owing to the handy STB size, cramped to the extend that the two SCART connectors cannot be used simultaneously - not, at least, with most standard scart leads. Audio connectors are missing, and a scart/audio break-out adapter suffers the same problem. I had to solder my own, but not everyone can do that.

Finally, I find it sad the remote has no guideance for visually imparied users. It looks very good, but if you cannot see much of this yourself, you'll find it hard to use. Since the STB provides no alternative user interface, I find this rather criminal. Thankfully my eyesight is excellent.

You honour, I request a community downthumb on the usability of the HC STB.

I certainly agree that the back of the box is cramped, but I've had no difficulty whatsoever using two scart leads at the same time. I too was quite annoyed to find no audio connectors, however this was solved by a connector from Maplin which passes the scart through to another socket and has 3 x phono on the top. ( http://www.maplin.co.uk/products/mod...moduleno=33041 ).

Also I'd say that if you're box is slow enough doing things to require some kind of activity monitor then something is wrong. I had a problem with serious control lag that happened about 9.30pm every evening - a call to their customer care line resulted in an engineer calling me back, and then the problem being solved next day after they ran some tests. They didn't tell me what was wrong though.

There does seem to ber very little consistancy with regards to peoples experiences with the HomeChoice technology, and as mentioned in another post I wouldn't be surprised if it was dependent on the quality of your connection.

Are all the channels broadcast in stereo?

Yes, as far as I can tell. Certainly all the 'terrestrial' 5 are.

Sound is one of the strong points of HC imho. It sounds especially good through a ProLogic II decoder, too (though it's not true 5.1 surround, obviously).

What bitrate do the channels broadcast at?

I believe that the ADSL bandwidth going to the TV box is currently 2.3Mbps (i've seen this figure quoted on the OFCOM website).

Unfortunately because HC are still using MPEG2 encoding at the moment, this results in some pixellation (probably on a par with early on-digital kind of quality).

There are rumours abound that they are moving over to MPEG4 later this year which should improve matters hugely. I wonder if anyone here has got any more info on this?

HC told me it was 6 Mbps for the streaming, and 1..2 for Internet. May be right, may be wrong. Can't change the streaming rate anyhow.


The official HC language is "MPEG 4 by the end of the year". My personal translation is Easter.

Well, there may be a potential of 6Mbps available, but the picture quality sometimes tells a different story. Though oddly this seems to depend what channel you're watching (eg right now Channel 4 is much better than, say BBC2).

A six megabit stream is about twice what's used on Freeview for example. HC's video quality is below that of Freeview, therefore I took the 2.3 figure to be correct.

For comparison, DVD video is stored at 9.8Mbps (iirc).


Oh that's nothing, I've just moved over from Telewest, so 3 months after customer service's 'estimate' is nothing in comparison

HomeChoice say the DSL line into the home has a total capacity of about 6Mbps, of which 4Mbps is reserved for the video stream. As pissedbob says, this is significantly less capacity than the bitrate of a typical DVD. We all eagerly await the MPEG-4 upgrade.

What may seem like slow response from the set-top box is actually slow response from the head end. The HomeChoice STB has very little intelligence: essentially, it shovels an incoming video stream out to the television, and relays incoming remote control signals on to the HomeChoice servers. Everything you see onscreen, including navigation menus and the EPG, is generated on a server at the head end, MPEG-encoded and streamed down the line to you as video.

This architecture has interesting implications. It allows HomeChoice to trivially roll out potentially major changes to the service that would, for cable or satellite, require a new STB. It reduces the cost of the customer premises equipment (although HomeChoice turn around and piss this advantage away with their ridiculous policy of sending an engineer on-site for even trivial changes, such as turning on the widescreen setting in the STB). The main disadvantage is the scaling demands on the head end: server capacity must grow as the customer base does, and there's a possibility that responsiveness for all customers might degrade if the servers are overloaded. (I suspect I may be seeing this happen lately. I've noticed that responsiveness is significantly slower (3+ seconds) during the evening than in the morning (2 seconds).

Interesting detail, Denuvo. I agree, the server demand is mad if the customer base grows. At this moment, I suspect HC people still know all their customers in person (and all their trouble-makers and they already struggle with latencies and drop-outs.

While I believe this to be the right techology going forward, I am very curious indeed to see how they'll cope, and what our system's gonna be like in 2 years time.

Interesting, I hadn't realised that's what was going on behind the scenes. Certainly explains the varying response times! Hopefully HC can afford to spalsh out on improving the performace of the head-end servers sometime. *

Does this mean that V.O.D content (which I guess is held centrally in a compressed form) is uncompressed at the head-end, overlaid with the menus, then re-encoded at a fixed bandwitdh (ie the 4Mbps stated above)?

if so, this has to be introducing some of the artefacts (which seem to be more noticeable on v.o.d). Although this of course all depends on how good the source quality was...

* I notice the blanket advertising on the Tube, Capital radio and the papers has all but stopped now. I wonder how much effect all this has had on HC's customer numbers?

If you look at the VideoNetworks website (HC's parent company) there are a LOT of job vacancies, across the board. Even down to the tea lady -- things are obviously looking up.

Crikey - you're not joking!

'Catering Assistant?'

http://www.videonetworks.com/careers_hr_legal.htm

I don't think the post about all menus being generated at the head end and included in the MPEG stream is correct. Menu backgrounds and some of the text certainly is, but other OSD details and text are obviously generated by the STB - you can tell that just by looking at them. Not to mention a question as to how a message about no ADSL could be sent like that!

A good point Zapomatic...

The only thing being that my box at least (one of the new shiny ones) doesn't show a message at all if there's no ADSL - it just gets confused and stays on a black screen if it's turned on unplugged from the line.

So in my mind it could still work either way. Certainly the responsiveness suggests it might all be remote Though of course I can see what you're saying, the EPG text etc does appear to be clearer than the streamed video could support.

Maybe someone which a bit of inside knowledge could shed some light?

I'd be curious to learn how you determine this by watching the telly screen - not saying you're wrong, just curious.

Easy, the OSD is not subject to *any* of the picture artefacts that spoil the Olympics, for example. If they were included in the MPEG stream, the text would be blurred and pixelated too.

I disagree. Electronic text is particularly easy to encode: clearly defined edges, few colours, no motion. I would expect the EPG to be artifact-free even at a pretty low bitrate.

Even when it's semi-transparent with the Olympics in the bacjground?

Thanks for the tip. Just bought the above from Maplins and I now have some sound improvement.