I have a Hitachi T825 250GB recorder, bought from ebay. For the most part it works, however there are two main problems with it. First is that if the unit is in standby it will often only record part of a programme then stop (without any fault notice given). This I can deal with by leaving it switched on.

The other problem, far more annoying, is that it will often crash on the EPG screen. This often happens when coming out of the EPG (the screen goes semi-transparent with an image in the background) but also happens randomly, where the screen will simply go black, the unit stops responding to any commands and the front display remains static where it was at the time of the crash. The only way to sort it out is a hard reset.

Are these common faults (the firmware is V13.0) or do I have a (singularly) faulty unit?

They are common faults and don't expect Vestel to fix them, I have an Hitchi and an Alba and both do the same thing, you may get others saying do this or do that but none of it will work, if you can I would get shot of it and buy something better, it may cost more but you will have a pvr that works, if you do decide to do that then don't buy an Alba/Luxor because they are Vestels the Bush and Hitchi available from Argos are Vestels and I think the new Luxor available from Asda are Vestels, Goodmans I think are made in China and the Dion sold by Tesco are made in china, I think the Dion is made by the same firm that make the Dreamax stb sold by Asda, well the remotes are almost identical except the rec button and they both work with each other

Thanks for the reply.

TBH this is not a main-room PVR -- it's in a bedroom and was only cheap anyway, and I am in two minds about getting it to a working state if possible then moving it on in any case.

I should note though that I also have an Alba 160GB T825 (without HDMI) and this does not exhibit the same problems that this Hitachi does, so I'm reluctant to believe that the issues I'm having are solely down to being a cheap Vestel.

Interestingly, I noted today that the problems seem to be occurring when the unit attempts to access the hard drive. I did not know about the "soft-reboot" on these units until today so tried this when the box was in the frozen state. It rebooted, but then went into a cycle of repeatedly checking the HDD and rebooting again. I have already reformatted the drive, so took the box apart this afternoon and replaced the Hitachi Cinemastar 250GB with an old 250GB Western Digital drive I had lying around.

No bad capacitors were noted on either the main board or the PSU, although I have to say that the whole thing does seem rather thrown together with caps lying haphazardly in all directions -- whether this means that someone has had a go before or that's the way they come out of the factory I'm not sure.

The box picked up the new drive, formatted it and I've put it to work flicking around from channel to channel, series recording a bunch of different programmes and moving in and out of the EPG. The EPG did go black, once, but came back up after a couple of seconds.

Too early to tell but the box certainly *seems* more robust since the HDD change.

I have to say I don't like the way this thing is laid out. The HDD seems to be sharing its power with the main board; surely that is bad practice?

Don't pay too much attention to our new resident troll - he mentions Goodmans, but he doesn't seem to realize that some of those were made in Turkey by Vestel too . He doesn't seem to want to respond to any offers to help him isolate the problem that he has with his box, in case it isn't faulty.

Your Hitachi box on the other hand does sound faulty - the symptoms you describe are not common for Vestel PVRs so I very much doubt it is a software bug of any kind. It could be caused by a faulty HDD as you already suspected, and unfortunately when buying units off ebay there is an element of pot luck involved because even the "refurbished" units are not tested adequately so your Hitachi may well have been exhibiting the same faults the original owner was experiencing.

That said, are you using the HDMI output or SCART? I seem to remember that some found the HDMI output a bit flakey on the T825 boxes, so try SCART instead if possible.

Thanks futaura -- yes I have a good idea of the various brands and who is building/designing them!

Trouble is, I bought the Hitachi specifically for the HDMI -- the TV in the bedroom (a cheap 32" supermarket effort) has a respectable picture but only on HDMI (the upscaling is pretty poor). I will try on SCART as part of my testing regime to see if it makes any difference.

As I have the Alba as well I was thinking of swapping components piece by piece until I find the offending area (assuming it's not the hard drive). I still suspect that if it's not the HDD then it's likely to be power related somewhere; I take it that components on one 825 are interchangeable with another?

If the Hitachi has to go it won't be being replaced; I've just bought a Technika HD Freeview box which will take its place if I can't get this thing to work properly. I'm hoping that the HDD is serviceable in other units as I was planning to put it into a TiVo box (alongside the 250GB WD) and downgrade the Hitachi to 80GB or similar.

All that said, if the WD drive stabilises the box then it's happy days...

IIRC, the PSU board on the T825 is separate from the main board, so yes, the PSU board is probably interchangable as a whole, although do check the part codes just to make sure and handle with care when swapping . Obviously, the main board is going to be different because the Hitachi has extra capabilities compared to the Alba. Like you say though, fingers crossed it will be the HDD.

Which software version does the Hitachi have installed on it?

13.0, which I believe is the latest. I don't recall what the Alba has (it's disconnected right now) but it received the OTA upgrade last year so I think it's either 12.9 or 13.0 as well.

If it isn't the HDD I'll just replace every cap on the PSU board as a matter of course -- one of them could just be marginal throwing the whole thing off.

I vaguely remember a couple of complaints regarding v13.0 causing some problems with HDMI, but I can't find the threads. So, it'd definitely be worth checking with using the SCART to see if it makes a difference if you are still experiencing problems. Unfortunately, given the T825 models are approaching 4 years old, further software fixes are unlikely .

He/she/it is not new to the DS Forum. He has regularly trolled the Top Up TV sub-forum for a long time. I suspect posters in their have learned to ignore him so he is looking for new territory.

I'm vaguely intrigued to know why he purchased all the PVRs he claims to be rubbish? Surely if had read the forums first he would have known how bad they are .

Colin

Well so far, since I replaced the hard drive the only issues I've hard are HDMI related - there's the usual aspect ratio fault, alongside a new crash I've not seen before - the box was apparently working just fine (recording, responding to remote commands etc etc) but nowt was coming out of the HDMI port. A warm reboot cured it.

The HDD is annoying me as it's quite old and thus is noisy (and will so be going the journey at some point) but apart from that it seems sound as a pound.

Azimo is going to be disappointed you have got a good result. Rather proves his assertions in his post #2 are not justified.

Colin

Thats where you are wrong, I know crap when I see it, Vestel PVRs are cheap unreliable rubbish

TUTV PVRs are rubbish to, I don't see Argos selling them anymore, come to think of it I don't see Tesco (not their ebay outlet) or DSG selling Vestel PVRs anymore, I wonder why that is

[quote=futaura;52877315]he mentions Goodmans, but he doesn't seem to realize that some of those were made in Turkey by Vestel too .

The new Goodmans boxes are not made by Vestel or didn't you know that

As I keep saying Vestel PVRs are crap, there are plenty of reviews that support what im saying.

Freeview HD? SD PVRs are gradually being phased out. I won't disagree about TUTV PVRs, but those problems are largely down to the buggy software provided by TUTV - the Thomson and Vestel boxes are both hampered by this. And, yes, I do obviously know that not all Goodmans PVRs are made by Vestel.

Strange that, my neighbour has a Luxor 2500 which as we know is another Vestel clone, it has the same problem as my Hitachi/Alba the only difference is they get their signal from Sutton Coldfield, its not just down to software, my boxes have always had problems but as with alot of people that have bought Vestel PVRs I thought these problems would be ironed out with SW updates, they weren't, so I bought an Hitachi for two reasons a) cheap (b) new model new sw but as I've found out it still has the same old problems, and now those problems have got worse which is why I say Vestel PVRs are nothing more than cheap crap, why pay £90 for an Hitachi PVR when for £30 more you can buy a Sagem PVR which is alot more reliable and has alot more features, USB, HDMI, Two Scarts, Export/Import from an external HDD, Edit features Cut/Split/Join and you can add a buffer to the beginning and end of timers and the best thing is it all works, I know because I have one and intend to buy another

Surely the big difference is that the Luxor 2500 has the Top Up TV software installed which known to be unreliable.

Colin

Good luck with that - why pay £120 for a SD Sagem, when you can get a HD DigitalStream for not much more??? My very first PVR was a Sagem 6240T and it pales in comparison even compared to the first Vestel T810 models, which is what I swapped it with. Actually, the 6240T has cut/split/join too and that's about the only thing I miss, but it's no big deal. The 6240T was notorious for not recording - you'd set it to record something, and either it would record it at all or stop halfway through. Sagem attempted many times to fix this with numerous OAD software updates, but they just made it worse! Sagem never once replied to any of my emails. In contrast, my first contact with Vestel resulted in them sending me the new software file that fixed the problem I had reported. I saw something on the Sagem forum recently that made me chuckle, and that was a problem present in their HD models that was in my 6240T, and that is the inability of the Sagem to record radio programmes. I'm not sure if your model has the same bug, but the series link feature does not work properly either, in that it will record all repeats in a series. The real problem is that it is hard to get Sagem to admit faults, let alone fix them.

Just because you have had problems with Vestel PVRs doesn't mean everyone else has - I would guess they are one of the best selling PVRs due to their low price and mass market availability in numerous stores. There will always be problems with any PVR, and usually you will not hear from people on forums who have no problems and are happy with their purchase.

I know this isn't a Sagemcom thread but I feel I need to redress the balance.

I do remember you did seem to have a lot of problems with your 6240T's but which I and many others never had. So to paraphrase your own comment, just because you had problems with Sagem PVRs doesn't mean everyone else has.

As for the current RTI90s, well let me correct you again, series record works just fine, and they do not routinely record repeats for the vast majority of channels. The problem is only with rogue channels like Ch 5 which persistently refuse to identify repeats with a seperate series id, whereas all other channels do.

Nevertheless, now that this has been identified as a problem they have issued provisional software which fixes the repeat problem, available by email from their site on request. It won't be released for general download until testing has been finalised.

Touché PTD


Good to hear that Sagemcom are listening and reacting. I don't however agree about what you say about channels needing to specify repeats with a different series crid - last time I checked, all the +1 channels use the same series crid as the corresponding main channel. I don't have the full Freeview+ spec, but I suspect this is not clearly defined, so it is open to interpretation by broadcasters and manufacturers. However, ultimately it comes down to the manufacturer to support all eventualities.

Yes, it's perhaps an overstatement to say that it's a requirement, but given the advantages it's puzzling why a broadcaster should choose not to.

I've never been quite sure about the +1 channels, though Ch4/+1 are readily bookable as seperate series, so certainly must have seperate series ids. E4/+1 however has been little unpredictable on the RTIs so I guess they could be sharing one. But the new software also addresses that. My only criticism is that the first available instance is recorded, which may be on a low-ish quality channel; I'd like to see a choice of instance.

I'm not keen on the idea of having the pvr keep a list of what's been recorded/deleted to avoid repeats but I guess needs must. I don't know if this is part of the Freeview+ spec but I note that the YouView core spec. specifically requires this for a pvr.

Sorry for hijacking the thread guys, I'll shut up now it's off my chest. :sleep::sleep::sleep: