I would have thought that Freesat would insist that the Freetime graphics etc would be the same across all box manufacturers, otherwise if everyone is allowed to "fiddle" with it to suit themselves, then cheap and cheerful versions of it will appear in the less expensive boxes and this would surely dilute and undermine the whole Freetime idea.

The epg is proprierity, cheap and cheerfull boxes won't be allowed to use it, nor get Freesat+ <free time> certification, how many platforms other than Freesat boxes can use it. The poster I replied to has stated that Freesat boxes vary how the epg looks, no idea if this is true only ever having used both Humax freesat boxes. If it is then why would <free time> be any different. Merely an opinion. Perhaps the spec allows different colour schemes, perhaps not. You may be right or wrong, like you merely expressing an opinion, hopefully based on some experience. Certainly Freesat+ boxes have quite different User Interfaces and features apart from the epg. Why would G2 boxes be any different.

As I said Youview is entirely different, the user interface is designed by a single source. Humax merely provide the hardware to the Youview spec. Other manufactures will do the same. The UI will be the same as the software comes from the same source.

It's schedule and green of you want the list view, smartypants.

If the guide button brings up a cached copy and the data sipping way of updating the guide is anything like it is on the Fox sat, I hope there's a way to force an update - my Fox sat often has gaps in the EPG data when the cache is viewed. Especially toward the end of the week.

Set your Foxsat to turn on for 10 mins every morning after housekeeping. I've never seen gaps in the epg except for those reported by others using guide as well. I haven't used the guide button apart from after a reset since 2008.

Back to the original topic...

Having now seen both, I think people are going to have to choose very carefully between Freetime and YouView. Even more so if/when there are boxes from other manufacturers to choose from. I'd recommend going to a shop, or a friend's house, and trying both YouView and Freetime for quite a while - they both have quirks.

...and if it was me, I wouldn't choose either yet. Neither looks finished (though of course, since it hasn't launched yet, I suppose it's not too bad that the Freetime software didn't seem to be quite finished).

btw, I found the pretty interfaces of both boxes very beguiling after the rather plain HDR. Owners of newer boxes probably wouldn't see such a big jump. They weren't as responsive as I expected though.

At the end of the day, I don't use catch up nearly enough to justify an upgrade. If my Freesat box broke tomorrow, I'd consider one - but hopefully it'll last at least another year, giving Humax/YouView/Freetime long enough to sort all the bugs out. It would be nice to see more responsive boxes from other manufacturers too.

Hopefully the two platforms and multiple manufacturers will lead to some healthy competition, rather than an SACD vs DVD-A style format war that pretty much kills both.

Cheers,
David.

Well, HDR-100S ordered, delivery towards the end of the month.... Does anyone know what size HDD it takes (2.5" or 3.5") as have a spare 1TB kicking about but it's 3.5"

Almost certainly 3.5". But a spare 1TB disc designed for a PC is unlikely to be a reliable replacement. Pvr's use AV specified drives, featuring low power consumption and minimal error correction (error correction on PC drives can delay read/write operations whivh pvrs can't cope with), they may well work for a while. It remains to be seen if the drive swap is as straightforward as the Foxsat-hdr.

Any opinion on a WD Caviar Black? it's the one I've got kicking about.

Sorry no experience of the drive. WD's current CE (Consumer Electronics) range are specified WD AV-GP.

http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=150

Whether the HDR-1000s will work with sata 3 drives is not known (if it's any help around 4 weeks after the Foxsat-hdr appeared there were wiki postings about changing the drive from 320GB to 1TB). You will need to wait till some brave owner tries a HDD drive swap
The trouble is someone will stick in a PC drive and report it works fine only to find 12 - 18 months later problems arise.

Oh. Um ... how do I do that?

The easy way is to set a watch reservation for example for 03:30 for 10 mins.

Or set a power on and power off timer from the menus. If you use the custom firmware and the non-freesat manual recording timer capability you need to do this after housekeeping to reload the non-freesat timer schedules after housekeeping which removes these.

Mine boots to BBC1-HD for 15 mins at 07:00 every day. Refreshes the epg from the BBC1-HD epg data stream and reloads non-freesat timers deleted by housekeeping.

According to the "trusted reviews" info, the Freetime box supports DLNA, which is important for me.

As you say neither is final, but one big POTENTIAL advantage I can see on the Youview side is that the software is designed never to be "final", because they develop the software and not Humax then they SHOULD continue to update it. On the flipside they (YV) seem to have the idea that unless a feature is likely to be used by >50% of mainstream users they won't add it, which means bad news as far as DLNA is concerned.

From the HDR-1000s thread on MyHumax

Thanks Graham, that's good to know.

If it does a good job as client and server then that's a slam dunk for me, will keep an eye on how it unfolds.

Is there any information as to what file types (avi. xvid. mp4 etc.) will be compatible with the the HDR-1000?

My box was due to be delivered Monday 24/9,until a phone call from Comet this morning saying delivery now would be 08/10.Just a tad disappointed now.

No doubt pirates in the South China Sea

What do you want DLNA actually to do?, from what I've seen of it (on equipment other than this new Humax obviously) it never seems to do what I'd like it to.

Which begs the question , what would you like it to do

I know what you mean, support for the hundreds of possible formats is pretty patchy. Mainstream mpeg2 (.ts container) and H264AVC (.ts. or .mts) is now pretty well supported. .avi will never be, the container can contain pretty well anything frame rate, compression and resolution wise.

Does the new humax have a manual timer on NON FREESAT the older fox sat did not

For me - play MP4/MKV movies from DVD and BluRay collection, which I've been ripping onto a network disk with AnyDVD and Handbrake. Also I have films from my HDR that I've converted to MP4.

Currently using a dedicated media player for this and a one box solution is more appealing. You are right that many devices do have the DLNA stamp and still do an appalling job of covering the formats - my Sony BluRay would be an example, doesn't play 30% of files and even when it does play there is a delay of several MINUTES before it plays, maybe it needs to copy the whole film before it begins ?

John Lewis are stating on their website that the official launch for the HDR-1000S is the 4th October. They are now taking per-orders,but at £299:95!

I have ordered mine from Currys and got a tenner off by going through Quidco so got it for £269.99. They say delivery 2 to 4 weeks.