Paul my tests today confirm your original post

See post 22.

Around 43MB for every hour at least over a 2hr period.

Interested to see if it's linear. Suspect it will be, done everything I can think of to test,

The download appears to be in discrete chunks.

eg

2 mins 2MB, 4 mins 2MB, 5 mins 3MB, 10 mins 3MB, 11 mins 6MB and so on.

What I don't have a clue about is if this amount of data is actually needed or could be reduced without affecting performance.

Why freesat would transmit more data than needed is hard to explain (it must cost more in the long run to do so)

Freesat may be between a rock and a hard place.

On one hand they get stick for taking a while to get recently aired programmed onto the catch up epg and on the other hand for continous data updates.

Repassac thinks it may be image related content for Showcase. May be, but the amount of data for relativelly small still image files seems unlikely to me.

Overnight test complete.

Box left on from 00:00 to 08:00. Data use 331MB = 41MB/hour.

I'd be more than happy for them to download nothing until I use the freetime epg and then suffer a delay while they're downloading stuff. I'm not sure I'm prepared for this amount of data use when not using freetime especially as I was intending to use the box for playing music via DLNA.

I'll post this on the freesat forum too and see if we can get any comment from them.

Disconnect the connection until you want to actually use catch up. As far as I can tell the box works fine as a normal pvr without a lan connection.

Hi Graham,
Agreed, the box does work perfectly as a pvb without a lan connection.
Only problem is without a lan I can't stream stuff over the local network.
Will have to see if I can make the router block outward bound traffic from the Humax.
Will post this stuff on the Freesat forum later.

In one of the hidden set up menus there is a option marked G1 (haven't dared to try it out ). May be it does what you want . Not tried a peer to peer link either. I take it you think the box polls for the data before downloading anything . I guess that makes sense. Don't profess to be any sort of network expert. I plug in the kit make a few address reservations for different kit based on MAC address.

I have quite a bit of networked kit. Foxsat-hdr, HDR-1000s, HD FOX T2, HDR FOX T2, blu-ray player, PS3, AV amp, laptop and Android tablet.

If you want to be deliberately combative and obtuse, Graham, that's your privellige. Anyone would think I called your wife ugly, not took issue with a PVR that's doing something unexpected and unwanted.

It's clear that Freesat G2 uses too much data for no discernable benefit to the user who isn't watching catchup TV.

Slurping that much data as a matter of course is unacceptable and potentially costly to people who don't have unmetered broadband.

An EPG should be updatable with a minimal differential download for starters - sweet baby jeebus, it's just some text - and images shouldn't cost that much in data as is reported in the numbers.

Freesat should be taking a lean and mean approach to pushing data over people's connections. Just as Google shaved its homepage down to a minute amount of data compared to other homepages - saving itself a lot of bandwidth in the process - so Freesat should be considerate with it's customers' bandwidth.

And it isn't.

And if you want to wave a flag for Freesat and defend the amount of bits the new boxes are bringing down people's pipes, then good luck to you, but you're not going to convince me.

If you take Paul1962's last report of 41MB per hour over 8 hours, that could amount to nearly a gigabyte of data per day. Without using catchup!

Your response, "Disconnect the connection until you want to actually use catch up," suggests to me that you're in denial.

Freesat's pretty damn good; you're not talking to a 'derek500' Sky troll here, Graham. There's a problem with the amount of data the G2 box is using, and I think Freesat need to take serious issue with it.

depending what router u have, i do believe it should b possible to block traffic via the MAC address, not sure if this would block it on ur local network tho

For the time being I'm leaving the LAN disconnected from the Humax.
The DLNA software in the box isn't reliable enough to use yet anway.

Graham, how do we get into the secret menu ?

Start a new thread.

Home - Settings - System Information

with General Info highlighted

Red Green Yellow Blue Green Yellow Blue

Hidden Settings

Freesat GEN2 Enable
Display CRID Disable
Get Network Time No offset
Debug Mode Disable

Well said. I commented on another forum...
http://community.freesat.co.uk/t5/Pr...g-on/m-p/68#M6
...that, given 4 years experience with Freesat HDRs, this box should have set new industry standards across the board. Instead it shouts out of abjectly bad project management or a box that was rushed into production to meet the Xmas sales. I'm patiently waiting on it getting better.

This page:

http://www.howtogeek.com/68886/how-t...e-url-logging/

...might be a help to find out what urls the Humax is contacting...

Oh, on second reading it's a little less useful than I thought - it'll only give you the IP addresses that are being looked-up, I was hoping it would actually give the full URL, eg: "http://js.revsci.net/gateway/gw.js?csid=C76484"....

The 2nd method documented, using WallWatcher, will do that. If you can extract the needed logs from your router, which in the case of my 3Com appears to be impossible.