Anyone else have experience with the Technika STBHD213 Freeview HD receiver? I saw this reduced from £49 to £35 in Tesco and bought it on impulse. *ahem*
Immediate problem upon plugging it in for the first time:-
Didn't go straight to language-select setup menu as manual promised. However, pressing menu button brought up a confusing mess of what appeared to be part-mangled Romanian with entirely wrong and misplaced menu item entries. (*)
Swithered about returning it there and then as life's too short to **** about with Tesco's rebranded OEM tat. Eventually found out how to do a factory reset in the manual, and it seemed to work fine with English-language setup.
Then... more problems:-
This thing provides PVR functionality if an external USB drive is inserted.
Worked fine with an ancient 512MB pen drive and my current 8GB one, but I want to keep that for normal use (it's slimline and fits in my wallet). So bought a 64GB one, which wasn't recognised at all, even after its exFAT filesystem was replaced with NTFS (which system is meant to support). And shouldn't it at least *recognise* the device itself, even if it needs to reformat it?!
Tried 32GB one which seemed to work, but had problem with one recording stopping early, and since there's no on-screen recording indicator, it's not immediately obvious that it's stopped. (Doesn't even show a stop symbol when you stop, what abysmal design).
Now the system always appears to lock up when you come out of the "PVR" library section.
Didn't seem to recognise NTFS-formatted 32GB drive when inserted (though it should), so- again- didn't even have option to reformat it. When I reformatted it in FAT32 with Windows again, it wasn't recognised (even though PVR itself had previously formatted it with FAT32).
I'd previously had the media player working, and it seemed to support a good range of file formats, except that it left a message regarding clearing the menu in place at the bottom of the screen even when the menu was gone(!)
I can see why this thing was reduced. The Freeview HD picture quality is great, but since I do most of my viewing on an SD set, it's not worth keeping this annoying piece of tat just for that. (If I was using it all the time, I'd want something better anyway).
I wonder what random OEM hardware this thing is based upon? It seems to do that typical low-end Chinese-designed OEM thing of providing a *lot* of functionality for the price, but totally ruining it with a cheesy interface and shoddy software design and reliability.
I was willing to tolerate this given how cheap it was, but why bother? I think I'll take it back tomorrow.
(*) Some words were Romanian, but had question marks in the middle, like computers have when they can't handle the extended character set accents. There were some English-language words in there that clearly didn't relate to what the menu was for, so it's *not* just like someone had just previously bought and returned it after setting it up in Romanian.
Immediate problem upon plugging it in for the first time:-
Didn't go straight to language-select setup menu as manual promised. However, pressing menu button brought up a confusing mess of what appeared to be part-mangled Romanian with entirely wrong and misplaced menu item entries. (*)
Swithered about returning it there and then as life's too short to **** about with Tesco's rebranded OEM tat. Eventually found out how to do a factory reset in the manual, and it seemed to work fine with English-language setup.
Then... more problems:-
This thing provides PVR functionality if an external USB drive is inserted.
Worked fine with an ancient 512MB pen drive and my current 8GB one, but I want to keep that for normal use (it's slimline and fits in my wallet). So bought a 64GB one, which wasn't recognised at all, even after its exFAT filesystem was replaced with NTFS (which system is meant to support). And shouldn't it at least *recognise* the device itself, even if it needs to reformat it?!
Tried 32GB one which seemed to work, but had problem with one recording stopping early, and since there's no on-screen recording indicator, it's not immediately obvious that it's stopped. (Doesn't even show a stop symbol when you stop, what abysmal design).
Now the system always appears to lock up when you come out of the "PVR" library section.
Didn't seem to recognise NTFS-formatted 32GB drive when inserted (though it should), so- again- didn't even have option to reformat it. When I reformatted it in FAT32 with Windows again, it wasn't recognised (even though PVR itself had previously formatted it with FAT32).
I'd previously had the media player working, and it seemed to support a good range of file formats, except that it left a message regarding clearing the menu in place at the bottom of the screen even when the menu was gone(!)
I can see why this thing was reduced. The Freeview HD picture quality is great, but since I do most of my viewing on an SD set, it's not worth keeping this annoying piece of tat just for that. (If I was using it all the time, I'd want something better anyway).
I wonder what random OEM hardware this thing is based upon? It seems to do that typical low-end Chinese-designed OEM thing of providing a *lot* of functionality for the price, but totally ruining it with a cheesy interface and shoddy software design and reliability.
I was willing to tolerate this given how cheap it was, but why bother? I think I'll take it back tomorrow.

(*) Some words were Romanian, but had question marks in the middle, like computers have when they can't handle the extended character set accents. There were some English-language words in there that clearly didn't relate to what the menu was for, so it's *not* just like someone had just previously bought and returned it after setting it up in Romanian.
