Many thanks for that Nigel.

Can anyone explian how you archive a programme from a Toppy. I downloaded the manual but I cant seem to find the information. Via USB? That means moving the Toppy to my desktop! or buy a DVD recorder and then play the material again... not too slick! A guess a laptop is the best idea but mine has gone to my daughter but that a silly fix it again!

Is there is a ONE box solution, twin tuner, HD and DVD play/record.

You are correct either copy it to PC, convert it and burn it onto a DVD or play it back into a DVD Recorder.

There are ways to connect a PC to a Toppy wirelessly although I haven't tried it and so can't comment on how esay it is to do, how well it works and how easy it is to transfer recordings.

I haven't managed wireless yet either... so far I've just thought about it, read about it, got confused, and forgot about it... but you can string multiple 5m lengths of USB together - I am using a total of 12m to connect PC to Toppy as I do not have a notebook either.

wow , I guess I would need 20 mtrs but that may be an easy solution. Just choose a time when the family are in bed and the dog is asleep! I can imagine a disaster if the plug jumped during an upgrade. It would be nice if a USB memory drive would work for the upgrades, they cant be too big. Thanks J

That might not be such an easy solution... I think the current record for a long USB connection to a Toppy is just over 18 metres, although with the speed dropping below the realms of USB2.0. People have been successful at faster speeds just below this length though (see other posts in the same thread).

Does the Toppy record the incoming signal in a 'native' format or use one of the common MPEG compression methods? Again with radio can you record and archive the content to MP3 or WMA files that can be copied over.

All the PVRs just write the MPEG to disk exactly as it's delivered by the DTG broadcaster (MPEG2 filtered transport stream format). No PVR (apart from Tivo) includes an MPEG encoder so there's no possibility of re-encoding.

(actually that's a white lie the 4TV boxes have a software MPEG re-encoder but it doesn't operate in realtime - it takes several hours to post-transcode an original one hour recording).

The radio also arrives as MPEG2 transport stream but once you copy it to a PC there are tools that can extract the audio PIDs from such a stream and re-encode to a "standard" audio format like MP3 or WMA

Cliff

I suppose that's not strictly true... The Toppy actually uses what amounts to a proprietary format in that it prepends a header to the dumped MPEG - hence we have ".rec" files that will only play directly on third party viewers that are either willing to ignore the header or just don't care about it.

OK, I'll grant you that but my point was that the main bulk of the MPEG stream is just recorded "as is"

Cliff

I just looked on a forum stream for the Toppy http://www.toppy.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=155

It looks like a performance to archive to PC.
Maybe I'll buy a digi tuner for my PC, and use that when I want to archive stuff. Use the Toppy for general viewing.

The discussion looks very 'nerdy' in the end it is only telly.
How easy is the toppy to use for non savvy and computer resistant family members. ( Trying to be PC!)

J

Archiving PVR streams to DVD is actually pretty easy once you have installed the right tools - give it a go, you might like it!

Cliff

Just doing the Toppy research and noticed that someone is selling thiers, moving to Sky!!. I wonder why, I did my sums for the year and even with discounts, it did not meet my best price!

http://www.toppy.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2864

Not as easy as it should be because the manual is not much help - it's wording is very technical and assumes you understand it. I think some of it is just bad translation. And then you have the standard software which isn't as friendly as it could be. But install a few TAPs, especially those from the UK TAP project (UK Timers and UK Archive) and you have a much more family friendly machine.