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can humax record via a scart input?


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Old 17-01-2006, 21:19
sablade
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my mum wants better tv and to record it for a good price,

she cannot recieve freeview so her best bet is probaby freesat sky with a phatomplus pvr dongle and a humax hdd recorder.

But, I understand a Humax cannot record sky via it's scart?

is that true and if so which low price hdd recorder can record via a scart input please?
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Old 17-01-2006, 21:38
Seymour Cat
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Originally Posted by sablade
my mum wants better tv and to record it for a good price,

she cannot recieve freeview so her best bet is probaby freesat sky with a phatomplus pvr dongle and a humax hdd recorder.

But, I understand a Humax cannot record sky via it's scart?

is that true and if so which low price hdd recorder can record via a scart input please?
Yes it's true. The Humax cannot record from an external source.
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Old 17-01-2006, 22:08
JAK99
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Originally Posted by sablade
my mum wants better tv and to record it for a good price,

she cannot recieve freeview so her best bet is probaby freesat sky with a phatomplus pvr dongle and a humax hdd recorder.

But, I understand a Humax cannot record sky via it's scart?

is that true and if so which low price hdd recorder can record via a scart input please?
If she can receive analogue terrestial TV there is every chance she could use the Humax. If she can't, then there is no point in getting one as it only records DTT (Freeview & TopUp)

As you suggest, a freesat receiver could be used to feed a HDD recorder but respectfully suggest that query would be better placed in the freesat forum where those using that system may be more informed to be able to help. I expect a browse in
http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/...play.php?f=142
may yield some ideas.

My experience of HDD/DVD recorders is that you get what you pay for!
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Old 18-01-2006, 09:48
gomezz
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Originally Posted by Seymour Cat
Yes it's true. The Humax cannot record from an external source.
None of the standalone Freeview hard disk recorders can. One option is one of the many combined hard-disk / DVD recorders. all of which can record from an external source such as cable, Sky etc.
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Old 18-01-2006, 10:21
marcdavis
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Is there anything stopping manufacturers building this facility into their twin freeview PVRs?

It seems you can buy a budget DVD recorder that will record from scart from around £70. If Humax were to build something into a box similar to the 9200t they could conceivably still sell an all singing and all dancing unit like this for the price of a £280 topfield? Well they probably wouldnt actually - even if they could sell it for £280 they know they could sell it for £350 and it would still sell well. Could they fit everything into one box without it looking like a PC tilted on its side though!
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Old 18-01-2006, 12:13
mbailey
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Originally Posted by marcdavis
Is there anything stopping manufacturers building this facility into their twin freeview PVRs?

It seems you can buy a budget DVD recorder that will record from scart from around £70. If Humax were to build something into a box similar to the 9200t they could conceivably still sell an all singing and all dancing unit like this for the price of a £280 topfield? Well they probably wouldnt actually - even if they could sell it for £280 they know they could sell it for £350 and it would still sell well. Could they fit everything into one box without it looking like a PC tilted on its side though!
It would be fine if they made a new box with SCART record functionality, but assuming they considering it for an option for the existing box I would say the component cost (and complexity for SW and HW) would increase significantly for a feature that very few people might use.

I agree with Marc - I would have much preferred the PVR9200 to include a DVD writer to backup any programs I wanted to save rather than having to goto the hassle of connecting the USB cable and transferring to a laptop and then eventually onto a DVD.
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Old 18-01-2006, 12:18
gomezz
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Originally Posted by mbailey
I agree with Marc - I would have much preferred the PVR9200 to include a DVD writer to backup any programs I wanted
But then you would not necessarily have best of breed in either. I use a separate DVDR to do this.
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Old 18-01-2006, 12:23
CJL
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Originally Posted by marcdavis
Is there anything stopping manufacturers building this facility into their twin freeview PVRs?
In theory no but the MPEG encoding silicon that's required and the licencing to go with it are quite a hurdle to doing it.

Also as we all know, what comes down the "pipe" from Freeview are MPEG2 transport streams - but what you write to DVDs are program streams and we all use various tools to convert from one to the other (projectx/imago for example). That functionality would need to be inside the box if the entire process were to be kept digital (and requires powerful CPU/MPEG chip processing). Otherwise I think the boxes would do what I think DVDRs with Freeview tuners do and take the signal to the analogue domain before re-encoding back to a different form of MPEG in the same way that a DVDR does for other SCART inputs. But this limits things to realtime copying.

So it's maybe not the simplest thing to "bolt together" as it may first appear

Cliff
(we looked last Spring at doing one for sale this past Christmas but canned the plans as it couldn't be done economically and there were quite a few technical headaches to overcome)
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Old 18-01-2006, 14:06
marcdavis
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I did notice there is a freeview PVR that can record from scart and has a DVD recorder as well as hard disk - from Sony and I thik one from Panasonic. No doubt they will have an analogue and a freeview tuner but not twin freeview tuners.
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Old 25-10-2016, 14:06
TheKLF99
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I just bought one of these boxes as we're having space issues on the Sky box. Thought we could copy stuff off the sky box onto it as it had two scart sockets. But now it seems one of the scart sockets is just for "show". Why on earth does it need to scart sockets if it's not input/output. I actually chose Humax as i'd heard good things about them.

It's all well and good with all these Freesat and Freeview boxes that allow you to copy stuff you've recorded to something else, but even though the sky box has a USB port Sky have never activated it and never provided any way to copy your programmes to the USB port which is a right pain in the backside as you either need to copy programmes onto DVD (if you can still find a dvd recorder lying around) or run out of space on the sky box. PVR manufacturers need to think that not everything can be recorded from a Freeview signal now - it's a shame it can't even record from analogue aerial as the sky box even has analogue out - guess the only solution is to get DVB modulator and create my own "freeview channel" (bit extreme I guess!)
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Old 25-10-2016, 14:51
grahamlthompson
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I just bought one of these boxes as we're having space issues on the Sky box. Thought we could copy stuff off the sky box onto it as it had two scart sockets. But now it seems one of the scart sockets is just for "show". Why on earth does it need to scart sockets if it's not input/output. I actually chose Humax as i'd heard good things about them.

It's all well and good with all these Freesat and Freeview boxes that allow you to copy stuff you've recorded to something else, but even though the sky box has a USB port Sky have never activated it and never provided any way to copy your programmes to the USB port which is a right pain in the backside as you either need to copy programmes onto DVD (if you can still find a dvd recorder lying around) or run out of space on the sky box. PVR manufacturers need to think that not everything can be recorded from a Freeview signal now - it's a shame it can't even record from analogue aerial as the sky box even has analogue out - guess the only solution is to get DVB modulator and create my own "freeview channel" (bit extreme I guess!)
In common with all true pvrs there is no way to record analogue inputs. The two scart sockets are provided to allow you to connect a device like a vcr/dvd recorder and record the output and only require the use of a single scart socket on the TV.

To record to a hard disk you need a stream of digital data (zeros and ones). Digital tuners provide this directly so there is no need to provide the required analogue to digital conversion and real time mpeg compression. If they did have to build in this the cost would be a lot more and not used by the great majority of owners. They work this way so that recordings are identical to the original broadcast (no recoding of the broadcast stream).

All aerials are analogue, the data modulated onto the analogue UHF carrier is digital and that's what the tuners output when demodulated.

The thread you are replying to dates from 2006 when analogue TV was still available in the UK. The TIVO recorder available at the time had analogue (PAL) tuners but also the required ADC and mpeg encoding. Now we have all digital services this would be now be totally redundant.
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