Well if you can copy a file from one folder to another in windows you should have no trouble using Altair to load TAPs.

Richard

TAPs over USB2 is just as easy (or difficult depending on your POV) as serial updates to any other IRD.


Martin Dawes occasionally does this sort of thing online. They had the 32" Humax LCDTV cum PVR thingy on sale some months back a lot cheaper than anybody else. If you think that's a good deal then by all means, but bear in mind that you're only going to buy one, so what's £50, and reflect that you won't find a Toppisti who has anything but great things to say about his Toppy on here and on the other place.

In my view it's a no-brainer (and I have had both).

IMO if you need 250Gb rather than 160GB on what is basically a time shifter you need to find a way to download or just press the delete button. Once you are 80 hours in arears with your TV watching you are never going to catch up unless you start watching a lot more TV than you have been; or else you would not have 80hrs to watch

Richard

Well I don't usually get involved in the Toppy versus Humax discussions... I am a Toppy owner and I am very pleased with my choice. Last night in QVC they were selling the Humax (for an inflated price of course) but it gavve me chance to check out the on-screen graphics, EPG etc as I'd never seen one working before. My God am I glad I got the Toppy, I don't like the look of the Humax at all. The only good thing I could see was the LED display on the front is capable of displaying more than the Toppy and also you can search the EPG by genre (which the Toppy needs a TAP to do), but other than that the Toppy wins every time in my humble opinion. Who designed the remote control for the Humax? Lego?

It was funny to watch them trying to sell the Humax on QVC because the so called expert clearly didn't have a clue! He came on and said well this is a twin tuner box etc... then he went on to demonstrate recording two channels and watching a third (on the same multiplex of course), at which point the other presenter said, how does it do that with only two tuners? His reply was something along the lines of.. err, dunno, it say's two tuners but perhaps it has three! Classic!

For what it's worth, go and get a Toppy, you won't regret it and the price difference to the Humax is so slight now. Don't be one of the sheep who buys the one that sells the most, be proud to be different, LOL!

I feel stupid asking, but can you explain this? How do you mean 'on the same multiplex'? I assumed if you had two tuners you could only watch a recorded program if you were recording two channels.

I've got a Thomson DHD4000 btw but I'm going to get a 250GB Toppy (I WILL use all the capacity (Richard46) and THEN delete stuff - record lot of films and watch them when I feel like it)

Each anlogue channel uses one UHF Radio channel frequency

With Digital TV you can fit Multiple channels into one UHF Radio Frequency, this is called multiplexing, so a UHF radio channel that carries digital TV contains multiple digital Tv channels, this is a multiplex, or Mux for short

Inside the toppy there are Two UHF Tuners, each one can tune into two UHF frequencys (Mux's)carrying digital TV
as each mux contains multiple channels, it is possible for the toppy to record two channels simultaneoulsy, and display a thrid as long as its on the same multiplex as one of the chanels being recorded.

If your recording BBC1 and BBC3 at the same time, you will only tie up one tuner as BBC1 and BBC3 are on the same Mux, one tuner can handle that, leaving the other tuner free for displaying a channel from another Mux.
due to hardware limitations you can only record two channels at once, although you can record two channels and watch a recording.

Thanks RT. I assume only some freeview PVRs take advantage of this - ie not my Thomson?

Just the Toppy and the Humax 9200T of the current clutch of PVRs.

Hi Chocky909, yes that is correct, if you look at http://www.emsee.co.uk/pvr/ it seems to suggest that only the Toppy and Humax are capable of performing this.

I know this has gone a bit off topic, but I looked at this last year when we first discovered our telly on at 3am !. We've lost the original remote for our B&O telly and ironically the only way to turn the TV on is to rely on the toppy to send a signal down the scart to wake the telly up.


This is another bug bear, not with my toppy, but with B&O. Our TV has been in constant standby since we switched it on. Apparently they removed the on/off switch when they were designing it for some reason or another.
We're planning a new telly soon so the issue should go away.

To bring it back on tread, only buy a toppy if you have the original remote for your B&O telly and you don't have a plug tucked away behind a cabinet that you can't get to easily!

HD looked good on a 60inch plasma in currys, but there isn't going to be much on it for a few years.

IPTV - I'm sure it'll be useful in my lifetime, but bandwidth just isn't there on normal telephone lines. I know someone at BT research labs where they're designing the next generation BT network, in a couple of years they'll be rolling out something that would compare to DivX - i.e. highly compressed video, not meant to go on a big screen.

Toppy - had mine the better part of a year, fan blumin tastic box, family all agree too, only problem is there isn't enough time to watch everything its recorded. You tend to get carried away with the search word recording features !

Thanks for this, this was the sort of advice I was looking for!!