Hi,

I'm thinking of buying a PVR, but have heard reports that he TF5800 gets very hot?

What courses this and how can it be prevented?

Is this during recording and play back of programmes or watching live freeview?

When watching live freeview only one tuner is used and no hard disk is not used- so surely this would not cause any problems?

Also, for future expansion, I will buy a screen with HDMI interface, so can the output from TF5800 be upscaled by some device to connect to a HDMI screen? This I know will take some years when they start broadcasting in HD.

Regards
Alien1x

Well I'm not sure about the answer to the HDMI question but I can answer about the TF5800 getting hot.... I've had mine quite a while now and it doesn't every get too hot really, just slightly warm. I think you'll be ok if you have good ventilation.

By defaul the disk on the Topfield does spin all the time becuase 'Timeshifting' is turned on to enable the rewind live TV function. But you can turn this off (as I do) then while simply watching live TV the box is completely silent and perfectly cool.

the toppy, just sneds a standard def picture ( no upscaling) to a TV via SCART/Svideo/phono, and YUV ( via scart)

If you buy an AVR with upscaling from RGB, like the Philips DFR9000:

http://www.videohifi.com/17_9000eng.htm

which has scart connectors at the rear, then the picture will be upscaled via the hdmi connector (onboard) to the HDMI port on your TV.

Alternatively, you could archive the .rec files via usb to a PC, Quickstream Fix them and output as .mpg files with VideoReDo and play them on something like this:

www.z500series.com

which also upscales to HD and outputs via HDMI; or you could connect the z500 to an HDMI input on the DFR9000 (it has two) and control that and your Toppy via the AVR remote.

The Toppy doesn't get hot by the way.

I also saw a report about it getting hot. Mine just gets slightly warm.

If your worried about space, ive only got 25mm (1 inch) of clear space between my toppy and the TV, and so far, after 12 momnths no problems with overheating.

So any AV amp with HDMI upscaling will do?

I ask as there are no freeview box's on the market that are future proofed for HD pictures.

Regards
Alien1x

Of course there aren't. The Freeview boxes that are on sale right now are based on commercially available SOC (Solution On Chip) modules tha come with two tuners on a mainboard. None are available with HD Terrestrial tuners and HD transmissions by UK terrstrial broacasters are years away yet. We've got to get analogiue switch off out of the way first and that will be a political hot potato.

The other problem you'll have is that to my knowledge there are only two hdmi equipped upscaling AVRs with scart connectors. The Philips (and that isn't on sale in the UK) and a JVC RXD-7000s that's very difficult to get hold of and expensive in the UK.

All the rest have upscaling from Composite, S-Video and YUV, signals that are all incompatible with the RGB that is output by UK Freeview recorders.

The Toppy however can be set to output YUV over scart in which case you can buy a scart to YUV cable and hook the Toppy to the YUV input on an AVR