I already have a Pace Twin with an 80Gb upgraded drive.

I am thinking of selling and getting a Topfield.

Should I go ahead or stick with the Pace?

What advantages would there be in defecting to Topfield? Assume cost is not a consideration. I'm a little fed-up with the rubbish EPG on the Twin.

Thanks

The BIG plus about the Toppy is that, if you don't like the EPG or some other feature of the 'vanilla' box, just install one of the 3rd-party TAPs (JAGs, MyStuff or EPGNavigator seem to be the favourite choices, I use MyStuff).

You need to be able to get a PC nearby to do it but, once you get the hang of installing them, they just put the Toppy in a different league to the rest.

Visit www.toppy.org.uk and have a browse around the forums.

K

Hi I used to have a Twin (My mother still has it actually) replaced with Toppy 17 months ago. Very few regrets although I would still maintain that in most respects the Twin has the best designed user interface of any PVR I have seen.
In fact I have now using MyStuff (see above) got it to behave and look fairly similar. I presume your complaint about the EPG is the slow population time; the Toppy certainly with the latest firmware has no similar problem.
Of course you get a grown up Hard Drive and dual recording and non of that freezing on black frames that I used to suffer from anyway.

Richard

I've had a Twin for several years and loved the ease-of-use (but hated the occasional crashes). Recently I wanted a new PVR and decided to go for a Toppy.
The best aspect has been the reliability which is great. However I must say that so far usability has been a real struggle.
Out of the box, it's much harder to use than the Twin and even after grappling with researching and fiddling about trialling the various TAPs that are available, it's still very unintuitive compared with it. I find that I have to keep the manual nearby all the time!
Plus so far I still haven't found a way to do simple things e.g. displaying channel Now/Next full info at-a-glance like the Twin, nor does it indicate that it is in delayed Live playback mode.

Hopefully the TAPs will continue to be improved and I'll get to grips with it one of these days, but be prepared to put in some time...
I'd prefer to pay a bit more and get an easy-to-use machine out of the box though.

Yes; with the vanilla Toppy you cannot scroll through N & N for different channels without changing channels. Agree this is a pain. This can be completely changed with a TAP however.
I have my Toppy doing N & N almost exactly as it was on the Twin except that if I want it can do a whole lot more.
e.g. Right - Left takes me through all channels without channel change (same as up - down on Pace IIRC). While Up - Down not just switches N & N progs but can scroll through a whole weeks EPG if I want.
Press OK on any channels N & N info switches to that Channel just like on the Pace.
N & N is infinitely configurable from simple menu but defaults are fine. Can change font size; No. of progs displayed etc.
This can all be done with MyStuff EPG. You will also need remote extender and eit2mei but they are just load and forget no configuration neccessary at all.
Other TAPs of course provide similar functions.


Richard

I have both. I don't tend to use the epg on the pace relying on the radio times. On the the topfield however I have installed the mystuff and use that all the time. I have nothing against the standard epg but mystuff is an improvement.
Since the last upgrade on the pace I think it is a very good M/C. I bought the topfield to satisfy the family demand for extra recording capacity. I think the topfield is the better M/C but it needs patience initially until you gain experience with it.
norfred

You can see if you''re in delayed playback fairly easily; first, when you pause, you'll see a counter top right, showing the time elapsed.

Second, press Play at any stage and you'll see the progress bar; yellow indicates the stuff in the buffer that you can rewind through, and the thin red line shows where you are, if you're behind live.

Nigel.

Personally,I think that the picture quality,and the user interface,on the Pace is superior to that on the Topfield.
Unless one wishes to get involved in TAPs,I find that the Humax 9200,with the latest updated firmware,is better than the Topfield.

But with the TAPS, particularly Mystuff, the Topfield is far superior to the Humax. I have both machines and the Humax only gets used as a backup on the rare occasions when there are more than two programs to record at the same time.

My Twin doesn't do this either

In terms of usability the Twin is still streets ahead of anything I've used, including the Toppy. The appeal to me is TAPs, and specifically MyStuff. For examply last night at work I noticed a program about PFI on C4 which looked interesting, but hadn't seen any trailers for it. Got home and checked if it was repeated, but quickly noticed my Toppy had already recorded it - I'd set up a CT in MyStuff for Dispatches on Channel 4.

So for me, the Twin is still king of the lounge, but I love my Toppy - no way the non-techies of the house would be able to use it. Having said that if I'd left it TAPless it would have been usable, but then the advantage over the Twin would have been far less.

But the key issue here is that having to press a normally disruptive action button to check status (i.e. press 'Play' to display the Live pause status) is unintuitive, because pressing Play at other times will change what's currently on screen.
The Twin has playback and record LEDs so you can constantly see which mode it's in. I've no idea if TAPs can modify the Toppy's LED front panel, but I'd suggest that it loses the superfluous leading zeros and 'P' e.g. P001 and uses a digit to indicate what it's doing e.g. P = live pause mode.

A related point is that the Toppy doesn't appear to protect you when it's in live pause mode. For example, if you change channel whilst in live pause mode, you just lose the contents of the live buffer. The Twin protects against this by saying "Exit Live Pause mode before changing channel".
This is why I have to keep a manual handy to double-check which button I need to press. (Plus I'm a 'technical' user!)

Finally when resuming live pause on the Toppy, there is a short gap in the audio, whereas the Twin's sound resumes immediately.

I don't want to harp on about comparing machines - and I am very pleased that the Toppy seems reliable, but I can't help admitting that I was pretty disappointed to discover these seemingly basic problems (plus others) soon after purchasing a recent PVR. Also it means that I can't yet confidently recommend the Toppy to any other Pace owners looking for a replacement.

If the Twin is seen by many as having the most usable interface (and I've seen this mentioned a few times), then hasn't anyone thought of implementing much of the Twin-like behaviour in TAPs?

I have a Twin and it is more stable than before but still the occasional lock up or failure to record. I'm currently extracting programmes by having to remove the hard drive which is getting a bit tedious, so I was thinking of moving to a Toppy which has the USB interface, but it sounds like it's not all good news.

I have heard the tranfsfer speed of the Toppy is quite slow - is that because it has a USB-1 interface?

I too do find the rec and playback leds on the front of the Pace Twin very useful at indicating what mode the Twin is in.

The most likely reason nobody has emulated the Twin's interface on the Toppy is because not many people have moved from Twin to Toppy. We rarely see questions asking about Twin like features, but there are very regular questions asking 'Can the Toppy do the same things as Sky+?'

There's a TAP that modifies the LED display. It doesn't indicate that timeshift is active, but does tell you what's recording. Of course with TAPs you can email the author with feature requests, which usually gets you a quicker result than Topfield themselves. I'd love to change the red standby LED into a recording indicator, but I expect that it's not programmable.

The USB speed is faster that 1.1, but slower than the maximum USB 2.0 speed, but then there can't be that many devices that can deliver data at 480MB/s. The limitation is due to the way the Toppy transfers data from hard disk to the USB port. It'll be interesting to see if any other manufacturers attempt to incorporate faster USB connections, the Humax 9200 is just as slow as the Toppy.

No the reason why transfer rates are a few Mbit/s over USB 1.1 is because the CPU isnt fast enough to manage transfers extremely fast. Similar story with the Humax as it also manages transfers via the CPU. The same CPU in fact but limited to USB 2.0 full speed

I've already done a thread (either here of toppy.org.uk - can't remember) on the LEDs. I think they're criminally underused. The fact that the Toppy has a red and green LED but uses one for standby and one for recognition of an IR is a shame.

For those who have never used a Twin I'll do a comparison:

Playback - PLAY on display, neither LED lit Vs Duration on display (ie 00:30) and green LED lit to indicate playback
Recording - RECO on display, neither LED lit Vs Usual display (clock if standby or channel number if viewing TV) and RED LED lit to indicate recording.
Live Pause - No difference compared with watching live Vs Both LEDs lit (since it's recording and playing simultaneously)

There's also no 'pseudo standby' , which makes things like it switching off whilst making a recording unintuitive and inconsistent

I'm not a Toppy hater - FAR from it, but it's amazing how much better the first twin tuner on the market does some things in comparison.

(And I've looked into the LED TAP, but there doesn't seem to be the facility to do most of what I'm trying to achieve).

I find that the picture quality from the Toppy is not as good when comparing with the Pace Twin.

In case anyone's interested, here's my list so far of Toppy differences to the Twin. IMO if these were solved it would significantly increase the ease-of-use. (I'm using the latest 5.12.88 firmware.)

I'll try to pursue them individually (time-permitting) on the www.toppy.org.uk forums (since they seem to have a wider audience) and report back here periodically.

I did try out the MyStuff TAP (and eit2mei). Although it seem sto be potentially very powerful, I found it very complicated and still couldn't get the basic Info display right will pursue that on the toppy forums also.

General operation
No View Subtitles toggle button - instead 6 remote button pushes are req'd!
Instant record button doesn't display any info on screen - just 'rECo' on LED panel. Channel number disappears.
Instant record should record current prog by default, rather than a 2 hours slot. Have to push rec button again and select when to end recording (rather unintuitive)
FFwd displays % progress indicator rather than elapsed time
FFwd only goes to up to 6X and then goes to normal playback on the next press. Pace goes to x64 and then cycles through to 2x. Ditto for Rew (except it only goes up to 3x)
Playback of recorded prog has blank audio at start
Play doesn't resume the last played back recorded programme

Info button
Info only shows Now program info, not Next. Also doesn't show current time clearly. Design needs improving to include Next title and ability to switch to show Next's details.
Pressing Info during recorded prog only shows played progress % for a few seconds. Prefer progress bar and time indicator instead. (This is actually shown when Play button is pressed, although only the elapsed time and not the total)
Signal strength/quality bar graphs aren't as readable or easy to compare as figures

EPG/Info
Confusing refs to "Service" instead of programme e.g. "Recorded Services"
EPG - 'OK' button - what does 'preselect' mean (vs Record)?
EPG layout needs improving
Delete File confirmation Y/N dialog doesn't actually say that it's deleting a file!
Recorded Services screen doesn't mention programme length in table (it's only shown in prog details)
Ditto doesn't indicate if prog has been watched
Free disk space is displayed in MB rather than hours/minutes
No auto pad for timers (TAP available)
No apparent way to skip fwd or back by 1 minute. (TAP available)
EPG shows truncated programme info.
Hit Stop whilst Recording and "Stop Recording" dialog isn't clear about which option is being highlighted (need to examine tick boxes)
Bottom half of EPG screen sometimes missing

Live pause
No indication on box of live pause playback activity. Pace has Rec and Playback LEDs. Have to press Play on Toppy to check status (counter-intuitive)
Live pause - changing channels loses live buffer. Pace has protection against this "Exit live pause mode before changing channel"
Live pause resume has blank audio initially

Display
Leading "P00" prefix on LED panel is superfluous.
Add status indicator characters: R for recording, L for live playback. P for recording playback.

Is it fairly easy to write a TAP? It might be something I'd like to try IF I decided to buy a Toppy.

Is there some sort of API dcoumantation that tells you how to access particular bits of the hardware (e.g.LEDs) and construct new screens etc?

I found the transition not too uncomfortable, but would agree that the Twin's UI is a thing of comparative beauty (as is it's casing, too). Finding EPGNavigator, which does a passable impression/pastiche of the Twin's EPG and timer list helped a great deal in getting used to the switch, as those were the two areas which I found most lacking on the native Toppy.

I suspect there may be more Twin-Toppy transferrers than you'd think, but we're so grateful for the lack of crashes and tenfold increase in recording time we don't say much about it!

John

Many thanks for all your replies so far.

Well i've sold the Pace so i'm definately taking the plunge - wish me good luck!

There is API documentation - you'll find it via www.toppy.org.uk/documents/

One note - the info box will show details of the next programme; press the right arrow, I think.

Nigel.