Thanks for the tip. I was aware of the buttons you suggested. Unfortunately I worded my post badly. What I was alluding to was that on the Vestels there are prompts at the bottom of the screen for the buttons required but on the Humax it is necessary to see the Time Bar to get this information. No problem once the buttons have been learnt and remembered. One option only available in the Time Bar I believe is the "Now" option for which the Vestels have a dedicated button.

Colin

It doesn't actually reserve any space. Fairly simplistcally, it records until the HDD is full, then stops. Uncompleted recordings are flagged in the library with an icon, green circle/white "-". Subsequent unstarted recordings are flagged in the library with a red circle/ white "X".
Of course you can find the disc fill during dual-recording, resulting in two incomlete items.
If you are viewing the PVR output shortly before the HDD fills, a message will appear onscreen, and you will have time to take action, including halting one or both recordings in progress, or deleting other items to make space.

OK! managed to get my grubby mits on a 9300 this afternoon!

First Impressions.....solid looking quality machine, excellent clear display, easy to install and set up, the upscaled picture (when set to 720dpi) does improve picture quality on live TV compared to standard Freeview on my Sony Bravia. Series Link is a big plus.

Found the menu's relitively easy to navigate but this leads me to a couple of negatives......the first being the need to open the flap on the remote control to access the recordings library and when accessed, the library then lists recordings in date order as opposed to alpha numeric as on the Vestel, you can change it but it always defaults to date order.

Now the BIG problem - the NOISE ! the fan noise is sooooo obtrusive, which if you were buying the machine to upscale via HDMI and would need the machine to be on all the time, it would drive me nuts! I could just about live with it when playing back recordings. This I think is going to be a big minus, as most potetnial buyers would be buying it for the HDMI connectivity.

Will experiment with it in different positions on my rack over the next couple of days (any suggestions?), if I cannot lower the din, It'll be going back! For this one reason only I am very dissapointed, my Hitachi is almost silent.

Dead easy to go back to NOW from anywhere in the EPG. Press the Guide button to clear the guide, press the Guide button again to bring up the guide which will now be on NOW. The down side of this, I hear you say, is that the guide will be on the channel that the Hummy is currently showing and not the EPG channel you were last viewing.

Thanks for the info. I guess the "reserved" space indicated in the HDD Control screen is for the live buffer rather than scheduled programmes then?

I've (unfortunately ) seen examples of the icons in the Play List but mine have black rather than white crosses and dashes in the red and green circles?

I think I prefer the Vestel way of doing things by allocating space for all scheduled recordings including all the events for the full 8 days of any Series Record schedules. This probably exaggerates the space needed and doesn't allow for maximum use of the HD space where the user knows that some recordings are to be deleted before the full complement of scheduled recordings are in fact recorded. So I can understand why other users would prefer the Humax way. It would be nice if the Humax had facilities to delete existing recordings in the event of the HD becoming full as the Vestels have. The Vestels have some clever options for implementing this.

Colin

That's correct but I always use Menu 1 5 ... because I may have been somewhere else in the menu structure previously. 1 5 always works a reflex OK OK may not

Why Humax are now making noisy machines is really stupid ... as my 9200T (jan06 vintage) is silent and its fan runs continuously... I have to check whether its still working was last time I checked ...

Perhaps they have had too many returns that where diagnosed as over heating.... due to people stacking them on other AV equipment.

There are some threads on this forum (when the noisy 9200T came into existence) about adding resistors to the fan which reduces their speed and makes much much quieter.

Someone has said the 8GB reserved is for the (upto two) timeslip buffers. The HDD is partitioned, one 5GB is for MP3/JPG storage. Also that 160GB is substantially less when binary/decimal conversion and formatting overheads are considered.
You've instilled doubt now
I think it was yellow/green/white(-) and yellow/red/black(X).
Again it needs a crystal ball to predict the data-rates the selected programmes will be broadcast in. Although the UK typical might be between 1GB and 2GB per hour, in another territory there may be fewer or more channels per mux and a single channel's bandwidth allocation could be far different. Also with Stat Muxing, a particular programme's size may vary substantially depending on what other channel bandwidth requirements are at broadcast time.
That has been requested by some users. Of course if it were included and optional, everyone would be satisfied. Personally I consider it quite a complicated thing to implement. One thing I had considered which would be equally useful in my case, is that Humax Media Controller could be adjusted to include "delete from source upon successful transfer".

Norman.

Thanks for the additional info Norman.

Regarding the colours of the icons I noticed today (oops !!now yesterday ) the colour of the icon components are different in the Recorded Programmes List from those in the Play List. I don't remember the details and it's too late to look now but I'll take note later today.

Colin

Sorry for bumping such an old thread, but was the aspect ratio stretching issue on HDMI ever fixed, either by changing the settings (someone mentioned its fixed if you put it down to 576i), or through an OTA update?