Thoughts on Humax HDR Fox T2 After Couple of Months

[kinda]

Hello, just thought I'd offer some further feedback on this after a cople of months of ownership.

Still finding the picture and sound great. Had no issues with any recordings or scheduling. However, one bad point is that whenever there is a retune all the scheduled recordings are lost. Not a nightmare, but inconvenient and doesn't happen on my (non HD) Sagem.

Another minor niggle, when in standby it's hard to tell if the box is recording or not. The ring around the power button isn't obviously red like it is wehn it's on and recording, and I have to go close to it to see on the LCD if the little 'REC' sign is on. Again, not a nightmare, but could be better.

Finally streaming from a DLNA NAS has been fine, except with 24P AVIs. The Humax is sending 50 FPS to the TV, and I'm not sure what it does but it sometimes seems to result in some juddery playback. My Samsung BluRay player gets the rate of the files right and sends 24 FPS to the TV.

Overall I'm very happy with it and glad I bought it, but thought I'd feedback on the above and hope it's useful. It's not information I'd seen prior to buying the box. All thre above are with a very recent firmware but not sure of the number.

 

[kinda]

Just to add, overall the good PVR functionality, and other features like accessing recordings from other devices, transferring files on and off via FTP or USB, remote scheduling functionality, HD recording decryption, and the media streaming, mean I still think this is possibly still the best freeview+ HD PVR out there.

However the recent Panasonic, (not sure of model), seems to also offer a lot of the similar features and should have good AV performance, plus is at a siilar price, so could maybe be a better option, and definitely worth checking out. The new Pure PVR also looks good, but is a bit more pricey.

 

[chebby]

I still count it as my best A/V purchase since the M-CR603.

The EPG is clear and easy. 'Picture in picture' and the fact that the EPG does not cut the sound is excellent. (I wish the TV itself would do this.)

I actually prefer the picture quality from TV broadcasts (SD and HD) to come via the T2's onboard tuner than from the one built into the television itself. (And the Panasonic's own tuner is pretty good to start with.)

Being able to pause TV and set up recordings, skip ads, record two other things and watch a third, start watching a programme from the beginning long after it started etc. etc. is all great. (Ok those are common to all PVRs I guess.)

Watching iPlayer on the Humax (via 'TV Portal') is slick and fast. Much faster than doing so on my Sony BDP-S390 which is painfully slow on iPlayer menus (with both connected to ethernet for fair comparison).

I could go on getting more and more boring about it. I just love this thing!