Humax PVR-9200T (‘Duovisio’) personal video recorder – 05/01/06

I’d been waiting for so long for this new twin-tuner model to appear that I had almost given up hope. But the review model arrived just before Christmas, and as a result its hard disk has been enriched by a diet of Christmas fare with – so far – no signs of indigestion.

The PVR actually took rather longer than expected to set up. The reason was, in fact, that it was a review model – i.e. it had someone else’s settings already in it – but the problems this caused reveal something of a design oversight, in my view.

What happened was that as soon as I had connected and powered up the box, I got an onscreen error message saying ‘no or bad signal’. Now, although I am generally a Sky+ viewer, I have only recently reviewed another Freeview PVR (the Topfield one), and I was reasonably certain that my rooftop aerial, co-ax cable and associated connectors had not suddenly failed in the interim. Surely, the fault was down to the previous reviewer having tuned in the Freeview channels from a different transmitter using different frequencies?

Happily, the PVR’s menu has an area where you can check the signal status. Sure enough, looking at the readout for BBC One showed it was getting an extremely marginal signal from the Crystal Palace transmitter, some 50 miles away (I live in Winchester). In some ways, this is a tribute to the PVR’s tuner, since by rights Crystal Palace shouldn’t have been registering at all – my aerial’s pointed at the much more local Hannington transmitter, on Cottingdon Hill in Hampshire.

So I got the box to rescan in the channels, thinking this would fix the problem. It didn’t. By this time I was worried enough to go outside to check that the aerial was still there on my roof (it was), and to check the co-ax connectors (they seemed OK). Perhaps if I put the box back to its factory settings, and carried out another rescan, that would cure the problem. Luckily, it did – or I wouldn’t be writing this review! Rechecking the status indicator now showed a good strong signal from Hannington.

But this reveals a real design flaw, for when you ask a box to rescan in the channels, surely it should do that from scratch – and not on the basis of the set of frequencies that happened to be there in the previous installation. This is not a trivial problem if you’re moving house or, indeed, if your transmitter location and/or frequencies change (as they are increasingly likely to do as the rolling digital switchover process gathers pace from 2008 onwards). A rescan should mean just that – you wipe everything and start again.

From then on, it was reasonably plain sailing. The Humax remote control is solid, chunky, and intuitively laid out, and it didn’t require a reference to the manual for me to guess that pressing the button labelled ‘Guide’, scrolling across and down to the programme I wanted to record, and then pressing ‘OK’ would result in said programme being recorded on to the hard drive. One-button recording is what consumers now expect, and the Humax box offers this very elegantly.

Other positives: the eight-day Freeview EPG seemed to be available almost immediately, which was something of a surprise, through a clever ‘time-line’ at the bottom of the screen. Modelled on VCR-type controls, this allows you to jump forward (and back) in time. I am presuming returning the box to its factory default settings wiped any EPG information that might have already been locally stored: if so, the technology has come on in leaps and bounds.

The PVR also lives up to the Humax tradition of being good at tuning in Freeview signals under iffy reception conditions. In some Freeview boxes I’ve tested in the past, the fact that I live in a dip has caused me to lose some of the Freeview channels transmitted from Hannington. On this box, though, I have them all.

There are also some nice features (or gimmicks, if you prefer): picture-in-picture, which allows you to watch what’s on another channel in a little window; instant replay, for those critical goal-scoring moments, and a facility to skip commercials in 30-second jumps. You can also fast-forward at 64 times normal playback speed, incidentally, which is another way of skinning that particular cat (Can advertisers really go on pretending that viewers have good ad recall under such conditions?).

To continue the ‘gimmick’ theme, you can also record MP3 music files and digital photos from a PC or laptop onto the PVR’s hard drive through its USB port. Having come a cropper with this type of operation before (it seemed to require a Masters in Computer Science), I approached this part of the review process with some trepidation. I can report, however, that the CD-ROM supplied allows the software and drivers to be installed very easily on a laptop, and that I whizzed across some music and picture files without much ado to the PVR, where it proved a relatively simple matter to play them back.

Be warned, though, that while the music files play back beautifully, the same cannot really be said of the photo quality. High-resolution ones take some time to load, and their dimensions are distorted on playback. But the MP3 facility, coupled with the RCA and optical audio connectors on the back of the box, suggest that the PVR-9200T could be a useful adjunct to your hi-fi – if it happens to be in the same room as your TV set.

My one significant complaint relates to what you have to do to actually retrieve a recorded programme and watch it, which is scarcely a user-friendly process, in my view. What you have to do is go to the menu by pressing the relevant key on the remote and then choose the ‘Record’ option (itself illogical because what you’re wanting to do is play back rather than record, a function which in any case is carried out without reference to the Menu at all). You then select the ‘Recorded Programme’ option and up comes a list, as you might expect, of the various programmes stored on the hard drive.

The intuitive action here (after this series of non-intuitive actions) would be to press the OK key when you’d scrolled down to the recorded programme you wanted to watch, in the full expectation that the programme would then start playing back. In fact, what you have to do is press the ‘Play’ key on the remote’s VCR-type controls. Now, although I accept that this is not in itself anti-intuitive, what happens when you do that is that the programme only starts playing in a tiny little window above the list of recorded programmes. What you actually have to do then is press the ‘Exit’ key to back out of that and watch the programme full-screen.

In fact, it took me some time to figure this out, because the manual is actually misleading on this point. All it says you have to do is press the ‘Play’ button – which as it stands is untrue. I wonder how many calls the Humax help desk has received on this point.

The model to be followed here is surely Sky’s. You access the list of recorded programmes from the EPG, you scroll down to the one you want, and you simply press OK to view it. The PVR-9200T requires twice the number of key presses. Why re-invent the wheel?

Verdict:

The PVR-9200T scores very highly on capacity (160GBytes), reception ability, functionality, and one-touch recording through an 8-day EPG. Make no mistakes, this is a PVR with lots of bells and whistles, and is pretty state-of-the-art for the twin-tuner Freeview class. It contains a common interface slot, so is upgradeable to Top Up TV, and has the right connectors to load music onto the hard drive and play it back at high-quality through a hi-fi. While I have reservations about the user-friendliness of the programme archive and playback from it, these are issues which are easily overcome in practice and should constitute no more than a minor irritant at worst. As for the channel rescanning problem encountered above, this is probably easily rectifiable through an over-the-air software upgrade in due course. At around £220, it represents excellent value for money, in my view.

Specifications:

Overview

• up to 100 hours’ recording (160GByte hard drive)
• pause and play live TV (time shift recording)
• fast forward/rewind in various speeds plus slow motion
• instant replay and skip while viewing
• one touch record scheduling in EPG information
• digital radio recording/variable instant recording

Digital terrestrial set-top box

• MPEG-2 digital & fully DVB-T compliant.
• common interface for pay-TV (MHEG-6 support)
• digital Teletext (MHEG-5 support) *UK only
• RF modulator/twin Scarts (Scart cable included)
• Dolby Digital 5.1 optical output
• two-year manufacturer guarantee
• up to 200 channels’ storage
• 5 favourite groups
• Subtitling feature supports EBU & DVB subtitles
• Teletext support by VBI insertion
• automatic software update
• various games

‘Plug & Play’

• simple installation, just plug and play
• no need for additional tuner loop-through. Humax special tuner has just one signal input.

Twin tuner

• Record two channels whilst watching live TV or play-back*
• Picture-in-picture (PIP) allows to two channels to be viewed on single screen

* viewing a third channel is limited to the multiplexes from which you are currently recording.

Pictures

Front view (click her for high-resolution image)

Front view with USB port and Common Interface Flap open (click here for hi-resolution image)

Rear view showing connectors (click here for high-resolution image)