Inview ties up with Acetrax

While many of the video streaming services such as LoveFilm and Netflix are only to be found on the higher end TV sets from companies like LG, Panasonic and Samsung, Swiss firm Acetrax is looking to extend its reach still further.

The company – which offers content on a pay as you go basis, with material to rent or buy – has teamed up with Inview to roll out the service across set top boxes that support their new connected TV platform.

Acetrax, running on Inview's new connected TV platform

Inview is perhaps best known to some people in the UK as the providers of the EPG data that drives the Radio Times Extra (formerly Teletext Extra) and TopUpTV services, but they also have a connected TV platform rolling out, which is available royalty free to ‘tier 2’ equipment manufacturers who don’t want to have to create their own. Inview then makes its revenue as a share of that generated by content providers such as Acetrax.

Acetrax is going to be on that new platform, along with Grooveshark and some other services, around the middle of this year. A spokesperson for Inview wouldn’t reveal the names of the brands involved, but I understand that it’s likely to appear in FreeviewHD set top boxes and connected TVs from the house brands of major UK retailers, and similar brands around Europe. There will probably also be some SD kit that includes it too, though given the closing gap between the prices of SD and HD kit, I suspect all but those on the tightest budget will be looking at HD, especially with the Olympics coming up this summer.

The new platform apparently integrates apps and a recommendation engine with Inview’s 14 day programme guide, rather than splitting content services off into a separate part of the interface, as is common with most of the ‘smart TVs’ I’ve looked at recently. It’s only slated to appear on new equipment; most of the kit that has the existing Inview software isn’t equipped for IPTV anyway.

Inview's TV guide

Aiming at second tier manufacturers, Inview's platform will try to integrate IP services with the EPG

More 3D on BBC HD – Streetdance

If you thought that the final of Strictly Come Dancing in 3D was all you were going to get from the BBC over the holidays, you might have missed an unexpected treat on New Year’s Day, in the form of Streetdance 3D, on the BBC HD channel.

I watched this mostly because it features dance dreamboat Richard Winsor, whom I’ve seen several times at Sadler’s Wells, but also because I was a little curious about it being broadcast in 3D. It was only a few days ago I posted here that it would be inconceivable that 3D broadcasts wouldn’t, for the time being at least, be accompanied by a 2D simulcast for those without a 3D set. Yet the film was scheduled only on the BBC HD channel, so what was happening?

The clue, it turned out, was in the red button. Switching to the channel while the film was on showed the familiar double image of a side-by-side HD broadcast, where the picture is split down the middle, with an image for each eye on one side of the screen.

Repeated on each side was a red button icon labelled ‘Watch in 2D’, and pressing that switched to the 2D version. So far, nothing unusual there. And my first thought was that it was a simulcast, perhaps using one of the interactive streams that wasn’t needed for anything else.

Except that the 2D version looked better quality than standard definition, and I don’t think there’d be the capacity, even on a day when there’s no sports, to manage that. Another give-away was that there wasn’t any break in either picture or sound when switching between the two. Normally, if the box has to tune to another stream, there’ll be at least a momentary break in both.

Technical tricks

So, how was it done? My guess – I’m waiting for the BBC to confirm, but I’m 99% certain – is that it was all done with MHEG, the interactive ‘red button’ service. This was evident when the application was still available during the following programme.

Pressing Red simply turned on or off one of the useful features that MHEG provides, which is video scaling. Taking advantage of the side-by-side format, the application simply took the left side of the screen, and zoomed it to fill the whole screen; obviously there’s a small loss of horizontal resolution in doing that, compared to broadcasting a full screen HD picture, but it still looked better than SD, and meant there was no glitch on switching formats.

How do I know it was the left hand side? ‘A little Later’ was on after the film, and the application was still live for at least a part of that, with the icon appearing twice on screen. Pressing Red during that zoomed the left side of the screen, losing the right.

So, I’d say that on the evidence so far, it looks like it’s perfectly possible to provide a 2D/3D simulcast without using any extra bandwidth. The downsides are that resolution isn’t quite as high as for HD, and 2D viewers have to take a positive action to see the ‘normal’ version, unlike the Strictly simulcast, where they just tuned to a 2D version.

You probably wouldn’t want to use this for a BBC One programme, because it would end up on the standard def channel version of the channel (unless that can be fed separately from the HD version), and a lot of older set top boxes don’t have an up to date MHEG engine which can handle the video scaling, so wouldn’t be able to switch to 2D; all HD boxes should have the necessary software, as long as they are FreeviewHD certified.

Incompatible equipment

That means, incidentally, that users of the 3View box probably wouldn’t have been able to select 2D, as it doesn’t have MHEG built in, and the same would be true of people watching with a generic satellite receiver, rather than a Sky or Freesat branded one.

So, this is also potentially interesting from that point of view; whatever equipment you have, even a generic satellite or HD terrestrial tuner, you would have been able to watch in 3D. But only equipment compliant with one of the UK’s platforms – FreeviewHD, Freesat or Sky – would have given 2D viewers the opportunity to select that version of the broadcast.

This sort of thing is not going to happen very often, but nevertheless it raises interesting questions about exactly what equipment should be supported by the BBC, and might well be seen by some as pushing people towards platform-compliant equipment.

Choosing a FreeviewHD recorder

I’ve just finished reviewing the TVonics DTR-Z500HD Freeview HD recorder for Register Hardware; it should be published in the next week or so. I can’t tell you exactly what I thought before then (after all, they pay me for my opinion), but I thought it’s worth raising some questions that people will have to think about when they head out to buy something like this, because there isn’t really a single product that ticks absolutely all the boxes.

I’ve looked at four ‘pure’ FreeviewHD recorders, by which I mean units that record only to a hard drive, and also a Panasonic one that can burn DVDs. There are some interesting new models coming along, which I hope to look at including the new Sony, which is the first model to be certified with all the necessary software for the BBC iPlayer via Freeview.

So, it’s worth taking a look at what you’ll find from the various products that are out there, and the key ways in which they differ. I’m not necessarily intending to direct people towards a specific product, but rather to explain the things you might need to consider when you buy, so you can choose the best product for your needs.

It’s worth stressing at this point that many manufacturers will tell you that something “is planned for a future firmware update.” It can be tempting to make your decision based on such statements, but do try to check them first, and make sure they really have come from a reliable source, and not just wishful thinking on a forum somewhere. The best advice, really, is always to buy a product for what it does now, rather than what you hope it might do at some later date, if there’s an update to it.

Under consideration

I’m going to refer to five products here, to give you an idea of the sort of breadth of functionality you might come across; four are ones I’ve tested myself – the Humax HDR-Fox T2, Icecrypt T2400, TVonics DTR-Z500HD, and DigitalStream DHR8205. The final one is the new Sony SVR-HDT500. I’m purposefully leaving aside the Panasonic disc burning kit – it’s not really in quite the same class as these others.

All of these products have differing degrees of functionality, but you can pick them all up for between £200 and £300, give or take a bit. The DigitalStream and TVonics are at the cheaper end of the range, the Sony is more or less in the middle, and the Humax and Icecrypt come in at the top of the range (that’s assuming a 500GB disk; some are available with different sizes; if you want to know how that relates to recording time, read this article).

Key differences

All the recorders have their own little quirks and differences, which I’m not going to enumerate here; you’d do best to read the reviews for more insight on that. But there are also big functional differences that might make quite a difference to what you want to buy, so that’s what I’ll look at here.

BBC iPlayer is one of those; only two of the products have it available – the Humax and the Sony. In the case of the Sony (and it will roll out to future kit, as I mentioned here) it’s provided by supporting the iPlayer on the red button services, so you press Red while watching any BBC TV channel and select it from the menu. On the Humax, it’s via their own TV portal, which also provides access to Sky Player – and it’s the only kit so far that will let you access Sky content that way. Some of the others may get iPlayer via red button later – but remember what I said about updates.

Dolby Transcoding (a favourite topic on this site) isn’t universally supported; of the products I’m talking about but the IceCrypt have it at the moment, though on the Sony it’s apparently not available via HDMI. Is this important to you? Only you can tell, though to keep things in perspective, so far it’s just a few HD programmes that broadcast with surround. All newer kit should have it, but I’d still advise checking exactly how much support there is.

Some people just want a recorder that lets them watch and record TV. Others want it to be able to view other things, like movies they’ve downloaded, or photos. The Humax can play media over your home network; the others don’t – but the IceCrypt lets you copy files to it via the network, and then view them. The others will let you view photos from a USB drive, and sometimes play MP3 files, but that’s as far as it goes.

How much TV do you watch? That might sound a silly question, but it can be important. Most of the kit I’ve mentioned is clever enough to let you watch a third channel while you’re recording two others, a trick made possible by the way digital TV works. But the TVonics doesn’t. Some people won’t be bothered, but others will find that pretty limiting.

Subtle shades

Those are the main differences you’ll find, really – is surround sound supported, is iPlayer available, can you view files stored on your home network. But of course there will be more subtle things too, like the interface, and how you can organise recordings (the TVonics, for example, just has one list, and no folders), or whether you can browse the programme guide by genre, or even search by name.

Some of those things might sound like things you’d never do, but it’s worth thinking about them, because they can be the little things that will make using a PVR a completely different way of watching TV, as I tried to explain here. Only you know which will really be important to you, but I hope I’ve pointed out some of the key areas where products may differ from one another, even though they seem superficially similar.

EU court decision could cut price of PVRs

For those who didn’t spot it, last week the excellent Broadband TV News site carried a report about a ruling from the European Court of Justice which may have implications for the pricing of PVRs – the hard disk recorders that many people are using for satellite and terrestrial services like Freeview, Freesat and Sky.

Until now, these have been classified as recording apparatus, and so attract a rate of duty of 13.9% when they’re imported into the EU, which of course makes them a little more expensive in the shops.

The ECJ has ruled that they should be reclassified as set top boxes with a communications function, which exempts them from duties (and that, ‘communications function’ element is why, for example, the iCan EasyHD Freeview HD set top box has a modem port on the back; it’s cheap to add, and reduces the import costs).

How prices work

Of course, the fact that the duty may not have to be paid won’t necessarily reduce prices – it could just be absorbed into the profit margin by distributors or retailers, and eventually eaten away by inflation over time, so don’t get too hopeful about a price drop yet.

It’s also worth looking at how things like this affect the pricing. Let’s suppose that a product costs a nice neat £100 to manufacture and ship to the UK.

Import duties of 13.9% take the cost at the point of import to £113.90. If we assume that the distributor of the product takes just 5% margin – out of which they’ll be promoting the product to retailers, perhaps advertising it, and handling repairs, warranty and so forth – the price that they can offer to retailers is £119.60.

According to people I’ve spoken with, some of the large retailers may demand a margin of 30%; sometimes they’ll work backwards from a retail price-point that they have in mind and say “We want to sell this at £179.95” so you have to sell it to us at a price that gives us 30% margin. But for this simple comparison, let’s assume that they just add 30% margin on, taking the final price to £155.47, but that’s before VAT is added, so the final price to the customer is £186.57, for a product that cost £100 at the point of import.

How much difference does the duty change make? If we assume everything else is the same, then the price after VAT is £163.80, or over £20 on £100 of imported product, so not to be sniffed at. And, of course, most PVRs are starting at around the £200 mark, or even higher, so potentially, there could be even larger savings.

Imbalance of power

Incidentally, going back to the point I made about large retailers having a price point in mind, if they did impose that price, then what happens is that the distributor – especially for smaller brands, who won’t have the same power as the large retailers, who can simply decide to drop the product – will be forced to cut their margin. With the figures I’ve given for the example with duty and a retail price of £179.95, that means they’d have to offer large retailers the product for £115.35, equivalent to a margin of 1%.

And after this duty change – which of course most punters won’t hear about – they could continue to sell at that hypothetical price, and if they paid the distributor his full 5% margin, the retailer would have a margin of 42.8%. Or, they could drop the price to £159.95, maintain their margin and the squeeze on the importer, and boast about having cut prices by £20.

This, of course, happens all over the retail world, not just in electronics – just ask a farmer!

The magic number: 6.2.1

Those who’ve followed the saga of Freeview HD since its launch, and the discovery by many early adopters that they couldn’t actually get surround sound using their existing equipment, may recall that I mentioned all that was going to change.

Well, in theory, that day is here. The latest version of the ‘D Book’ which contains the technical specifications for Freeview HD kit in the UK is now being used for testing. It’s version 6.2.1 and it apparently clarifies further two of the important aspects of Freeview HD.

One is the transcoding of surround sound, which means that even if you have older equipment that can only be connected via optical, or HDMI kit that only understands Dolby Digital, you should be able to get surround sound through your existing system, even when the broadcasters are using AAC audio, as they do at the moment. (If you want a crash course in surround sound, start here)

The second feature is support for the enhanced interactive services (called the MHEG Interaction Channel), which are used to provide the BBC iPlayer via the Red Button service.

The DTG has been helpful enough to announce on their website that Sony’s new Freeview+ HD box has been certified to D Book 6.2.1, so you should be able to buy the SVR-HDT500 safe in the knowledge that it’ll do everything you want.

But it’s not likely they’ll be doing that for everything else – and that means you’ll find some equipment on sale that has been tested with the new version of the D Book, and some that was tested with the older version, which may or may not provide iPlayer or Dolby Digital transcoding.

All you know is that if a product has the digital tick and the Freeview logo, it has passed DTG testing. There is no way for a consumer to know which version of the tests it used.

In time, that won’t make so much difference, but right now, it’s pretty stupid. There should, at least, be a list of equipment tested under the previous version of the D Book, so that consumers can make an informed decision about whether or not to buy older kit – they’d know, at the very least, that they would have to enquire further to find out exactly what functionality was supported.

Update: The DTG told me this morning that they are working on such a list. More details when I have it.

Sharing information

I have my own list on this site, but I’ve not been able to try every box out there, let alone every version of firmware for them; as I posted yesterday, if you have kit that’s not on the list, or can offer more information, perhaps we can crowdsource a more comprehensive one.

Why’s that important? While all new kit should support surround sound, and iPlayer, the older stuff isn’t going to vanish from shelves overnight, and it’s likely to be around for a while. It will also often be discounted, making it cheaper for many users who want to buy HD kit, so it’s important that they are informed about just what they’ll be getting.

What the new specs say

Although the D Book itself isn’t publicly available, the Freeview HD licence that manufacturers have to agree to is, and that outlines the changes. There are three main ones to focus on:

1. Support for Audio Description on channels using AAC audio is mandatory, since 1^st January 2011. As long time followers of this will recall, it was the need to offer Audio Description that made broadcasters choose AAC audio, causing the whole transcoding issue, so the fact that it wasn’t even mandatory for receivers to support AD made things even more frustrating.

2. Audio Transcoding; D Book 6.2.1 ‘clarifies’ this and the following features are mandatory since 1^st Jan 2011:

Via HDMI:

Where the HDMI sink does not support the native bitstream audio, the receiver shall be able to perform one of the following, presenting the same number of channels as broadcast:

• Transcode to AC-3. • Transcode to DTS. • Output linear PCM.

For the uninitiated, ‘HDMI sink’ means the thing the box is plugged into, such as an AV receiver or a TV. And there’s still pretty much nothing on the market that does support AAC multi-channel audio; AC-3 is old-fashioned Dolby Digital, which most home AV kit will support, giving you proper 5.1 surround via HDMI; DTS is an alternative system, but I suspect most kit will simply output Dolby Digital.

Via optical:

If SPDIF supported, the receiver shall be able to output any multi-channel audio, regardless of the broadcast encoding, in one of the following formats, presenting the same number of channels as broadcast:

• AC-3. • DTS.

So, finally the specs make transcoding mandatory, and this should be true of all of this year’s kit – but I’ll certainly post about any I find where that turns out not to be true.

3. From 1^st April 2011,

Receivers shall support the MHEG InteractionChannelExtension and ICStreamingExtension, as defined in Chapters 11 to 19. This requires receivers to provide a broadband network interface supporting TCP/IP (e.g. Ethernet or IEEE 802.11).

Equipment tested between 1^st Jan and 1^st April doesn’t have to support the latest spec, and so won’t necessarily support iPlayer.

Where are we now?

Essentially, any kit tested now must support both iPlayer and transcoding of surround sound. Any kit tested since Jan 1^st must support transcoding. Kit tested earlier doesn’t have to support either – but it may support transcoding anyway (see my list for kit that does).

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as saying “Only buy products released from now on” as the testing process can often happen quite some time in advance of kit being on sale. And the lack of a public list stating what was tested when, or even an addition to the Freeview HD labelling, indicating support for transcoding and iiPlayer is something of a shame, to put it mildly.

The forthcoming list from the DTG will hopefully help choosing equipment a little easier.

Freeview, trailer booking, VOD and Richard Desmond

The other day I was watching a recording from Channel Five and spotted an advert for ‘OK TV’ which is, apparently, coming soon. Not that I expect readers of a quality blog like this to be interested in such things as celebrity chit-chat, but it did set off a chain of thought about minority programme content.

At the moment, channel space on Freeview costs an awful lot, largely because there’s limited capacity, and it’s been much more successful than many people imagined back in 2002.

If you want to buy space to broadcast, there’s something of a quandary – the only time it’s really cheap is when there aren’t many people watching, so how are you going to make a decent amount of money? One solution is the sort of late night programming we’re all familiar with when we forget to switch over from some of the tackier channels – the ‘slappers on a sofa’ type of chat, or the competitions that were popular a few years back. You don’t need to encourage too many people to call expensive phone lines to make money, if you’re broadcasting when the airwaves are cheap.

There is another way of doing things, however, one that TopUpTV seized upon a few years back. They have several hours of broadcast time in the middle of the night, and operate what’s known in the business as a ‘Push VOD’ subscription service. VOD stands for Video On Demand, and it’s more normally associated with requesting content when you want it, like BBC iPlayer for example. In Push VOD you send the content anyway, and it’s recorded on the user’s hard drive, ready for when they want to watch it. Usually, there will be a special recorder – like the ones that TopUpTV uses – which decides which of the programmes to record.

So, for example, with a TopUp box you can select which channels you want from them, and the box automatically records the content from those channels; you then access it through the library on your box.

A third way

So, what’s all this got to do with an advert for ‘OK TV’ ? The answer lies in a relatively new feature on Freeview, mostly seen so far in Freeview HD PVRs, called Trailer Booking. It’s also available on Sky, too. Essentially, during a trailer for an upcoming programme on some channels – BBC and Channel 4 at the moment you may see a green dot on screen with the message ‘Book me.’

Press the green button on the remote control and you’ll be invited to set a timer for the programme, usually after seeing a bit more info about it. It can work across channels, so the BBC can show a trailer on BBC2 for a show that’s coming up on BBC1 and you’ll be able to set a recording very easily.

And, it struck me, couldn’t this be a way for some minority content to achieve delivery to people via a sort of Push-VOD system? Instead of just that advert for ‘OK TV’ you could have an advert that says “Want even more chav-tastic celebrity gossip from CheapoChat magazine? Press the green button for our exclusive celeb videos, delivered to your TV every Thursday morning!”

CheapoChat magazine could broadcast in the middle of the night, every Wednesday, and people who’ve responded to the advert by pressing the green button would have the programme sitting on their recorder Thursday morning, ready to watch whenever they want.

And – unlike TopUpTV – there’s no need for special recorders; it would work with any box that supports trailer booking.

Practical issues

Of course, right now, there aren’t that many boxes out there that support trailer booking, though that will change in future. But that’s not the only awkward problem to solve.

The other one is the signalling; the code to trigger the ‘Book me’ pop-up has to be broadcast alongside the promo for the programme, and that may be a little fiddlier to arrange. It’s easy enough to book an advert for one channel on another – look at the ads for Sky on other channels, for example – but getting the appropriate signalling alongside it might prove difficult.

And that’s where Richard Desmond comes in. The former pornographer and owner of unregulated tabloid newspapers – as well as OK! magazine – also owns Channel Five. With Channel Five also comes some other broadcasting space on Freeview. So if there’s anyone who would be in a position to make use of technology like this, it’s probably Desmond’s Northern & Shell group.

Will they do it? I honestly have no idea – and I don’t think the installed base of recorders with trailer booking is big enough yet. But it would certainly work, and it would be an interesting way of delivering short programmes, or ‘video magazines’ to people.

Icecrypt T2400 Freeview HD PVR review

My review of the IceCrypt T2400 Freeview HD PVR has now been published on Register Hardware. Here I’m going to add a few more bits of information, which couldn’t all be fitted in the space I had over on RH.

Firstly, the overall summary – I gave the unit 70%, because I think it’s pretty much as good as the Digital Stream, to which I gave 75%, and adds media playback facilities that the Digital Stream doesn’t have at the moment. But, set against that, it has an EPG that is rather flawed, in my view, and doesn’t support Dolby Digital transcoding.

Now, that may change in future – I know that the people at IceCrypt understand the importance of this – but it’s not yet a firm commitment, and as I’ve said many times before, it really makes sense to buy a product on what you know it does now, rather than what you hope it will do, if it gets an update at some unspecified time in the future.

For those who want to know, the review was written based primarily on firmware version 1.04.4A, loader 1.02, Micom 1.24.00, though I’ve had a pretty steady stream of firmwares since the box arrived in November, and already have another one (1.04.6A) to install.

Remote control

There are a few other impressions of the T2400 that I want to jot down, in no particular order.

First, the remote; one other reviewer didn’t like this, but actually I find the positive click of the buttons as you press them quite good. It’s not a full universal remote, but it can control your TV – the manual (which I’ve linked to below) has a table of codes in the back.

There are a couple of niggles around how the remote is used, though, which I hope will be addressed soon. To jump around using the yellow ad-skip button, you have to bring up the progress bar, which you do with the navigation keys; that’s fine, as it’s only two presses to skip the ad break – up, then yellow. But if you press pause, you can’t jump without pressing play first, which I find a little irksome. That might not bother everyone of course, but I find it’s quite a common thing for me to want to do – for example, the ads come on, so I press pause, pop to the kitchen for a drink, and when I come back I want to jump past the ads and carry on watching. Ideally I’d like to press the yellow button and have play resume. But it doesn’t – you have to press play first, and then yellow, and those two buttons are quite a long distance apart.

A very nice touch, which I’m afraid I omitted from the RegHardware review, is the handling of Audio Description. There’s a dedicated button for this, and it’s the bottom left, so very easy to find by touch. And there’s an audible signal too, with two tones when it’s turned on, and a single one when it’s turned off, so even if you can’t see the screen display, you know whether you’ve set it the way you want.

The Advanced menu is where you need to go to set up media playback

Media playback

It’s worth talking a little about the media playback in the box, as it works in a way that will be unfamiliar to many people. You’ll need to go to the Advanced menu, and there are two relevant sections.

The ‘Media Settings’ menu allows you to say how much of the hard drive should be reserved for media files – the default is 10% You can also set the slide show time, and registration for DivX files (not that I’ve ever found anyone who needed that).

You need to make a note of the T2400's IP address before you can connect to it

The Network setting screen is the important thing in terms of transferring media to your unit; the default setting seemed to be ‘Manual’ rather than ‘DHCP’ so you’ll need to change that, and you may want to restart the PVR. Go back into the menu and you’ll see the IP address that’s been allocated by your router. You need to make a note of this – in the case of my unit, it’s 10.0.1.26.

You can connect to the T2400 with any FTP program

To connect to the unit you need to either use an FTP program (there’s a command line one built into the Mac, for example, as shown in the screen) and connect to the IP address; you can just press enter when asked for a name – it doesn’t matter, as the PVR only accepts anonymous logins.

For a command line FTP program, you’d type (replacing my IP address with the one of your T2400)

ftp 10.0.1.26

Then you could type dir to see a list of the files you’ve stored, as in the screen – though note that only the .divx, .avi and .mkv files will appear when you browse media on the box.

Enter the FTP url of the T2400 and you'll see the files in a window on your desktop

Mac users can mount the drive in the finder by pressing Apple/Command-K and entering the server address ftp://10.0.1.26 then pressing Enter and selecting ‘Guest’ as the logon type. You’ll then be able to drag files into the PVR window.

In Windows XP, you can type ftp://10.0.1.26 into the Open box on the Start menu, while in Vista and Win 7 just type that into the search box, and press Enter.

Programme transfer

As I mentioned in the review, you can’t transfer recorded programmes from the unit via FTP. You can copy to a USB drive (FAT32 formatted), but only SD programmes – HD can’t be exported from the box.

These are the files you'll see when you export a recording from the T2400 to a USB drive

As the screenshot shows, when you copy a recording, you actually end up with a several files, in a folder that’s named (more or less) for the programme name. I recorded a concert listed in the EPG as ‘Bruce Springsteen: Darkness …’ and it shows up in the list on the T2400 as ‘Bruce Springsteen_Darkness___’. Copy to a USB drive and what you end up with is a folder named 000&&Bruce Springsteen_ Darkness___, which contains the list of files shown in the screenshot. The .TRP file is the actual broadcast programme, and plays in MPEG StreamClip and VLC on the Mac, so should play fine with VLC on Windows too (though my version of VLC did display an error message, it still played fine).

I’ve not analysed all the files that are exported, but the .TH0 file contains the programme description from the EPG.

Other quirks

One of the quirks I mentioned in the RegHardware review is pausing radio – that’s something that you can’t do. In fact, it looks as if the hard drive is powered down when you switch to radio mode, unless you’re recording something.

If you want to be able to pause the radio, then you need to start recording – and remember that pressing the Record button only records up to the end of the current programme – and then go to the file list, and start playing from there. You can then pause, rewind and do whatever else you want to, but unless you set a very long recording, it’ll only work until the end of the current programme, when the recording stops, and you’ll be taken back to the live broadcast.

Another little oddity, though not one that will affect many people, I think, is that it appears you can only start one instant recording at a time. So you can’t press record while watching TV, switch to another channel and press record again to start recording that one. Dual records set by timers work just fine (and as with the other Korean boxes, like Topfield, Humax and Digital Stream, you can watch any channel available on the multiplexes being recorded).

So, that’s more or less it – I’ll be playing a little more, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask them here, or in the thread over at AV Forums.

T2400 manual (PDF)