Dolby transcoding for Icecrypt T2400

Owners of the Icecrypt T2400 will be pleased to hear that a new firmware update is being tested at the moment, which will add Dolby digital transcoding to the unit.

In my original review, that was one of the main points against it, so if this works well, it will be very good news for users.

I hope to start testing the update in the next couple of days, and will post more about it next week.

Icecrypt T2200 Freeview HD box only £60

If you’re quick – before midnight today (8th March), you can pick up a FreeviewHD bargain.

The Icecrypt T2200 Freeview HD box is on offer at Play.com for £59.99. It’s a pretty respectable bit of kit, though it lacks Dolby Transcoding. Once you’ve got one, you’ll find some beta firmware here, which allows you to record to a USB hard disk.

You may want to read my review on RegHardware.

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)

Icecrypt T2400 – updated impressions

I’ve already done a quick first impressions piece about the T2400, and I’m aware some of you have been waiting a while for a more detailed look, so here are some extra notes. Don’t forget to check the photo gallery, too.

I wouldn’t go as far as calling this a full review – I hope to be doing that in due course for Register Hardware. Consider this more an extended set of impressions. There’s yet another firmware to test, which I’ve not tried yet – it came out the week before Xmas, when I had flu, and requires a hard drive format too, so I have some viewing to catch up on first, before I can report on which issues it resolves.

Functionality

There’s the usual Freeview+ HD functionality, including series link, and keyword search (though you can’t save keywords and have them searched for automatically, as with say a Topfield and TAPs).

There’s no network media playback at the moment, nor any support for iPlayer. There is, however a built in FTP server. Before you get too excited, you can’t use that to retrieve recordings from the hard drive. It’s sole purpose is to allow you to transfer media files onto the unit, so that you can play them back from the built in disk. That’s not perhaps as useful as having things streamed over the network, but on the positive side, it means you don’t have to set up a NAS, and even if you don’t have a fast home network, by playing from the internal disk drive, you won’t get problems with stuttering.

More extensive network functionality may, apparently, come later – but as with all these things, do consider that carefully; as some Panasonic owners will tell you, sometimes you can wait an awfully long time for software updates, and the best thing is to consider only what you know a product can do when you buy it.

Navigation

When you’re watching a program, a quick press of the Up button on the remote displays the progress bar; you can nudge your way through a show using the left and right buttons, which is roughly 20-30 seconds a time, as far as I can see. Press Yellow to jump a configurable amount, eg four minutes for an ad skip. However, a couple of times I found that doing this caused the sound to drop out; starting and stopping playback resolved it.

Also, if you pause, say when the adverts come on so you can go make a cup of tea, you have to resume playback before you can use the jump buttons. That might not bother you, but I find it a touch irksome.

The programme guide, showing the pop-up when a programme has been selected for recording

Another thing I’m not so keen on is the EPG display; as you can see from the photo, there’s a very limited time window in it, and you also can’t get an overview of a single channel.

More annoyingly – and hopefully going to be fixed soon – is a flickering that I find very noticeable when holding down the arrow keys to scroll through the EPG, something that you’ll be doing a lot of, thanks to the time window.

Moving through the EPG, pressing OK changes channel; the picture in the top left changes, but you have to press Exit to return to live TV.

Performance

On the whole, aside from the niggles mentioned above, performance has been good. Particularly with the BBC, recordings have started and stopped at exactly the right time. On Channel 4, I’ve often noticed the end of Grand Designs being cut off, but that seems quite a common issue with C4 and their accurate recording signals in my experience, so I’m reluctant to put it down to the T2400.

All recordings have completed ok; I’ve had a couple with glitches on the HD channels, but that’s most likely down to the fact that the recorder is the final device in a long stream of PVRs fed from an unamplified aerial, rather than any intrinsic problem itself.

Recommendations are handled pretty well; press Green when the prompt appears on screen, and you can see all the details of the program, then press OK to set a recording if you wish – though it seems to set only a single one, rather than a series. I had to manually set Upstairs Downstairs as a series.

Media playback

I’ve not done extensive testing of media playback yet, as I know this is an area that’s still being developed. JPEG slideshows work ok, and so did a test MKV file that I copied over. An MPEG 2 (.mpg) and an AVCHD (.mts) file didn’t even show up in the file browser, and while an XVID .avi file was listed, playback gave a blank screen – though the firmware version I have waiting to install does specifically include an update for DivX, which will probably resolve that too.

Caveat

Finally, please remember that all the notes here are based on the current firmware I have on the unit I’m playing with. There’s still the one received before Xmas to play with, and there will doubtless be some more before the T2400 finds its way into people’s homes.

First impressions of the Icecrypt T2400

The Icecrypt T2400 FreeviewHD PVR

I’ve been playing with a pre-production sample of the Icecrypt T2400 Freeview HD recorder for a few days now. First, let me make it clear that the unit I have is not a final one – it’s got a smaller hard drive, for instance – and the firmware is still being tweaked. So, I’m not going to give a run-down of problems I’ve found, until I’m sure that the firmware I have is one that ordinary users will get to see – I don’t think it would be fair to do that.

What I will talk about are some of the impressions I’ve gained so far.

The T2400 remote control - with a dedicated Audio Description button

External controls

Starting with the outside, the box looks pretty straightforward; the front has the click-wheel control, with a power button to the left, and below it are two small extra buttons, menu and exit. There’s a display in the centre of the panel, and on the right is a flap, behind which is one of the USB ports, and blanked off slots for card reader and CI bay – that’s not too unusual in products like this, where often the same case is used in different markets.

I was a little unsure how to work the click wheel at first (my unit didn’t come with instructions), but eventually sussed it. During normal viewing, you can turn it left and right to control the volume. Press it, and the channel list pops up, then rotating scrolls up and down the list; when you reach the channel you want, press again to switch to that channel.

Using the menus took a little more figuring out; press the menu button below the wheel and the main menu pops up. Moving left and right scrolls through the sections, and pressing will select the first item in each section. If you want to select another, press the Menu button again, then you can scroll up and down, and press to select.

The remote control has a good positive feel to it, and the layout of the buttons is reasonably logical, to me at any rate. A very nice touch is the dedicated Audio Description button, at the bottom left. And when this is pressed, there’s also an audible tone through the speakers, once if it’s been turned off and twice if it’s been turned on, so you know the setting is right, even if there isn’t an AD at the moment.

User interface

The user interface isn’t the prettiest, but nor is it the clunkiest; the wizard that helps you install the T2400 is simple to work through, largely just by pressing the OK button, and the menus and configuration screens are pretty straightforward.

This is the info bar that appears when you change channel

I’m not terribly keen on the yellow highlights myself, but I’m sure some people will like them; they’re less annoying, in my view, on the smaller items, like the pop-up recording status, than on the info bar that appears when you change channels.

If you’re chase playing, the end of a recording is entirely glitch free – no jumping to live, or anything like that. And you can set a configurable jump forwards. There’s no jump backwards button, but a press of the up arrow on the remote brings up a progress bar, and the left and right arrows can then nudge the playback position forwards or backwards too; in conjunction with the jump, this is a fairly easy way to avoid things you don’t want to see, or skip backwards if you’ve jumped too far, or been talked at during a crucial bit of dialogue.

Setting recordings is simple; you’ll be presented with a choice of series, or single record, and recommendations are clearly displayed, so you know what you’re getting if you select those. Series are automatically filed in folders for you.

There’s also trailer booking support; I’ve only seen it pop up once, with a ‘Book me’ flag on screen, and didn’t have time to leap for the remote control, but I’ll check it out later.

Still a work in progress

I’ll stress again that this is still not a finished firmware; I’ve not commented on media playback functionality, because that’s still being developed, and if I say that a certain of file won’t play now, there’s no guarantee that will hold true.

The programme guide, showing the pop-up when a programme has been selected for recording

I have sent feedback that a single channel view in the EPG would be a good idea, and I hope that will appear – especially in view of the relatively small amount of programme data shown at one time in the current layout.

Another missing feature at the moment is Dolby Digital transcoding; whether or not that will appear, I can’t say at the moment, but I hope very much that it does.

I’ll be continuing to play as more new firmwares arrive, and will post more info as I have it. Overall, reasonably favourable – I’d say this machine will firmly be in the Digital Stream class, rather than the Humax class, given current functionality.

The rear panel view

Icecrypt T2400 FreeviewHD PVR photo gallery

A sample of the Icecrypt T2400 Freeview HD recorder arrived today; I’ve not yet had time to really test it out, and I want to do that before reporting back with even first impressions. But I have taken a few photographs, while setting it up, which will have to be enough to keep you busy for now.

You can click on any of these photos to see a larger version of them.

PVR software beta for Icecrypt T2200 Freeview HD box

When I first reviewed the Icecrypt T2200 Freeview HD box for RegHardware, one of the promised features was an update to enable recording to USB hard drives. And now, I’ve managed to get my hands on a beta version of the firmware that makes it possible.

You’ll need a USB stick or external hard drive, and though the T2200 can play back from FAT-formatted devices, it can only record to those formatted using NTFS. While it can format a drive via the Installation menu (System Recovery / Format Hard Disk) it won’t do that if it doesn’t recognise the partitoning – in fact, the drive won’t even show up as available.

So, to re-use a drive that had been formatted using the Digital Stream PVR, for example, I had to delete the partitions and recreate them in Windows, before the T2200 would recognise the drive – but considering many other PVRs want drives formatted in Linux, that’s not a major worry.

Recording

Setting a recording is a simple matter; just highlight a programme in the EPG and press Record, or press OK twice (the first press sets a ‘pre-select’, which changes to the channel, but doesn’t record).

You can also do an instant record – just press the record button while watching TV, and it will run for the time specified in the Recordings menu. Press the button again and a pop-up allows you to specify a duration, or ‘after this programme’ or ‘after next programme.’

Press Record a second time and you can easily alter the duration of an instant recording

There’s no series linking or automatic tracking of start and stop times at the moment, but you can set repeat recordings with options for every day, every weekday, every weekend, or weekly, and you can adjust start time and duration to give you a bit of leeway in case the schedules slip.

There's no series link, but there is a comprehensive range of repeat settings

The Recording menu in the settings section also allows you to turn on buffering, so you can rewind live tv for 30 minutes, 1 hours, or even up to five hours.

Timeshift can be switched off, or enabled - for up to five hours

Two other points worth mentioning: first, while recording you can watch another channel on the same multiplex, and second the box will record from standby, and then go back to sleep afterwards.

Watch one channel while recording another - the channels in white are available, others are on a different mux so can't be watched during recording

Playback features

During playback, you’ll find some useful features in common with Topfield’s PVRs. For example, type a two digit number, like 75, on the keypad, and playback jumps to the 75% position.

Pressing the play button brings up the on-screen progress bar. While this is displayed, you can use the |< and >| keys to jump to the start or end.

The progress bar shows bookmarks; it's easy to navigate around a recording

Whether the progress bar is displayed or not, press green to set a bookmark, and yellow to jump to the next bookmark. If no bookmarks are set, then the yellow button will jump forwards 30 seconds. Fast forward doubles each time you press the button, up to 64x.

There’s a reasonable file browser – you can create folders, and move files to them, though the on-screen keyboard isn’t the easiest to use.

Recordings can be saved to an NTFS disk, and organised into folders - but they are encrypted

It’s worth noting that although the files are saved as .rec (which is the format used on Topfield PVRs), you won’t be able to play them on your PC. You can see them, but they’re encrypted, to comply with the Freeview HD content controls. Even SD recordings are protected at the moment, though perhaps that may change in future.

Installing the update

If you want to have a play, you can download the zip file for the update below. Note that it’s a beta test, so use at your own risk. Unzip the file and copy the TFD file onto a USB stick. Plug it into the T2200, and you should see an on-screen message telling you that a device has been connected – if not, try another USB stick; it worked for me with one formatted as FAT-16, but not as FAT-32.

When the stick has been detected, go to the main menu, select Installation, then Firmware Upgrade, and USB Firmware upgrade. The screen will show a file browser, and you should see the firmware file; select it and press OK to begin the update.

Click here for the T2200 beta firmware (zip)