iPlayer on the TVonics DVRs, IPTV on Freeview

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, since the PR people for TVonics kindly send me one of their DTR-HD500 units to play with (I’ve previously looked at the Z500HD for RegHardware.)

Both units have essentially the same software and UI; the difference with the HD500 is that it’s in a rather more stylish case, which you’ll either appreciate or think “That’s just bonkers!”

TVonics DTR-HD500 - unconventional styling

Both models include a two port HDMI switch, so you can connect a games console and DVD player, for example, as well as the DVR, even if you only have the one HDMI port on your TV; unlikely as it may seem to the more techy amongst us, there are still a lot of people out there who will have a shortage of HDMI ports on older TVs.

I won’t go over the main points of the TVonics kit in too much detail – read my review on RegHardware for that – but it’s a fairly straightforward interface that perhaps verges on the bland, but certainly won’t frighten people who are not used to digital TV.

The latest updates to the products add support for IPTV services, including the BBC iPlayer, thanks to support for the latest D-Book version, including the MHEG Interaction Channel.

That means that, essentially, when you’re watching a BBC channel on Freeview, you can press the red button on the remote, and you’ll get iPlayer as one of the options on the menu.

iPlayer on Freeview HD - just press Red

As you can see, it’s much the same implementation as you’ll get on a Freesat box; easy enough to find your way around with the remote control, but lacking some of the fancier touches found on the dedicated apps used by some manufactuers, like the one on Panasonic’s VieraCast, which I talked about recently over on RegHardware. However, this is what the BBC provides, not TVonics themselves, so it’ll be common across a lot of Freeview HD boxes over the coming months.

That’s not all that’s added by the latest software update, however. If you’ve browsed the upper reaches of the Freeview HD programme guide recently, you’ll have seen that, past the porn section, starting at channel 110, there are several new channels listed.

These are IPTV channels, which work using the MHEG-IC functionality on Freeview HD boxes. You can tune in to them on any box, but you’ll see a screen something like this if you do:

If your receiver doesn't support the IPTV channels, you'll probably see a message a little like this

On the TVonics – assuming it’s connected to the network, which is pretty much plug-and-play using an ethernet cable (a wireless adaptor is also available, but I’ve not had one to play with) – then you’ll see the station logo (‘Sports Tonight’ on channel 112, for instance) followed by message ‘Attempting to start video’ and then the picture will appear.

Sports Tonight, on Freeview channel 112

If I had to describe the picture quality, I’d say “VHS”; it’s hard to know if it could be better or not – certainly my broadband connection is more than fast enough, so the limitations are to do with the channel itself, and how much bandwidth it wants to pay for. Also, in the screenshot above, the programme was doing an interview via Skype, so it’s not exactly a fair example of what’s possible.

Some may, no doubt, be wondering why Freeview bandwidth is being taken up by minority channels, but the good news is that these channels really aren’t having much impact. All that has to be arranged is a slot in the EPG, and a very small amount of data, which essentially just provides the loading screen and the logo. The channel then points to the IPTV stream, if your box understands it, and all the programme content is delivered over the internet.

It’s obviously a lot cheaper for channels to get on air like this, and as more TVs come with Freeview HD and D-Book 6.2.1 support, we can expect to see more of this sort of content, including paid events and subscription services, helping Freeview fight its corner against other TV services.

For those who are curious, there’s a reasonable amount of buffering, it seems – it took five seconds from unplugging the network cable in the back of the TVonics before the channel was affected.

Remotely viewing the Echostar Freesat box

My review of Echostar’s Freesat recorder is over on RegHardware, but I thought I’d add a few more words and some extra screens here.

First, the connectivity side of this was very straightforward – I fully expected configuration problems with remote viewing, but there weren’t any. While I can’t promise it’ll work fine for everyone, I did access it in fairly challenging circumstances.

The box was connected to my Apple Airport Express powered network; that puts it on a private network, behind NAT, and I didn’t so any special configuration of the Airport. The Airport itself has a public IP address, but is behind a firewall in the router, which is set up to pass limited traffic to the Airport from outside – principally HTTP and some instant messaging. In didn’t add any extra rules for the Sling functionality.

Viewing remotely was done in the Computeractive office, where all the machines are also on a private network, and present a single outgoing IP address. So, effectively, there’s NAT at each end, plus two firewalls – and the streaming still worked without a hitch.

As to picture quality, well if you want to catch up on stuff when you’re away from home, I suppose it’s reasonable enough. The limiting quality is your broadband upload speed – mine is 0.6Mbps, which is reasonable (and faster than quite a lot of people).

So, what’s it like? Well, you can watch BBC One HD remotely, but it won’t look anything like HD; it’s blocky but sit a fair distance from the screen an it’s perfectly watchable. What was more interesting was the difference the quality settings had on the presentation of the on-screen menus, which will be necessary if you want to view recordings remotely. here’s the recording list, with the quality set to ‘Auto’

Menu quality on 'auto' isn't great; click to view full size

Change to ‘Best’ and now the menus are readable; the speed shown in the bottom bar changed from 504 to 536kbps when I did this – and the sound started to break up. But unless you only have a few recordings, you’ll probably need this better quality to be able to work out which file you want to play:

At 'Best' quality, you can read on screen displays, but the sound broke up

Finally, one last pic; I mentioned in the review how bright the front panel lights were, and the Sling indicator, which comes on during remote access is particularly bright, and annoying – that arch of LEDs cycles off and on. This is one you’ll probably want to disable via the menus, if you’re at home when someone else is accessing the box.

All the LEDs are bright, but especially the remote access indicator

What do you do in the ad breaks?

A recent survey, reported on Broadband TV news, suggests that it’s smartphones rather than PVRs that pose a threat to ad revenue. For many years, there have been some in the TV industry who are concerned that video recorders and especially PVRs might cause a decline in ad revenue, so this is quite interesting, if true – though the research looks like it’s based on a relatively small number of people.

Video recorders didn’t turn out to have a massive impact on ad revenue; fast forwarding was a bit imprecise, I guess, and there’s also been some research that apparently says people have a reasonable recall of some ads, even when they’re viewed at fast forward. Of course most VCRs didn’t go that fast, and so a 30 second ad would still take up ten seconds, and it’s quite easy to recall a logo if it’s on screen for a part of that.

Digital video recorders had the potential to change that, and plenty of people were worried. Back in 2006, when the specs were being drawn up for Freeview Playback (which became Freeview+), ITV wanted maximum fast forward speeds to be restricted, precisely because of that. They relented in the end, but people aren’t supposed to promote features as being useful for ad skipping. Elsewhere in the world, other broadcasters have tried to impose similar limitations.

With a fast forward speed of, say, 64x, then a 30 second ad spot is going to take up less than half a second, so it’ll be easy to miss (though, actually, controlling such a fast speed through a 3 or 4 minute break is hardly practical either; you’ll almost always overshoot).

The real problem broadcasters have with digital recorders is the jump, rather than a fast forward. Many boxes have a button that allows you to jump by a set number of seconds; the better ones allow you to configure exactly how many; with a 90 second jump, three quick presses of the button takes you through an ad break on many channels more or less perfectly, and there’s nothing to see at all while it happens – so with nothing on screen, there’s nothing to stick in the memory.

Getting smart

No wonder then that some people were worried about PVRs and their effect on ad revenue (though perhaps some broadcasters should have spent more time worrying about making decent quality programmes!).

But, this new research suggests that more and more people are using the ad breaks not to reach for the skip or fast forward button, but for their smart phone, catching up on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tasks.

I’d love to know how many of the rest of you do that; is that really how you access these things alongside TV? Or do you check them during the programme, as well as the adverts? If you’re watching a show that has a lot of online participation – like the Eurovision Song Contest, or Question Time, then you probably don’t restrict your commenting and checking of comments to suitable breaks. What about ITV’s endless torrent of talent shows? Do you only comment in the breaks?

I suspect not, frankly – and as I said, the study was quite small, with only 48 participants. You can download it from here

What do I do?

For my part, how I interact with ads depends an awful lot on what I’m watching. I seldom watch anything live, especially on ITV or Channel 4, and the jump button is always there. That’s what most adverts make me do – reach for the jump button, press it three times, and carry on watching.

But, often I might have my eye on Twitter, or Facebook, and if something’s caught my eye, then I will check it properly in the ad break. But I don’t just let the ads run on in the background; I’ll pause the show I’m watching, give a news story my attention, read it all the way through, and then it’s back to those jump buttons, so the end result is much the same – no adverts viewed.

About the only time the ads do get to roll is when I decide I’m going to go and get a drink or a quick bite to eat; I leave them running and walk out of the room, then when I get back in, I jump over the rest of them.

So, what do you do when the adverts start?

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!

Is content transfer essential in a PVR?

One of the things that many people appreciate about the Topfield PVRs (and to a lesser extent the Humax 9200) is that they allow you to transfer digital recordings from the hard drive to your PC. That allows you to convert them for portable media players, or to burn DVDs very easily, or you can simply store them on a media server, and play them back via a streaming device, freeing up space on the PVR itself.

That’s quite handy, though technically speaking it’s not something that’s legal – recording TV is allowed in the UK for the purpose of time-shifting, to watch at a more convenient time, and not to place material in an archive for repeated viewing. (For details, take a look here on the IPO site).

Content restrictions

With the advent of HD in the UK, things are slowly changing; although the broadcasts themselves are not encrypted, the programme guide is, and as part of the agreement to access it, makers of boxes have to protect the content that’s flagged, so that it can’t be duplicated. In some cases (like the Icecrypt T2200), that means that the simplest solution is chosen – encrypt everything on the hard disk, so that even unprotected SD material can’t be used elsewhere.

That’s clearly a blow to people who want to do the same sort of things that they did with the Topfield 5800, and the YouView specification makes it clear that similar restrictions will be imposed there too.

Does it matter?

However, I’m going to suggest that actually, perhaps this won’t matter as much as people may think it does. Firstly, it’s always been something of a minority activity, though that’s clearly not much consolation to those who will lose the ability to do something that they could do in the past.

But it is worth considering the things people actually do with recordings that they transfer off, and how much they will be impacted.

One of the most common uses, certainly in the past, has been for people to burn a DVD of a recording to lend to someone who missed a programme. And yes, you won’t be able to do that in future. However, while that was a very useful thing to be able to do when the Toppy first went on sale in 2005, it’s arguably less useful now, six years later. iPlayer and other similar sites are well established, broadband infrastructure has improved – perhaps not as much as people might like, but it’s better – and YouView will make it even simpler for people to catch up with programmes they’ve missed.

If it’s streaming within the home, then again, you won’t be able to do that in the ‘traditional’ way by copying a file from the PVR, converting it, and storing it on your media server, to play back on the TV. But I do think that we are going to see more recorders that support built in streaming. There are already products that do that job, but so far they tend to stream only to devices made by the same manufacturer. That will, I believe, change, as more people adopt D-TCP (about which I’ll blog more another time). And that means that a PVR with a sufficiently large hard drive will be ale to both record and stream for you. You may not have the security of keeping the data on a RAID array, but again, the core job of in-home sharing will be taken care of, albeit in a slightly different way.

The main fly in the ointment here is transfer to portable devices, and I confess I’ve not seen anything yet that will address that for many people – though it is possible to download from iPlayer for some of them anyway.

The question, of course, is whether or not this will be enough? If you’ve been using something like a Topfield 5800 for a few years, and are used to transferring programmes from it, then you might well worry about the loss of the facility.

I’d be interested to hear from other users if they think that they would find some of the alternatives outlined here acceptable.

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)