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.

It’s the little touches that make a PVR

I recently published a well-deserved critique of Topfield, makers of the TF5800 PVR. But it’s worth recalling some of the things that their boxes do really cleverly – or can be made to do – that make them still the PVR of choice for many people.

Last night, I was catching up on some recordings on another PVR I’m testing. After I finished that, I realised that a new series of Silent Witness had started 20 minutes ago, and I was completely unaware, so hadn’t set a timer.

A quick glance at the front panel of the Toppy revealed that it was fortuitously on BBC1 – I switch mine off to reboot once a week, but otherwise leave it on – which meant that everything from the previous hour was stored on the hard drive.

So, switching over the the Toppy, I was able to rewind back to the beginning of Silent Witness.

More cleverly, thanks to a TAP I use called ImproBox, and a patch in the firmware, all I had to do was to press the record button, and the unit went right back to the start of the buffered TV, turned it into a recording, with the end time set to stop four minutes after the scheduled end of Silent Witness. At the same time, it automatically set two bookmarks in the recording, one at the start of each programme it contained.

So, a quick press of the green key jumped me straight over whatever was on before Silent Witness, directly to the start of the programme. And all, essentially, with just one press of the Record button.

That sort of flexibility is what many of us will miss, if we have to move to one of the current crop of Freeview HD recorders.

How Topfield lost the plot

Long time readers of this blog will know that I also run the Toppy.org.uk site, which is a pretty useful resource for owners of the Topfield Freeview recorders, principally the TF5800 but also the TF5810.

There was a time, a few years ago, when the accepted wisdom was pretty much that, if you wanted a Freeview hard disk recorder, there were two leading models. One was the Humax 9200, and the other was the Topfield TF5800, or ‘Toppy.’

There were two things that made many people consider the Toppy the leading Freeview PVR. One was the ability (shared with the Humax, but a little more reliably) to transfer recordings from the hard drive via the USB port. The other was the presence of an open API, and a freely available set of development tools that allowed users to create ‘TAPs’ or Topfield applications. When the box launched, back in 2005, this was somewhat unprecedented for a piece of domestic AV gear, but it allowed all sorts of things, from simple tweaks like making it easier to jump around a recording, to an almost complete replacement of the user interface.

In short, the TF5800 was a tinkerer’s paradise. Thanks in part to the community that built up on the Toppy forums, and great work done before that by the Australian users (where a version had been on sale for a while), plenty of TAPs appeared, making it one of the most flexible PVRs out there. And, in some ways, it still is – want a box that can automatically record any programme that mentions the word ‘Almodovar’ ? Or that you can set up so that when a radio show has been recorded, it’s transferred to your PC and turned into an MP3 for your iPod? Or that you can set recordings on via the web, or text message? All those things, and more, are possible with the Toppy.

It’s no surprise, then, that many users have been eagerly waiting for a similarly-specced High Definition box to come out.

What is a surprise, though, is how completely and comprehensively Topfield has dropped the ball. They started out as an unknown name in the UK. They gained prominence with a good – if at times quirky – PVR. And they then proceeded to ignore the market to the extent that they’ll have to try very hard to win the trust of users back, even if they do launch a Freeview HD product under their own name.

What went wrong?

When the TF5800 arrived, it had bugs. Plenty of them. But the company was also willing to work with their distributor, Turbosat, who in turn worked with the Toppy.org.uk community, where we collated problems and feature requests. We even created a bug tracker that they could review online.

And, for a while, we had reasonably regular firmware updates; some of those were necessary because in the original firmwares, the MHEG engine (used for interactive services) was a pretty ropy open source implementation that appeared to be being used in a way that breached the open source license. It crashed, and at times while we waited for Topfield to issue fixes, we had to rely on the work of some of the forum members, who reverse engineered firmwares, creating patches in MIPS code, to address shortcomings in the system.

Things really started to go wrong for Topfield with the launch of the TF5810, and the Freeview Playback system (now called Freeview+). To put it bluntly, they never successfully adapted their firmware to work reliably with Freeview+.

If you’re using a Topfield PVR, the advice we have to give on Toppy.org.uk is not to use the Freeview+ firmware; if you have a TF5810, you don’t have much choice, but you can at least use a TAP to create recordings, avoiding the bugs in Topfield’s code.

From a distance

One of the problems is that most of Topfield’s work is done in Korea; they occasionally sent engineers to the UK, who appeared to tinker, then go home, and think “this is good enough.”

On the Toppy forum, we have a group of people who will run through pretty detailed tests and discover bugs that the Topfield engineers never noticed; we report them back – and then another firmware comes out, featuring the same bugs.

Worse, while sending Turbosat firmwares to pass on to the testers, Topfield would release a completely different firmware on their website, that we’d never even seen. When they finally decided to replace the MHEG engine with one bought in from Ocean Blue, they sent a firmware to test, and then released one built two days later on their site, before they had any test results. And then withdrew it.

There hasn’t been an officially released Topfield UK firmware for over two years; the updates that have appeared have been unofficial ones from Toppy.org.uk, patched by our users, or semi-official ones, where Turbosat has commissioned an experienced UK user to patch a firmware to fix critical bugs that Topfield seems unwilling or unable to resolve themselves.

In short, there’s been more work to keep the products alive carried out by dedicated, unpaid forum members than there has been by Topfield’s seemingly never-ending succession of engineers. They have the source code, and yet are unable to fix bugs that users have resolved.

To date, there still hasn’t been an official release of a firmware with the Ocean Blue MHEG engine. There still hasn’t been a properly working Freeview+ firmware update for the 5800 or the 5810.

And, frankly, it seems as if Topfield just consider it all too much trouble, having to have their equipment tested to meet certification requirements, or even asking a dedicated – and willing – group of users to beta test, and then listen to the information that they report back.

Happy Humax

Contrast with their Korean compatriots, Humax, who have taken the UK market far more seriously; though not without some issues of their own, and some grumbles about the time for firmware updates, they’ve managed to maintain a good reputation, and to bring out some first class products for Freeview HD. They have, rightly, become a respected name for PVRs in the UK.

Their 9200 launched in the UK around the same time as the Topfield 5800; both were built on the same platform too – NEC’s EMMA2 chip. Both have been through ups and downs over the years. And both have been well supported with vibrant user communities.

Topfield, however, just seems to have run out of steam; they give every impression of not really caring if their products work the way they’re supposed to, of not listening to their customers and – perhaps worst of all – of not even being familiar with their own software. How is it that crucial bugs, including one affecting scanning for channels, have only ever been fixed by third party patches, rather than in a release from their own engineers?

What next?

So far, none of the Freeview HD products out there yet has caught the imagination the way that the original Toppy did when it arrived in the UK in 2005. Many users are still hanging on, hoping that something will come along that’s close enough to make them want to switch.

Five years is a long time for a product like a PVR, especially these days. That the TF5800 is still popular, and has such a vibrant community around it is, in my view, more in spite of Topfield than because of them.

Slapdash software development, an unwillingness to understand the UK market, or to listen to users have probably doomed Topfield in the UK. From a position where they had a leading product, and a good track record in providing updates, they have become, an also-ran, with a reputation for products that the users support themselves.

And the biggest shame is that it needn’t have happened.

What do I want from a PVR?

Over the last few months, I’ve been playing with various Freeview HD recorders; I wrote a piece a little while ago about the work involved in thoroughly testing them, but I thought I’d say something about what I want a PVR to do for me, and how I want it to work.

Some of this is, almost certainly, biased by my long term usage of the Topfield 5800, which is one of the most customisable units around; lots of people reckon that to get the best out of it, you have to use a TAP (that’s an add-on application) called MyStuff; personally, I’ve never tried it, and use a different combination to achieve what are probably pretty similar ends.

None of the units, so far, has made me think “I’ll switch off the Toppy and use this one.” Now, partly that’s because the Toppy is nicely integrated with everything else – programmed into the Harmony remote, for example – but also because, while the gadgets I’ve been playing with will record the Freeview HD channels fine, they don’t do everything it does. And, for the time being, since most stuff isn’t actually in HD, I’m prepared to watch a few things in SD instead, or make ‘appointments to view’ for programmes such as Dr Who, so that I can view them in HD.

What I want from Freeview HD

First, when it comes to Freeview HD recorders, there are some features that are an absolute essential. Top of that list has to be a Dolby Digital output, via optical S/PDIF. For me, this means I will get surround sound, and if a box isn’t offering it (look here for more on the gory details), then it’s off my list right away.

Network media playback would be good, but not essential – my TV will handle that in SD, and will give me iPlayer via Freesat too, when Panasonic issues their update.

I prefer an internal power supply as well; there’s a lot of equipment in my living room, and tons of cables. I don’t want more boxes lying on the floor behind the boxes that actually do the work.

How a PVR should work

In terms of how a PVR should work, there are things that I’m used to, and find essential – some people might not want these, or thing them superfluous, but they’re what I find incredibly useful.

A flexible EPG

I don’t just want a fixed grid; I want to be able to zoom out, so I can see a few hours at a time, if I want, rather than planning an evening in 2 hour blocks. And I like to be able to see a list for a single channel too.

Most of all, it should be responsive; you should be able to skip through the week to see what’s on your favourite channels, without finding it a chore. You should, ideally, be able to hide the channels you never watch, too.

Series recording and persistent searches

A must these days, series recording is great, though I don’t actually use Freeview+ series links. Instead, all my programmes on the Toppy are recorded by searches; I can highlight a programme in the guide, and press a button to create a default search, which is for that show, on that channel and day, with a two hour time window. I can tweak it more, and make things even more clever – if anyone ever starts showing Oz again, my PVR will record it. Any film with the word ‘Almodovar’ in the description will be recorded, whenever and wherever it’s on.

And I can change the priority, so certain things are always set, and others will be set if they don’t clash with the more important ones. I know that, even if I miss trailers and news, the next time Dr Who starts being shown on a Saturday, it will be recorded.

Some of the PVRs I’ve looked at allow you to search the EPG, but only in real time, and you can’t save searches to happen automatically.

Intelligent recording

Freeview+ allows for ‘accurate recording’ which is great, and can cope with late changes to scheduling that searches can’t. But some channels are a bit lacklustre with their signalling, and you miss the first few seconds of a show.

Again, this is a feature I don’t use on my Toppy; instead, all my recordings start a few minutes before the scheduled time, and end a few minutes after. In the vast majority of cases, this is sufficient.

And, no, I don’t have to fast forward to the start of the programme. A bookmark is automatically placed in the recording when the start and end signals are spotted, and the archive program that I use to browse and select a recording to play automatically jumps to the first bookmark, if it’s less than a certain way into the programme.

Jumping and bookmarking

Forward and backward jumps are essential tools for watching via a PVR, as I’ve said before. And so too are bookmarks. I have a recording of last year’s excellent MGM Prom by the John Wilson Orchestra, and plenty of bookmarks, so I can skip to particular songs within it.

There’s more

Those are the things that I would really miss; persistent searches mean I don’t have to spend ages wading through the paper, or the programme guide. Jumping and bookmarks mean I see what I want, and don’t waste my time with vacuous adverts. It’s little touches like this that make me return to the Toppy, and that I find frustrating when I don’t have them on another recorder.

I hate missing a couple of seconds at the start of a show. Watching adverts and juggling fast forward/rewind to get to the bit of a programme I want is tedious.

And interfaces that need lots of button presses to do simple things, or that take ages just to see everything that’s on a single channel in one evening aren’t going to make me run out and buy a new PVR.

Some of the products I’ve looked at strike me as not that much more evolved from the first generation of standard def units; none of them has yet excited me as much as the standard definition Topfield TF5800 did, back in 2005.

Topfield's 5800 - only SD, but still not usurped by any FreeviewHD models

What’s so great about a PVR?

PVRs – Personal Video Recorders – are one of the technologies that can dramatically change the way that you watch TV. Also known as ‘Digital TV Recorders’ or DTRs, they’re essentially a dedicated computer with a couple of TV tuners and a hard drive. You can select what you want to watch from the electronic programme guide, press a button and a recording is scheduled, much more easily than with a video recorder. Whole series can be recorded at the touch of a button, and you can watch them whenever you want.

A lot of people, at least to start with, don’t quite get what the fuss is about. They use them a little like a video recorder, as something that you turn on when you want to watch a recording, and turn off again afterwards. Personally, I think that if that’s how you use one, then you’re missing out on some of the really good stuff.

A change of habit

The Topfield TF5800 - in my opinion the best standard def Freeview recorder there is

I use a Topfield TF5800 PVR; I think it’s one of the best standard-definition boxes available in the UK, not least because of the ability to customise it. But even without some of the more exotic features, it really is worth thinking about how a PVR can change the way you see television.

First, I hardly ever use the tuners built into my TV set; I use the Topfield all the time. One reason for doing that is that it means there’s just one remote to worry about, no more fiddling with different ones depending on whether you’re watching live, or watching a recording.

With two tuners (some cheap models only have one, but it’s rare these days), even if you’re recording one channel, you can still watch another on the PVR, so there’s no need for that artificial divide between a device for watching live and one for viewing recordings.

You can also pause live TV – great when someone comes to the door, for example. You might think “so what,” but take the next step, and realise that you can then fast forward to catch up to real time.

Perhaps that’s not so useful on the BBC (though you could fast forward through certain World Cup matches, perhaps), but on commercial channels, you can start watching, press pause when the adverts come on, go make a cup of tea, or empty the washing machine, and then fast forward through the ads, to get back to the programme.

Beyond pause

And once you’ve tried that a few times, you’ll probably think, actually, why bother pausing in the first place? Why not just record everything, and watch it when you want. Many people are doing just that – as much of a third of the drama watched on Sky is apparently time-shifted like this.

So, instead of flicking around and seeing what’s on, and settling for the least annoying thing, a PVR can change things dramatically. Set up a few series recordings; flick through the Electronic Programme Guide once or twice a week, and find things that look interesting, setting them to record too.

Before long, you’ll find that instead of having a poor choice of whatever’s on when you turn on the TV, you have a collection of things you wanted to watch, ready to view whenever you want – and if you fancy, you can skip through the adverts too.

There’s no more rushing home to catch Dr Who, when the weather’s so glorious that you fancy another beer in the sun. And modern PVRs will automatically work out when a programme starts late, just in case the tennis unexpectedly goes on for a few days longer than you expected.

Jump to it

There’s more to some PVRs than others, of course. With the extra software you can load on a Topfield, it can do clever things like automatically search the programme guide, and set recordings itself – if anyone every starts showing ‘Oz’ again on Freeview, I’ll get it recorded, for example.

Some PVRs have ‘jump’ buttons; on mine, I can skip forwards 90 seconds, or back 30. So when the ads come on, press three or four times on the skip button, and I’m back to the action.

It’s not just for adverts, either – the backwards skip is a great tool for when someone in the room insists on talking at you, making you miss important dialogue (the “mother button”, perhaps). You’d be surprised how useful things like this become – after five years of using my PVR, I instinctively find myself reaching for the ‘skip back’ button on the remote, even when I’m watching a DVD.

For me, a PVR is now such an important part of the way I watch TV that I wouldn’t be without one. If you’re about to go digital, and wondering if you should just buy a basic set top box, I’d strongly recommend that you consider spending the extra for a PVR – though with the caveat that Freeview HD models are pretty rare at the moment, if you want HD, it might be best to wait a while and see how the different models stack up against each other.

Do I watch more TV, or less? It’s hard to say, overall. But I think I can say that I do watch more of the TV that I want, and I seldom sit down and watch something ‘just because it’s on.’

As risk of hyperbole, a PVR isn’t just a digital version of a video recorder. It’s a whole different beast. Use it as a VCR, and you’re missing the point. Use it to its full potential, and it really will change the way you watch TV, forever.

Testing PVR firmware

At the moment, I’m working on a roundup of Freeview HD PVRs; while I do that, I thought I’d share some information about Topfield PVRs. The TF5800 was one of the first twin tuner Freeview recorders in the UK, and when it launched in 2005, I had one of the first models.

The amount of interest that built up around it was quite considerable – enough for me to set up the Toppy.org.uk web site, and through that a nascent interest in digital television grew much stronger.

Those who’ve persisted with their Toppy since the early days will remember some of the truly, shockingly, awful firmware updates that we had – though to be fair to Topfield’s engineers, they’re far from unique in shoving out PVR firmware that has serious problems. Some of the current crop of Freeview HD kit has arrived on store shelves with sluggish response, inability to play back sound on some recordings, and so on.

So, one of the things that we did on the Toppy web site was set up an extended beta testing scheme, working with Turbosat, the UK distributor, to do our own testing of how the units performed, both to check some of the bugs that we’d experienced in previous firmwares hadn’t reappeared, and to verify some of the things in operation that, frankly, it didn’t look like the Topfield tests included.

Test documents

For those who are interested in these things then, the two PDF documents attached to this posting are part of the unofficial test scheme that we devised. Before going any further, you should note that they’ve not been updated since 2008, and some of the tests will be applicable only to the Topfield models, though the bulk are worth checking on any twin tuner recorder, to see how well it performs.

channelmap2008

This first document, the ‘channel map’ is simply to help people select the appropriate channel needed for testing. It’s not terribly up to date, but you’ll get the general idea; I’ll try to find time to do a revised version when I can.

The second document is the test scheme itself; testers work through this – and it can take hours to do in full – and record the results on the web site; we can then see which things are always failing, which might be intermittent, and so on, and pass more feedback to the engineers. Some of it may look dull and tedious, but if you want to be sure that a PVR is working properly you really do need to check these things.

It’s worth bearing in mind, too, that the scheme doesn’t include all the possible tests, especially with the launch of Freeview+ and things such as series link, which would require a whole new set of tests, to determine how well automatic recordings and scheduling work.

If you think testing a digital TV recorder thoroughly is a matter of just setting a few timers, and sitting back, think again. And if you have a recorder of your own, and fancy working through some of the tests below – the notes should help you – let me know how you get on. If there’s enough interest, perhaps I’ll create a generic version of these PVR tests that people can use to score any brand of recorder.

TestScheme-0.4

Notes on the tests

To help you understand the tests, here are some notes which explain some of the Topfield-specific elements.

• 1.3 On the TF5800, you can key in a percentage on the remote to jump to any part of the recording
• 1.4 An early bug caused the memory to fill up as the unit reloaded the BBC interactive application
• 2.3 If you use the remote when the TF5800 has woken up to record, it should stay on afterwards, as it thinks you’re watching TV
• 2.7,2.8 Unlike some recorders, the TF5800 is very flexible about which channels you can watch, even with two recordings running
• 2.9 The bug mentioned here would cause a recording to change channel part way through, as the TF5800 ‘stole’ a tuner to allow you to watch live TV
• 2.10 When a channel is off air, it displays a static text screen; sometimes, recordings that start then fail to pick up the video stream correctly
• 2.14-17 A bug in tuner allocation on the TF5800 in some firmwares meant that, even if there was a spare tuner, sometimes the box would change channels on the one you were watching, or interrupt a playback unnecessarily
• 2.24-27 The Topfield units can save a Pay TV channel in unencrypted form, either directly, or by using the ‘copy’ function
• 6.1 A bug in some firmwares meant that identically named files, in different folders, would be mistaken for each other
• 6.5 The TF5800 includes some games in the firmware
• 6.6 Some firmwares would forget your selection of favourites when switching between TV and radio modes
• 6.7-9 Some firmwares would not play back TV programmes correctly when in radio mode

Icecrypt T2200 FreeviewHD photo gallery

Finally my pre-production sample of the Icecrypt T2200 has arrived, so I’ve taken a few photographs to show. The front panel is the same as in the pictures available elsewhere, with a few tweaks to the logos. The rear panel has changed substantially from the prototype unit that I was using – now the only sockets are HDMI, Ethernet, optical digital, twin SCARTs and the aerial connectors – the prototype also had composite, component and stereo audio.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the photos I took this afternoon. In most cases, the captions should be pretty self-explantory, but feel free to raise any points in the comments below.

In all cases, just click the image to see it full size.

For comparison, top to bottom: Icecrypt T2200, Humax HD-Fox T2, Humax Foxsat HDR

Front of the Icecrypt T2200

The rear view of the T2200 reveals the bare minimum of sockets

The remote control for the T2200 is the same as for Topfield's TF5810 PVR

The main menu has a simple row of icons

The channel scan screen will be familiar to Topfield users

The main view of the T2200 programme guide; you can alter the opacity

Press red, and you see this newspaper-like EPG view

The channel list will show only favourite channels, if you've set them up

You can create multiple favourite channel lists

A close-up showing the T2200's USB port in action

The T2200 plays media files from USB drives - here a DivX HD clip