Rants

Posted on 27 Jun 2006 at 10:38

 

Gallery

Simon Edwards says a sad farewell to his video collection

In my quest to solve imaginary problems, I bought a personal video recorder (PVR) last Christmas to replace my video recorder. It has changed the way I watch TV and I've been meaning to Rave about it ever since. But you'll notice that the little gnome in the picture above looks less than happy.

Things started so well. The Humax PVR-9200T is a combination of two Freeview tuners and a recorder that copies TV programmes to an internal disk. You can even record two different channels and, in some circumstances, watch a third simultaneously.

This means an end to piles of VCR tapes and an end to fruitless attempts to remember how to program the VCR. The PVR's programming system is incredibly simple. You view an onscreen schedule of programmes, navigate to the one you want using the remote and press Enter. Everything should work like clockwork. If only the technology were as reliable as old-fashioned clockwork.

For months it worked well, bar the very occasional crash. As far as I know it sometimes even recorded scheduled programmes while in a frozen state, so it could all have been much worse. The gadget was so easy to program that soon the 160GB hard disk was over three-quarters full. From believing there was never anything on TV, I now had to go through hours of decent programming to free some space.

I ended up lagging behind in a couple of very good TV series, and had a few great films stored up for the inevitable drought of decent stuff around summer time. It's refreshing to watch TV at your own pace, on your own terms. It's probably technically illegal, too, so don't tell anyone please.

Then, one evening, having deleted a film and celebrated as the usage meter showed it was now only half full, I checked the list of remaining programmes. Shockingly, there was only the most recent available. All the other recordings had disappeared, while still occupying 68GB of disk space.

Emails to technical support went unanswered and various internet discussion forums confirmed that this was a known problem, although you can never be sure if the noisy minority make small issues appear bigger than they really are. Anyone who researches a potential purchase by reading forums should bear this in mind: there could be millions of satisfied customers and only 50 pissed-off ones. But those 50 are the ones who will make the most noise, seemingly determined to get their own back on the company that has stiffed them out of £250.

Wipeout

As far as I can tell, no definitive solution exists to this lost recording problem, which can manifest itself in a second but is the equivalent to you accidentally sitting down and spending a month systematically wiping out your video collection with a large magnet.

Humax offers some updated firmware that you can supposedly download to the device over the airwaves, although I've always received an error. In the end I formatted the disk, downloaded the firmware from the internet to a PC, along with an updating tool from the support site, and updated the system myself. This involved connecting a PC to the PVR with a serial cable from my lab.

How many households have a serial cable hanging around? Or a lab? In fact, my notebook doesn't even have a serial port, so I had to dig out an old one running Windows 98. How many people have old notebooks lying around at home? If you're not the sort of geek who does, I don't know what you would do, short of sending the PVR back to the manufacturer.