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The Sagem PVR 6280T has left the building

It has been replaced by a Humax PVR-9200T. The Sagem box had a number of peculiarities that have never been fixed by Sagem even though it has had a couple OTA (Over The Air) upgrades. When I got close to its 1-year anniversary I had actually decided to see what Tesco would say if I tried to return it under warranty, but buying and moving house at the same time meant that I never got around to it. Its worst peculiarity happened if you were viewing a recording and a new timed recording kicked in. It would briefly switch to the channel on which the recording was about to take place, stay there for a few seconds and then return to what you had been watching all along. But even though its peculiarities were really annoying at times, its ultimate downfall in this household was the size of its hard disk. The fact that we don’t actually se that much TV means that the hard disk was usually more than 75% full because of recordings we wanted to see sometime.

The Humax has a 160 GB hard disk, so it should in theory make life easier for us. It is of course a possibility that all that happens is that it will take us longer to get to the 75% mark and then we will be back where we started. If that happens, I plan on using the USB plug and take some of the recordings of it.

So what is there to like or dislike about the Humax device compared to the Sagem box (some of these features are not unique to the Humax, but they are features the Sagem didn’t have):

• If something I want to record is part of a series, and I choose to record, it asks if I want the whole series or just that particular program.
• Rather just having the ability to choose to record from the EPG or via date-and-time programming, there is a “Find” option where I can search by name or part of the name or I can choose a genre such as “Movies” or “Education” and scroll through the resulting list. After I discovered that, I haven’t used the EPG list at all.
• I like and dislike the remote. It is much bigger than the remote for the Sagem, and most of the buttons are much better laid out. On the Sagem I frequently pressed the wrong button. Unfortunately, some of the potentially useful buttons are under a sliding panel which doesn’t seem that sturdy, and I just don’t use them because they are under that panel.
• The Humax can make two recordings simultaneously. Even though the Sagem box has twin tuners, it can’t make more than one recording at a time.
• If I choose to record something which conflicts with something else I’ve already set to record, the Humax will show me the conflicting recordings, and I can choose to replace or leave alone. On the Sagem, it would just ignore you.
• The EPG take ages to fill with data compared to the Sagem. I knew about this from comments on the internet, so it wasn’t a surprise. The other features of the Humax outweigh this downfall, but it really does take a surprisingly long time to fill up.
• Getting to the list of available recordings was actually better on the Sagem. One click on the “List” button would bring, well, the list of recordings up where you could see all details of the recordings such as date and time the recording was made, from which channel etc. Highlighting one of the recordings and clicking “Ok” would start the playback. The closest thing to this simplicity on the Humax involves pressing one of the buttons hidden underneath the sliding panel, and the list that pops up is not very detailed in information. If you want the detailed information, you have to press “Menu” and then choose “Recordings” to get to a list with information similar to that displayed on the Sagem. When you then select a recording, it starts playing right away, but the menu interface is still on the screen as well, so you have to push the “Exit” button on the remote to get the menu interface away.
• There is an 8 GB partition on the hard disk which is reserved for JPEG pictures and/or MP3 audio files. Whether you use it or not, it is there and taking up exactly 8 GB of space. If you do use it, for many people 8 GB would turn out to not be enough, and for those who don’t use it, it is just wasting space.

At the time of writing, the cheapest place to get the Humax is at Dixons where you can get it for £159.94 (incl. shipping). They are frequently sold out at Dixons, so you’ll have to watch their website every now and then to check whether they are back in stock. Or you can buy my used Sagem box on eBay…

Sagem PVR 6280T

In August 2006, I purchased a Sagem PVR 6280T. The Sagem PVR 6280T is, depending on how you define it, a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) or a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) for DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting- Terrestrial). Mine is a Freeview model, Freeview being the British version of DVB-T. It has twin tuners, an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) and an 80 GB hard-disk.

If you are on the market for a PVR, get the one with the largest hard-disk. My 80 GB model allows me to store 40 hours worth of material. In our case the reason hwy the hard-disk is always full may be because we don’t actually watch that much TV. So we get it to record something we want to see, and two months later it is still sitting on the hard-disk, un-viewed.

In an earlier post, I described how a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is a must when watching TV. And it is!

I just don’t know whether the PVR 6280T is the PVR I would recommend. On the one hand, it has transformed our TV watching experience, it is usually quite simple to use, but it is buggy. Or maybe they are “features”. Maybe the other PVR’s on the market are also buggy which is why I haven’t traded it in yet, but I am considering it.

In Use

Before I get too far down that route, let me describe some of the good stuff. Well, before that, let me describe it. Not very big, non-standard size, so you can’t stack it with any other audio or video equipment. It has a small temperature-controlled fan, I’ve only noticed it being on once. You can vaguely hear the hard-disk softly clicking as the heads move around but it is very silent. Being a small computer with a hard-disk, it has to boot up before you can use it. It is definitely not “instant-on” technology.

Recording Programmes

Here is how we usually use it. After having turned it on, I press the “Guide” button on the remote and the EPG comes up on screen. In the upper left corner is a small preview window showing the current programme of the currently selected channel. On the right side a line displays graphically how far the programme is, and at what time it ends. Below that is a description of the programme. On the lower left side I can scroll through a list of channels, and on the lower right side I can see a programme list for that particular channel. Using arrow keys I can scroll through this list. Once I’ve found something I want to watch, I press the “Record” button and that’s it, I’ve programmed it and a little clock icon appears next to the programme. I can now switch it of.

Viewing Programmes

When I do want to watch the recorded programmes, I switch on again and this time I press the “List” button. Here I can see a line that graphically illustrates how much disk space is in use (in our household it usually hovers around 80-85%). I can see the actual list below. I navigate to the right programme and hit the OK button. When the commercials show up I can fast-forward through.

Other Stuff

Other than being very easy to program and watch programmes with, there are lots of other niceties to the 6280. It is for example quite simple to cut of the beginning or the end of a recording. You can also split a recording in two and then merge them again. I guess you would want to do that to get rid of commercials in the middle of a recording you want to keep.

Software Upgrades are automatic. Software upgrades are transmitted over the Freeview net at different times for different models. The trick is simply to have the PVR turned on during one of those times. On the Freeview website I found a list showing that there were was an update to the 6280 and it was a higher version number than what it had originally been supplied with. When I went to see what the current version was again, I found that it already had the latest version, so it must have upgraded itself without anyone noticing.

So as I said, in general it is so easy to use, and yet…

The Bad

If you are watching a recorded programme while the timer kicks in to start recording something else, the display actually switches to that of the channel from which it is now recording. It usually switches back to what you were in the middle of watching.

Well, first of all I consider this behaviour a huge bug, worst of all though is that sometimes (not often, but it has happened more than once) it then seems to hang. I can’t switch to a live program or a recorded programme. It is stuck. It does finish the recording though and then usually becomes responsive again. It has happened once or twice though that I had to switch it of completely to reset it.

Having twin tuners means it can record a programme on one channel while I’m watching another programme on another channel. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean I can record two programmes at the same time which must be a design choice. If I were able to record two programmes at the same time, since both tuners are in use, how should the PVR react if I switch it on and want to do some channel surfing? As it is, it just completely ignores me if I try to make it record something that overlaps with another programmed recording. The only indication that there is an overlap is the fact that it ignores your command to program a recording. It would be elegant if it came up with a question on whether I wanted to forego being able to watch anything live during the overlap and set up two recordings anyway. As it is, I have to find the list of programmed recordings to see where the overlap is. I can then go back to the EPG to check what the other program was and then decide whether I want the recording to go ahead, or cancel and set up the other recording.

Anytime you watch anything live you have the option to pause the programme and (provided you have been watching for long enough) rewind and then go on playing. The reason it can do this is that it is always recording what you are watching and it always keeps up to the last 30 minutes of what you have been watching. If you pause it, the 30 minutes is also the maximum amount of time it can be paused. Being able to pause just like that, or to rewind a bit is great, unfortunately there is a drawback to this functionality. Anytime you switch channels, it first has to start recording to the hard-disk and then playback from there. Not much you can do about that other than putting a fast hard-disk into the box, so I can’t blame Sagem for that. I can blame them for what I consider to be a bug. When I no longer want to pause, I press play. You would expect it to continue from that point on, but no. It immediately gets in step with the live transmission, so I now have to press the rewind button to get back to where I really was. In other words, there is no point in using the pause button (unless you want to be reminded of where in the programme you were), let it play and then press the rewind button when you want to catch up on what happened while you where out.

Another oddity is seen when you want to watch something that is in the middle of being recorded. You go to the list of recorded programs and you will se a red circle next to the programme that is in process of being recorded. You press the OK button and you find yourself not at the beginning, but at where the programme is right now. So you then have to press the rewind button to get to the very beginning of the recording.

Will I Keep It?

I probably won’t trade in the PVR 6280T. I can live with the oddities and it is a stop-gap. What I really want is a network connected PVR, or at the very least with a USB port so I can take a recording of the device. I want to be able to store those recordings I want to keep long-term, and I want to potentially view them somewhere else in the house, and the PVR 6280T is a stand-alone island in that respect.

PVR, The (Intermediate?) Future of TV!

I’ve had a PVR with built-in hard-disk for ½ a year now. We have never watched a lot of TV, nevertheless it has transformed the way we use our TV. I wouldn’t want to watch TV without a PVR anymore (but I still think it is only a temporary evolutionary step and I’ll get to that in another post). The 2 features that have brought this change about are:

EPG (Electronic Program Guide): The ability to see what is coming (with a short description), when and where directly on the TV and to be able to navigate in the list is brilliant.

Time-shifting, the ability to watch TV at another time than the original broadcast is THE reason to get a PVR. The EPG is what makes time-shifting practical. Granted, a VHS video recorder and a blank tape can also do time-shifting, but despite working with IT at a technical level I have always had to get the manual out when programming my VHS video recorder. With the PVR I bring up the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) on the screen, select the program or film I want to record and press the record button and that’s it, the programming of what I want recorded is done. Even my wife can do it (Not meant to be disparaging, in fact she has more education than I do, but she never programmed the VHS). Worst of all, I could never find a blank tape when I needed it. 99% of what I have ever recorded wasn’t recorded because I wanted to keep it; I just wanted to be able to see it at a more convenient time. So saving a recording on a hard-disk for later viewing and then deleting it is fine.

The simplicity of time-shifting with a hard-disk based PVR means that we hardly ever watch anything not time-shifted, and even then we have the option of pausing the viewing or rewinding because we missed something and then continuing the viewing. This has become slightly problematic. The device I bought has an 80GB hard-disk which the manufacturer claims can hold 40 hours of recorded TV. We recently “lost” some recordings (the PVR ran out of space and left a 30 minutes recording of something which lasted 2 hours) because of lack of space. The lessons are:

• Effortless time-shifting changes the way TV is watched (I’m not the first one to find out as can be seen here and here).
• You can never have too much hard-disk space (I learnt this lesson back in 1986 when I told a colleague that he was ridiculous buying a 20MB hard-disk, occasionally I need my memory jogged).

Is it a PVR or a DVR?

Most TV recording devices with hard-disks are today sold as PVR’s (Personal Video Recorder), but are they in fact DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders)?

According to “Decipher Strategy Consultancy” (as documented in the lower half of this page), only a TiVo or equivalent device may properly call itself a PVR, the “Personal” bit indicating that it is a smart device capable of, for example, learning which shows I like and automatically recording them for me. A Digital Video Recorder is just that, a video recorder that can record digitally. And this page claims that for it to be called a DVR it must have a hard-disk; writing digitally to a DVD-R for example is not good enough according to their definition.

Here is my definition:

If it can record TV digitally, it is some kind of DVR. If the media is something that enables features such as time-shifting while it is recording, it is a PVR. Why? By time-shifting I have made the TV viewing experience Personal. The additional “smart behaviour of a TiVo we can then call PVR+.

What do you think, is any recording device with a hard-disk a PVR or does that only apply to truly Personal Video Recorders that knows you and knows what you want to watch?

The year of Media-players, Media-servers and Media-hubs?

In the first real post on this website, I described the basic infrastructure in my home: A LAN with primarily wireless access to a server and the internet. I thought I would gradually build up to describing more and more media-rich functionality by starting to describe the most basic functionality first. But it seems like this, the beginning of 2007 is becoming the year where digital media-centres of various types are really starting to take of.

My own media-centre setup consists of TwonkyMedia on the server and a D-Link DSM-320 media-player. The basic idea and functionality behind my own setup I like, but I am not 100% happy with the implementation. In general it is a specialty that has yet to mature. Which is obviously why it is still so interesting
The Microsoft Windows Media Center has been out for some time but without a lot of success.

Now Microsoft has introduced the Microsoft Home Server, I still don’t quite understand what it is about and I’m a little sceptical as to whether it will be a success. It is going to be sold by other hardware vendoes who can OEM the concept and software from Microsoft. What happens if or when they lose interest?
Apple are releasing the Apple TV. Again I’m a little sceptical, for one the avalable hard disk space is woefully inadequate plus it sounds like it is tied very closely to iTunes.

What I want are devices that support the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standards such as uPnP. My current setup does that, but it is lacking in usability.