Personal video recorders
It’s an unusual looking PVR, with its leather top and no display except a single LED on the front. Yet this hides (or enhances, if you like the design) a solid two-tuner PVR which also includes a goodly portion of the media abilities and networking which helped the company’s four-tuner media machine (known as either the ‘4tune’ or the HDR-1000T) to win last year’s PVR Award.
So what do you get for your $449? The hard-drive storage capacity is about what you’d expect at this price, with 500GB provided. It has, as its nickname makes clear, two tuners, but you can record four shows at once, provided they’re from a maximum of two networks (e.g. three ABC channels and one from Nine network).
Then there is the combination of features and well-developed functions that makes the unit stand well out from the crowd. Chief among these are Humax’s trio of apps, the most useful of which allows streaming of Live TV and recordings to a smart device on your network, so that even if this PVR is in your lounge, you can sit in bed watching its recordings on your iPad.
And once it’s networked, recordings made by the unit can be downloaded via FTP, or indeed directly copied from the unit’s hard disk over the network using Windows Explorer or Finder on a computer on the same network. You can also copy media to a special ‘Download’ folder on the unit, both by FTP and simply by dragging and dropping to that folder from a PC/Mac on the same network.
It has its own suite of ‘apps’ on the unit itself, including several that access catch-up channels direct, but by far the best path to catch-up TV is via FreeviewPlus. Most implementions of this all-channel catch-up system we’ve seen have been clunky and prone to failure. Humax seems to have nailed it with its latest firmware — whenever you change channels you are reminded that the red button will take you to that channel’s dedicated catch-up information, while the green button will deliver FreeviewPlus as a whole. This offers an excellent EPG that goes back in time as well as forward, showing which previous shows can be viewed at the press of a button. Nor does Humax bow to the technical hobbling Freeview imposes on “certified” PVRs (no ad skip buttons, no archiving allowed); this unit is compliant, but not certifed, the best possible solution. (Note also that some regions, including Canberra, do not have full FreeviewPlus services available as some regions have pulled out of the system.)
Impeccable recordings, auto-filling of its EPG, remote recording, good options for setting buffers — there’s a whole lot more to the 2tune than its quiet exterior might suggest. These strengths come from the combined might of international Humax, with careful attention to detail from its Australian team. It’s a winning combination. More info:
www.humaxdigital.com/au