our humax is on the blink

Our aging humax is having a bad moment or two.

Is there any disadvantage in getting a Humax YouView as opposed to a plain humax apart from about £20.

what, exactly, is blinking ?

Youview is the package for on demand stuff no, not specific to Humax?

I’ve just bought the plain version, figured I’d get the catchup stuff via a Panasonic Freetime telly in the summer. Wireless was a pain to setup BTW, working now.

Got the latest Humax DTR-T2000 a couple of months ago.

It’s absolutely brilliant, the UI is super smooth and well thought out, whoever created it has done a terrific job, and for once the processor can keep up with the UI, nearly no lag at all. PQ is great too, as is the on-demand stuff, iPlayer and Netflix are great, the lesser on demand providers less so.

However there are a couple of caveats, the “D-Pad” on the remote control is really clicky – FFS why? It’s crashed a couple of times, no power switch so you have to pull the power, not a fan of that. The hard drive is a bit noisy especially when recording two shows – not sure why it wasn’t on my old Humax, other public criticisms are “only” two tuners and only a 500GB drive, not bothered about either of these personally. Feels a bit built to a price.

Overall very happy 7.5/10, a non clicky remote (grrr), and silent drives would have bumped this up to a 9/10.

Edit: Oh yeah thought of another gripe, you can’t set up a favourites list, you can remove channels from the channel list which you don’t like/want but no actual favourites list, weird.

I know YouView is not specific to Humax it is just that they do a YouView version as well as non YouView versions of their recorders.

Of the onDemand stuff our telly only has Iplayer.

what is blinking – playback can be jumpy, pause causes voice/picture to go out of sync. Tried doing a full format of the disc which helped for a while.

We use an HDR fox T2, looked at the youview units but picked the fox. Mostly because of the forum knowledge and homebrew software available.

Check out hummy.tv

We’ve also got an HDR-Fox T2, as has Pete. With the custom firmware it’s great.

This review at The Register was instrumental in my decision to go for a ‘normal’ Humax rather than a YouView one:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/review_humax_youview_dtr_t1000_iptv_freeview_pvr/

It is from 2012 so others will be able to tell you if things have moved on since then, but the things that put me off were the slow UI and the lack of DLNA support.

I’d suggest that it would be worth opening your box, removing the hard drive and testing it in a PC- chances are that it will be what is failing.

A good idea to check to make sure that the fan at the back of the unit is working and that there isn’t a build up of dust/fluff whilst you are at it.