My Series 1 TiVo died on Friday night 🙁

It’s a long time since I last looked into PVRs, can anyone recommend any particular models?

My dad has a Humax YouView box which seems OK (I suppose… It still seems a big step back from my 13 year old TiVo), is that worth getting or are there better options?

I’m not keen on monthly subscriptions so only needs to handle Freeview and I would prefer something I can buy outright.

I’ve been looking at Panasonic, there’s some unhappy Humax owners on here.

HTH

Had a humax which went back as it was a bit buggy. Replaced with Panasonic which is great. A couple of minor niggles but very reliable.

I gave up once iPlayer/C4OD came out – still streamsd at HD and I have pretty pony broadband.

What’s died on the TiVo? Might not be an expensive fix.. did the HDD on my Humax a couple of times.

I tried to replace a non HD humax recently, got a Panasonic one from John Lewis. Couldn’t for the life of me work out how to search for programmes by word search, and the JL staff couldn’t either. It went back. I don’t think it can search, which is a bizarre design flaw if so.

What TV have you got? If it is a modern one then you can probably just get an external HDD and get your recording functionality off that. Might be limited if you haven’t got twin tuners so you can watch one channel at the same time as recording another though.

In the best STW tradition I’m going to say…

I have a Sagemcom

AVOID!!!!!

And in the other tradition I’ll say –

build one!

Or not. Currently not best pleased that full Bluray playback STILL isn’t happening outside of a small number of licensed programs all these years later. Can only imagine what hoops building A PVR would have you jumping through.

I got one of these

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HDR-FOX-T2-Freeview-Digital-Recorder/dp/B004BMB2XC

Then stuck the custom firmware on it. It’s really great.
Stream anything around the house, download for train etc. so flexible and lots of neat utilities.

http://hummypkg.org.uk/

^ Word for word what he said ^

The YouView version, although more recent, was a downgrade in functionality (even before you add the custom firmware)

^^ that T2 is the buggy one I binned. On googling to try and fix it, It seems to be a common problem. Good ones are good but it’s pot luck.

Buggy how? The only issue I have is the screen occasionally is green or blank. Very rare I think hdmi security or something someone said. Reboot fixes it.

I bought mine off eBay used for a steal. Remote was fading a bit
so I took it apart and cleaned the contacts. There’s a web how to for that as well.

Buggy how?

Occasional freezes. Not recording programs. Quite rare but often enough to be annoying and defeat the object of the device. The Panasonic I replaced it with has been 100% so far. Never frozen/crashed, never failed to record. The T2 had more features but I can live without them for reliability.

I see. All humax recorders behave better if you manually tune the Muxs.
Only adding the ones for your region.
Do that and they tend to be v reliable. I can’t claim 100% though.
More like 99.9%

I used to have one of those TiVos many years ago. Still haven’t seen anything for Freeview as good as that really.

I have a YouView box (the smaller BT one like this) and it’s doing a very decent job. I’m not a BT customer, bought s/h on ebay, and the subscription stuff is very easy to avoid. Works well for catch-up services too.

Thanks for all the comments.

I’ll scour eBay for the BT T2100 and the HDR-Fox-T2 and see what bargain comes along first.

Bought a BT DTR-T2100 Youview box from eBay.

It seems like a decent bit of kit and possibly the best of what’s available (off-contract) but it’s frustrating that it lacks a few of the niceties of the 15 year old TiVo!

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.