musings

Don’t get me wrong - I still love my new personal video recorder (PVR) and I wouldn’t dream of going back to a single Freeview tuner and VCR. But there are a few irritating shortcomings in the Humax, one of which I think amounts to a breach of the Sale of Goods Act.

You are supposed to be able to hook up the PVR to a computer using a USB lead. Not only is this essential if you want to archive a programme (eg by burning it to a DVD) but also if you want to load the Humax with mp3 music files or jpg images. (That’s what the 5 Gb partition on the hard drive is reserved for - and it can’t be reassigned to TV or radio files.) However, I have spent several hours and failed to transfer a single file in either direction.

If you search the internet, you will see that I am not alone in this. Almost everybody has major problems in getting data into or out of their Humax. Amazingly, many users see this as an interesting technical challenge rather than a critical flaw. Someone has written his own file transfer software called Media Controller because the eLinker software supplied with the machine is so useless. (Neither works for me, as I said). People post advice and even little home movies which include steps like “now drill a hole in the Humax …”!! They are willing to buy hard-to-source parts and make up special cables to get data out of or into their recorder. They are also willing to invalidate their two year guarantee by doing so.

Not me. I shall write to Humax, shaking my tiny fist at the big company which releases a product which emphatically does not do what it says on the tin. Others have been doing so for several years apparently, so I shan’t hold my breath.

Also, the Auto Tracking feature, which is supposed to record chosen programmes when they actually start (useful for example if an extended news bulletin delays a programme you want to record), is enabled only if you choose a programme from the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). But this is not always the way you want to choose programmes. You might want to search for a programme name, or list by genre and then choose from the list. Do so, and you won’t get Auto Tracking. Even if you choose from the EPG, changing the recording frequency from “once” to, say, “weekly” will lose Auto Tracking.

Another irritation is the design of the remote control. There are rather a lot of buttons on there, and I admit that the associated pictograms are fairly easy to understand compared with most remotes. But to get around the fact that there are so many buttons, there is a sliding cover over the bottom third of the remote. This would be OK if it weren’t for the fact that some of the most useful buttons are under the cover. I have simply prised off the sliding cover from mine and it’s a lot less fiddly to use now. Come to think of it, I had better be careful - it’s only a short step from there to getting the drill out!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 5:15 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.