[Yoleus]

I want a new PVR, my Tivo is getting a little tired now.
Also, I live in an area where the terrestrial signal is poor so have decide it's time I switch to Satellite, but I don't want to subscribe to Sky.

Should I take the plunge and get the highly acclaimed Humax PVR9300T @£170(or even the 500Gb version available direct from Humax rather than the standard 320Gb @ £229) and then add the Foxsat HD (£140)?
OR..
Should I wait (and I have been waiting quite a while) for the forthcoming Foxsat HDR which is allegedly due out in December @ £299

One box will cost less but will it perform better and will it be as versatile?

What's your view?

Panasonic TH37PX60, Sony VTX D800U, 2 Tivos

[wingnut121]

if you have the money i would get the new freesat box for your HD channels only and ge the 9300t for freeview as the quality of freesat SD channels are not as good as digital tv. so you can have the best of both

[grahamlthompson]

Originally Posted by Yoleus

I want a new PVR, my Tivo is getting a little tired now.
Also, I live in an area where the terrestrial signal is poor so have decide it's time I switch to Satellite, but I don't want to subscribe to Sky.

Should I take the plunge and get the highly acclaimed Humax PVR9300T @£170(or even the 500Gb version available direct from Humax rather than the standard 320Gb @ £229) and then add the Foxsat HD (£140)?
OR..
Should I wait (and I have been waiting quite a while) for the forthcoming Foxsat HDR which is allegedly due out in December @ £299

One box will cost less but will it perform better and will it be as versatile?

What's your view?

Panasonic TH37PX60, Sony VTX D800U, 2 Tivos

If you want a Foxsat-HD, there's likely to be few shortly on e-bay as people upgrade to the foxsat-hdr (me for one)

[spinaltap]

My understanding is that if your were to buy the 9300T and the FoxSat HD, you would not be able to record anything from your FoxSat HD onto the 9300 (as the SCART's on the 9300 only facilitate pass-through signals).

In an ideal world (and ideal-sized pockets) you would buy a 9300T for freeview recordings and a FoxSat HDR for freesat recordings.

Channels such as Fiver are available on freeview but not on freesat. This may or may not be important to you, but you should examine what channels you want to watch/record.

[grahamlthompson]

Originally Posted by spinaltap

My understanding is that if your were to buy the 9300T and the FoxSat HD, you would not be able to record anything from your FoxSat HD onto the 9300 (as the SCART's on the 9300 only facilitate pass-through signals).

In an ideal world (and ideal-sized pockets) you would buy a 9300T for freeview recordings and a FoxSat HDR for freesat recordings.

Channels such as Fiver are available on freeview but not on freesat. This may or may not be important to you, but you should examine what channels you want to watch/record.

No pvr can record an external source they do not have 2 vital components,

Namely

An analogue to digital converter to turn the analogue video and audio into a digital stream

A real time mpeg2 encoder to compress the digital video into a form suitable for use on dvds and record on a hdd

Pvr's don't need these as digital tv is already mpeg2 all they have to do is save the signal to the HDD

DVD recorders do have these (they can't work without them) and can therefore record analogue video/audio to a dvd or HDD). They don't offer the flexibility of twin tuner pvrs. Some pvrs allow you to transfer the mpeg2 data from the HDD to a computer and from there it's possible to create DVD's. Both the Topfield 5800 and the Humax 9200 allow this but the implementation on the Humax is decidedly iffy. The new Foxsat-HDR allows this except for some HD programming (for copyright reasons)

[Cyril]

Of course TiVo can record from external sources and can record from your Freesat or Sky box, so can record the output from FoxsatHD, albeit in SD only. You can record the HD output of the Foxsat using the latest Hauppauge HD recorder, or you can wait for the Foxsat HDR .

As mentioned previously I'm sure the standard HD Foxsat will be dirt cheap on ebay once the Foxsat HDR is released. Maybe all DVRs in general will drop in price at that time as well

What do you mean by versatile?

I still feel a hacked and upgraded TiVo is still ahead of the competition in terms of software and EPG versatility, but is obviously ancient hardware-wise.