Topfield T5800PVR
A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a Topfield T5800 PVR and thought after a few weeks of using it I'd mention my experiences. I got the 160Gb version for approx. £250 from eBuyer, despite arriving the day after eBuyer said, I can't really complain about their service.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Toppy it's basically a little freeview box with 2 tuners and a hard drive, so you can watch and records digital TV. The two tuners let you record two channels at once or watch another channel while you are recording. If you are recording on both tuners, you can watch a third channel as long as it is broadcast on the same frequency as one of the two you are recording. The one thing the Topfield has that other similar products don't is a USB 2.0 port on the back which can be used to download recorded programmes to a PC or upload updates.
First impressions were good, the unit itself is pretty small and really simple to set up, the remote feels a little cheap but is functional and reasonable easy to use once you get used to it. The 7 day EPG is much better than on my old £20 box and recording programs from it is simple. One early problem I had was that I quite often cut off the start of the program, I then had to go through all my timers once I'd set them and add 5 mins on the start. I later found out that when creating a timer from the EPG you can edit the start time there and then which makes adding the padding pretty straightforward.
The quality of recorded files seem as good quality as watching live TV and bringing up the list of recorded programs and choosing which one to watch couldn't be easier.
I had anticipated problems with the USB connection as I wanted to connect it to my Linux box rather than to a Windows machine, but fortunately, there is a nice little open source program called Puppy which makes doing this a doddle. I was surprised when it worked first time with no problems. Being able to get the video of the box and onto a PC means no worry about hard drive space issues on the Topfield.
While the Topfield does allow you to edit the videos to cut out adverts, I found that it was quite limited and would cut the video at key frames so you would lose parts of the show rather than just the adverts. After some experimentation I found the best way to remove the adverts was to download the file to my PC and remove them using Video Redo which is almost effortless to do.
As well as recording, the Topfield also provides timeshifting functionality, although I have to say I've only used this once to try it out and never found the need again.
It's surprising how much there is on TV that I want to watch when I can see everything that's on in the next week rather than only seeing what is on when I want to watch TV.
Overall, the Topfield is by no means flawless and is probably a little expensive for what it does, but I have found that it allows me to watch TV I want to watch when I want to watch it.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Toppy it's basically a little freeview box with 2 tuners and a hard drive, so you can watch and records digital TV. The two tuners let you record two channels at once or watch another channel while you are recording. If you are recording on both tuners, you can watch a third channel as long as it is broadcast on the same frequency as one of the two you are recording. The one thing the Topfield has that other similar products don't is a USB 2.0 port on the back which can be used to download recorded programmes to a PC or upload updates.
First impressions were good, the unit itself is pretty small and really simple to set up, the remote feels a little cheap but is functional and reasonable easy to use once you get used to it. The 7 day EPG is much better than on my old £20 box and recording programs from it is simple. One early problem I had was that I quite often cut off the start of the program, I then had to go through all my timers once I'd set them and add 5 mins on the start. I later found out that when creating a timer from the EPG you can edit the start time there and then which makes adding the padding pretty straightforward.
The quality of recorded files seem as good quality as watching live TV and bringing up the list of recorded programs and choosing which one to watch couldn't be easier.
I had anticipated problems with the USB connection as I wanted to connect it to my Linux box rather than to a Windows machine, but fortunately, there is a nice little open source program called Puppy which makes doing this a doddle. I was surprised when it worked first time with no problems. Being able to get the video of the box and onto a PC means no worry about hard drive space issues on the Topfield.
While the Topfield does allow you to edit the videos to cut out adverts, I found that it was quite limited and would cut the video at key frames so you would lose parts of the show rather than just the adverts. After some experimentation I found the best way to remove the adverts was to download the file to my PC and remove them using Video Redo which is almost effortless to do.
As well as recording, the Topfield also provides timeshifting functionality, although I have to say I've only used this once to try it out and never found the need again.
It's surprising how much there is on TV that I want to watch when I can see everything that's on in the next week rather than only seeing what is on when I want to watch TV.
Overall, the Topfield is by no means flawless and is probably a little expensive for what it does, but I have found that it allows me to watch TV I want to watch when I want to watch it.
posted by Unknown at 2:45 PM
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