Spaced Out ::

Santa was good to me this year and delivered a shiny new Humax 9200T PVR. For those not familiar with PVRs, they are hard disc based digital video recorders. The Humax are specifically designed for Freeview and the first generation of recorders (the 8000) allowed you to record programmes through the Freeview electronic programme guide (much like Sky) and also timeshift shows. Timeshifting allows you to pause live TV and rewind or fast forward through it. The PVR records the live channel into a cache on the disc and can also stream the recording from the cache at the same time. Basically, if you fancy a cuppa tea just pause your programme, run to the kitchen and when you come back just carry on playing.

Time shifting alone is a fantastic feature, as well as not having to worry about tapes or DVD discs. Great. However the PVR could only record one channel and, much like a VCR you had to watch that channel whilst it was recording. Well Humax have upped the stakes considerably with the 9200T which is a dual channel recorder. This means you can record two different channels at the same time whilst watching a third different channel or playing back a recording. It also features picture-in-picture (PiP; a small window on the main screen that shows another channel), MP3 playback, recording cutting/splicing, stills photo viewing and a USB2 interface for upload/download. The hard disc is now 160Gb or about 90 hours of recording.

The firmware on the device is still not perfect and has gone through several releases. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the USB2 connection. The interface on the box, as well as the software, appears to have been very rushed. The transfer speed is very slow at ~1Mb/s (it should be at least 10Mb/s) and no error correction is employed which means recordings with blips in them. Also, they are transferred as raw video streams as transmitted over-the-air. All of this has led to a variety of investigation and development by the community at large and reported, to a greater extent, at Hummy.org.uk. A new set of USB drivers, and command line software, have been written for PCs (Humax media Controller) which implements error checking and slightly increases the speed. A GUI front-end is also available.

The video files are in a format called TS or MPEG2 Transport Stream. The good news is that MPEG2 is exactly the same as the encoding used on DVDs, although it is formatted is PS or Programme Stream. In short the TS files need to be demultiplexed, re-multiplexed as PS files and then set up for DVD authoring before they can be burnt to a DVD. It would be nice if Humax did all this for you. But they don’t!! I currently use ProjectX to de-mux and then IFOEdit to re-mux/author my files. Nero is then employed to burn the disc.

It’s the actual file transfer that takes time and so, as a result, considerable work as been done in understanding the disc format used by Humax. son_t distributes a file reader for Humax formatted discs called 9200TReadFiles Utility, however you still need to mount the Humax disc in aside a PC. A nice little hardware workaround has been devised that leaves a USB2 interface attached permanently to the Humax disc inside the recorder. This can be plugged in to a laptop and files copied directly off the discs bringing the benefits of both error checking and full USB2 speeds.