Humax PVR Update

Tuesday, 3 January, 2012

After the best part of a year since I reported on my new Humax PVR, I thought I’d give an update as the firmware has been upgraded a few times and I’ve finally gotten around to playing a little more with it.

First up, a reminder that it’s a Humax HDR-FOX T2 with HDMI output, twin tuners and a capacious 500Gb HDD. It supports plugging in USB media and plays a large range of formats (although its not entirely complete, FLV missing for instance). It comes with a LAN port and you can plug in Ethernet over powerline or go for a wifi dongle. The former is much faster and more reliable. And FTP server is built-in for uploading/downloading content, but as I noted before all content stored on the box is encrypted. It is also able to play media files on uPnP servers (for instance my Synology Diskstation) and act as a uPnP server as well.

I won’t go in to detail about the software, but suffice to say (and read the many reviews) it is well written and intuitive. Series recording is a breeze and there is a more sensible folders method of storing files which makes finding recordings easier. The integration of internet TV is generally good (and improves with each version of the firmware) although not all channels are supported. iPlayer is the big one though and works well as long as your broadband connection is fast enough (although it does optimised for screen and connection I gather). The one slight pain is automatic tuning…. yes it works well, but where you are in an area with overlapping transmissions it often ends up storing channels from many of them which can cause dropped recordings. use this advice to manually retune your receiver… works well.

OK, so what about some of the “extra” things you can do? First up their’s a very useful summary FAQ of all the things you could possibly want to know about the T2. Secondly, there is now a well established updated firmware (actually firmware patch) that removes many of the restrictions of the T2 and adds other extra features.

I haven’t patched my box (yet!) but that’s simply because I’m happy with what I’ve got for the moment. So… I can play content off my Synology uPnP server. That works well. I can also directly play stuff off the T2 using it as a uPnP server. This is actually more fiddly than it needs to be (for the moment anyway)…. you need a uPnP browser and video player. Portable VLC is more than happy streaming video content, but (for the moment) doesn’t have a browser so you need to provide it with a URL. I have been using the mp3 player Foobar2000 with the uPnP browser plugin. This allows you to get the filename and paste it into VLC. There are other players around (e.g. XMBC) which also work: the above are portable and small. And, by way of experimentation, I used uPnPlay on Andoird to browse to the T2 over wifi and then play back the video using BSPlayer. It works…. but the video files are a little big for the wifi so its not smooth. It does work fine from the Synology though.

The other thing to remember is that the T2 stores it’s files as .TS; this is how they are broadcast and are essentially the same encoding as DVD (MPEG-2). The files are quite big (upto 1Gb for 30 mins) but fairly easy to work with. So I said above that there is encryption on the box to stop you copying files…. how do you work around that? Well if you login to the ftp server and copy files off the stay encrypted. However if you use the remote to copy the file to an attached USB stick on the T2 it removes the encryption. You can then copy it back on to the box and FTP it off. OK, so it works but is a little bit of a faff. Well it turns out that there is another workaround given that the T2 is a uPnP server. To stream video it needs to be unencrypted for the client to play it. So if you know the URL (use Foobar above!) you can simply paste this in to your browser address bar and it will download the entire .TS file. How easy is that?! Note, it doesn’t work for HD recordings; the T2 keeps them encrypted regardless, so what can you do about that?? Well, you can use Foxy to remove the encryption from the recording by FTPing off the header file (HMT), reprocess it and copy it back. You still can’t access it using uPnP, but you can copy it off on to a USB stick where it is decrypted and then copy it back on to the T2 unencrypted. Neat.

Finally then…. .TS recordings. Well VLC plays them off-the-bat no problems, but if you want to archive them then you really need an MP4 type codec. Whilst H264 is “de rigeur” I still tend to prefer to encode to XVID because its open source and remains reliable; expect a compression ration compared to .TS of about 5:1. I use Mencoder for this.

There’s plenty more things in the offing for the T2, but all-in-all it’s a great bit of kit and is firmly placing itself as a media centre. And a rather elegant one at that. Just ordered one of these to experiment with streaming stuff around the house. See how it goes.

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