I originally had a Topfield 5000 and early last year, added a TRF2460 to the family. I've still only got a SD RPTV but in preparation for some upgrading to HD in the near future, I decided to replace the aging Topfield 5000 (also IDE hard drives are getting a bit hard to find) with a Humax.
I purchased my Humax at the end of August last year (with the lifetime IceTV subscription, which was one of the major selling points for me) and have had ongoing problems with the padding from day one. I don't normally have to worry about firmware updates as these are downloading and installing automatically, so I've always got the latest version. The Humax and Toppy are both hard wired into my home network.
Padding on my Humax has always been flakey. I've always had mine set to +3 at start and +20 at end. Sometimes I get no padding at all, other times the padding is correct. Dave from IceTV Support also advised me that there is a known problem when recording 2 different channels and the programs overlap. Although it shouldn't, this does impact padding usually resulting in none at all. He recommended I report the problem to Humax.
I sent an email to Humax about my issues and received a brief message back from one of the staff who advised he was one of the technicians working on the problem and that they needed a bit more time (that was nearly 3 weeks ago). I also had an email from Dave at IceTV support 6 days after the Humax reply advising that Humax "(finally) admitted the problem with padding on their boxes when using the Ice guide. We have worked out why it's not working (when the TV guide's end time doesn't match our end time) and Humax are working on a new firmware". I don't believe this is the only issue with padding but I don't know if Humax acknowledge that.
Because of the problems with the padding and the inability of most TV stations to start or finish a program on time, I have now had to revert to using the Humax effectively as a single tuner PVR. Generally, if only one program is being recorded, then the padding works most of the time, but not always.
The latest firmware update (V1.05.01) seems to be worse than the previous version regards padding. It has also introduced a new problem relating to the automated moving of series recordings into their own file folders. That was working reasonably well before (not 100% but close) whereas since the update, most recordings are not being moved into their folders.
I don't have problems with padding on the Toppy, so now anything I want to record reliably with padding goes on either the Toppy or the Foxtel IQ2 which also doesn't have any problems with padding.
I am very disappointed with the Humax. Coming from the European market, I thought it would be reasonably mature in its development. It has a lot of promise and some nice features, but at present, I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I only wish I had bough a second TRF2460 instead of the Humax.
