Great PVR but time to sort out all the other issues

[swamprat96]

Ok I know the humax struggles with many formats but why offer youtube if it can't play the files? Last night we were playing music videos via YouTube and the the bulk of them wouldn't play as the humax did not support the format. I ended up hooking my laptop to the tv.

Which reminded me of the terrible file support for streaming and local hard disk. AVIs over 1.5gb won't play. Almost no Mkv files play. Most mp4 files play but some don't. All of them can suffer frame rate issues. No other formats work at all.

And if I use a USB stick and put those same files to the USB port on the tv they ALL play. Without any frame rate issues. And wma files are supported. And stream perfectly.

Then the music player. Can't shuffle folders of music on the local drive and struggles to shuffle streaming music in the same folder on Ethernet.

If a dumb TV can do it the Humax has no excuse.  The humax has come a long way. The portal has been enhanced dramatically. Most of the recording issues are now addressed and the guide works well.  But my tv can do all this except record. I'm at the point where the only reason I still use the humax is for recording and pausing live  tv. I've been waiting over a year for the other features to be fixed and nothing. So now that the primary tv feature works properly can we please get some attention to the other features offered?

Otherwise I can see myself just using the feature set on an $800 tv and retiring the humax. That's sad

[carlprowse]

Interesting post.

My first reaction was disagreement. Our Humax performs its core tasks really well. But then I realised that my expectations have been lowered by the performance of our smart TV, blu-ray player and previous devices we have used over the years.

We currently use a portable hard disk to move files from our Mac to the living room. We plug it in to the TV. All our devices are on WiFi as my wife has a pathological dislike of cables (and its a solid brick house with no underfloor or ceiling access and few wall cavities)

Idealy we would just flick files to the Humax HDD via WiFi, but the FTP interface is too slow, clunky and so last century. Then, as Swamprat96 testifies, the Humax has trouble playing too many files.

If we plug the portable HDD into the Humax it overcomes the FTP interface, but seems to destabalise the Humax at times. We have had a few subsequent crashes. (We are still on 1.07, but thats another post).

Yet when I compare the Humax to the other devices, it is best placed to be the core of the system. A key reason is the user interface. It is way ahead of the Samsung Smart TV and Sony Blu-ray. My wife took to it straight away. (She is my ultimate yardstick for usability)

So I agree with Swamprate96, because the Humax has potential. It has a great user interface compared to the TV and Blu-ray player. It has the IceTV support. It has the HDD built in. It is designed to deliver what we want, in terms of home hub for storing and playing video and music, and in providing a portal to on-line content. But, it is just not quite there yet.

Lets hope Humax realise this potential, and put in the extra effort to make the Humax the device that it could and should be.

[dcoggins]

I agree with the above. I am a long way from a high end user - I mainly watch some catch up on iView and SBS, and occasionally on Youtube.

I can't understand why some youtube videos can't be played. Recently I wanted to catch up on two episodes of Heartbeat as the Humax failed to record (my fault!). S6 ep 12 played fine, S6 ep 13 couldn't be played. Both from exactly the same youtube source - Heartbeatchannel.  Of course there's no problem on the laptop.

Why? Would Heartbeatchannel upload two consecutive files in a different format? Why can't the Humax play these formats anyway? Is it a copyright/patent issue? Surely it's just a matter of including the decoder in the software, or is that too simple.

Could someone please enlighten me? Thanks.

[swamprat96]

Again its probably down to the Humax's codecs. The one you can play is probably an AVI or MP4 - and the other perhaps an MKV. Youtube plays many different formats that the Humax can't deal with.

There are three key features that need expanding or enabling
1. A decent range of codecs - and ones that the CPU can handle without stuttering (as seen on many avi's)
2. Add samba support or something easier to use than FTP
3. A decent music player

1. should be easy- as said in the previous post my panasonic CPU is way lower power than the Humax - yet does not stutter any avi's. Its just a poor choice of codec
2. A bit tougher but reasonably simple on a Linux OS
3. Just spend some time sharpening it up. Some decent file support would probably do it. Or add a third party player to the portal