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Just for the records...
Entering exhibition halls of ExCeL on a beautiful sunny day (and those come
rare in London) we roughly knew what to expect. Press kit received few days
before in a manner of speaking revealed what's hot in satellite fashion for
the forecoming months. We also had a chance to see, that there were no misunderstandings
between manufacturers as to the future of the market.
Personal Video Recorders built into satellite boxes dominated stands across
the hall this year. Ignoring discouraging rise and fall of TiVO in Europe, major
and minor manufacturers joined the bandwagon of mpeg2 recording on internal
hard drives, adding what they felt could attract potential customers from advanced
playback features to sat+internet hybrids with Mp3 storage onboard. And it's
a positive thing - the mission pursued by nearly ancient Nokia 9600 hackers
streaming mpeg via SCSI port finally took a right turn and found commercial
followers with budgets and rooms full of designers.
Humax, the major Korean manufacturer well known for its 5x00 series brought
two of their inventions:
The follow up to their IRCI series - WIR 4450. The box has a new design, traditional
OSD of 5x00 series and two built in slots - one for Irdeto card and one for
"banking card". There are no spare CI's whatsoever, so this option
is probably more interesting for Pay TV providers than a typical user. Additional
features include Open TV (En2) and built in modem.
Humax WIR 4450 |
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»1 Irdeto smart card reader
»1 Banking card slot
» built in modem (V.90)
» OpenTV EN2 support
http://www.humax.co.kr
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In the centre of the Humax stand we found the PVR 5000 - as the name points
- Humaxes step towards digital recording. Redesigned and pleasing to the eye,
the OSD is driven by two powerful MIPS CPUs at 150Mhz and 200Mhz for video encoding
(to compare - whole 5x00 series were driven entirely by 81Mhz) and that shows
- box had much better response to remote commands than anything else we've seen
from Humax to date. PVR 5000 consists of 40Gb hard drive storing up to 14 hours
of mpeg2 video, dual tuner (guy on the stand reckoned you can record up to two
channels in the same time) and dual CI.
Humax PVR 5000 |
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» 2 slot common interface
» 40Gb HDD/ 14 hours rec.
» Dual satellite tuner
» USB and IEEE1394 connector
» Quick program search
» Mosaic browser
» AIV files transmission between PC and STB
http://www.humax.co.kr
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PVR features of 5000 model looked quite impressive - you have A-B repeats,
bookmarking entire or parts of recordings, stop live picture with skip and fast
forward options, rewinding live TV with one touch fast return to current picture.
Since it's dual tuner there's also a picture-in-picture view on a different
channel. One negative note - at some point during the short play with receiver
box encountered sudden crash and reboot. It's still beta, so no tears. But the
biggest surprise of all is hidden at the back of the receiver - except standard
RS232, RF, 2 SCRTs, RGB and S/PDIF optical output we found the box was enriched
by S-Video output, and external connectivity options in form of an USB port,
phone line connection and IEEE 1394 interface! Yes - in theory you will be able
to hook your camera up to the PVR 5000 and what's more important - still theoretically
- you should be able to move video files to your PC
Echostar, usually found on the shelves reserved for more expensive receivers
in Europe showed its replacement to slowly retiring Ad3000 series in form of..
Obviously.. PVR. DVR 7000 is the name to remember. Built in Viaccess plus two
CI slots, storing 4000 digital TV channels, 1000 radio stations, 700 analog
channels, 300 MP3 files, 100 satellites and holding Usb port, full DisEQc 1.2
plus standard analog positioner. DVR 7000 has been also given a brand new interface
called EchoNav with 6 weeks EPG. Currently, the interface feels quite slow and
heavy, which may or may not improve in the future. This bad boy looks so busy
at the back that your girlfriend might never find her way out of cables while
cleaning your AV centre. Oh - yes - DVR 7000 doesn't hoover your carpet and
it doesn't wash your car. Bummer.
Echostar PVR 7000 |
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» EchoNav™ enhanced UI
» Advanced 6 weeks EPG
» 300 MP3 Jukebox
» Viaccess 1.1.2 and 2 CI slots
» IntergrAted positioner
http://www.Echostar.nl
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Staying with PVR tune - Strong showed off its SRT 4355 PVR at this year's exhibition.
Stunning VFD in three colours, 2 CI slots, record 32 button remote control,
nice to the eye 256 colour menus comes with either 20 or 40Gb HDD and carries
positioner onboard. Box felt stable and moderately fast.
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SRT 4355 PVR
» Dual common interface
» 3500 channels
» 32 keys Slim Line IR remote
» Positioner (40 positions / 64 max)
» 256 Color OSD
» 3 color VFD
» 20 or 40 Gb HDD
» Subtitles with OSD and Teletext via VBI
http://www.stronguk.com
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The "old boy" of PVR business - Micronik - brought its new addition
to recording series - TVBox 1400s. Kept in the same characteristic cover with
exchangeable CI drawers 1400s and blue VFD is an exact twin of the 1300 series
(including interface) with added modem/ADSL option and Java, Open TV capabilities
compiled into OS.
Surprising appearance came from LG - Asian giant known more from TV/DVD than
satellite market. LG showed a wide range of boxes out of its 440 series, kept
in simple but stylish covers and varying from Irdeto + 2Ci, Viaccess + 2 CI
models to its own implementation of PVR. PVR-440CI has 2000 channels storage
capability, two CI slots, digital audio output and quite fast and pleasing user
interface. Normally we would moan about such low number of channels but in this
particular case PVR from LG might as well become a lower price option for European
market and that has to be seen as by all means positive.
And there is obviously more PVRs looking for their way to your wallet - there's
Kathreins UFD 552, ADT 6600 s from ADTSat/Pixx, boxes branded by EVO, Radix,
BEC and Middle Eastern Fortec Star.
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