"John Rowland" wrote in message
...
"Agamemnon" wrote in message
...


I doubt it, because you will not want to do this. Once you have a PVR you
will start to watch programmes in a different way. You will always
fast-forward through adverts, so your half-hour programme will take
approximately 23 minutes to watch. This would screw up any schedule. You
will pause it whenever you want to go to the loo or get some food, instead
of waiting for advert breaks. You will rewind 10 seconds to hear any gag you
didn't catch, or watch the last five minutes again if you feel your
concentration wandered. You will start to feel that you control your viewing
and drive it forward at your own speed, instead of being dragged
relentlessly on a conveyor belt set up by the broadcasters. On the rare
occasions that you watch live TV, you will hate it. Trust me, you will not
want to schedule your own channel.

Or think, I'll watch that later and end up with a full hard disk.

--

Michael Chare

Mike Henry wrote:
In , "André

Mark Carver wrote:


Yes, 4hrs 30 mins to transfer a 5 hour programme from the Toppy to a
PC in my experience.


Hmm. I'm interested to know what the settings were in the above example.
(ie what was the bitrate of the 5hr programme - was it very high
perhaps?).

It was five hour's worth of Live 8 from BBC 1 (South)

File size is 10.4 GB

Which is 83.2 Gb

Which works out at ((83.2/(5*60*60))/1000) = 4.62 Mb/s (BBC 1 South is fixed
bit rate on DTT, so that sounds about right ?)


For comparison I've just transferred a programme from my TiVo+network
card. It was 35 mins long, 1084MB total filesize, and took 7m 42s to
transfer (ie 22% of the broadcast recording length). It's a VBR
recording with target average bitrate 4.45Mb/s and peak 7.5Mb/s - I
could set higher values than that but the law of diminishing returns
kicks in.

Transfer times in the order of 90% of the broadcast recording length
seem a tad on the slow side to me? Or is this a USB vs Ethernet issue.

My lap top (used for Xfer) only has USB 1 ports.

--
Mark
Please replace invalid and invalid with gmx and net to reply.

"John Porcella" wrote in message
...

Just out of curiosity, as this is the second time that you have done it,
why
the apostrophe after the word 'PVR'?

It's a way of pluralising abbreviations allowed by some (but not all)
chapters of the Apostrophe Police.

--
Max Demian

In article , lid
says...
André Coutanche wrote:
Agamemnon wrote:

snip the bits I can't answer!

Can I transfer DVD recordings to the Humax or the Topfield from my
PC via the USB port so I can play them back on my personal TV
channel as well.


*****

To the Topfield, I believe so, though I've never tried (don't know
about the Humax - which Humax, anyway?). With some jiggery-pokery on
the PC and a long wait while it transfers.

Yes, 4hrs 30 mins to transfer a 5 hour programme from the Toppy to a PC in my
experience.



I get rather better than that in turbo mode. It varies from 10 to 15
minutes for a 40 minute program. I've never tried transferring anything
5 hours long though.

Steve.

On 06/10/2005, Agamemnon wrote in message [email protected]
text.dial.pipex.com:

Since the TV schedules show no sign of improving I am minded to get a
PVR with as large a HDD as I can afford and set up my own personal
channel. So do any of the current PVR's let you set up an automatic
play list.

Can they be programmed to record something and then play it back in the
play list at a specific time without any further user intervention.

No. You can set up a playlist on the Topfield, then start it off and
it'll play one recording after another. But I haven't seen anything
that's clock-triggered.

Can I transfer DVD recordings to the Humax or the Topfield from my PC
via the USB port so I can play them back on my personal TV channel as
well.

Why bother ? You can set up a DVD playlist on your PC and play it
without needing the PVR. If you demand to watch on your TV screen
instead of your PC monitor, use a Macintosh: they all have a socket
that can output composite video straight to your TV.

Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk

On 07/10/2005, Stephen Henson wrote in message
:

I get rather better than that in turbo mode. It varies from 10 to 15
minutes for a 40 minute program. I've never tried transferring anything
5 hours long though.

Mark's PC is slow or has a bad USB implementation. Using a Macintosh
PowerBook which has USBII (as the Toppy does).

With Turbo mode off, I transferred 30 minutes (526 Meg) in 11 minutes.
With Turbo mode on , I transferred 30 minutes (687 Meg) in 6 minutes.

(These were two different recordings, therefor the different mbps.)

Turbo mode switches the Toppy from its normal state (where it records,
plays, and pays attention to the buttons on the remote control) to a
mode where it ignores buttons on the remote control. Transferring files
in turbo mode is far quicker, but you can't change what you're watching
and may get the odd visual artefact if you're trying to watch a recording
at the same time.

Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk

André Coutanche wrote:
Agamemnon wrote:

Does this imply that the Toppy is only compatible with USB 1. With
USB 2 you should theoretically be able to transfer an hour of
footage in about 10 minutes.

*****

It's nominally USB2 but doesn't actually achieve anywhere near the
theoretical maximum. It will interesting to know what the new Humax
can do.

André Coutanche

Yes, with USB2 the limitation should really be the HDD disk bandwidths. Even
allowing for reserving disk bandwidth to keep recordings and playback going
it should be possible to go at least 5 times faster than that if done
efficiently.

For comparison purposes transfers over 100Mbit Ethernet between my Media
Centre PC and a server go at about 8 Mbytes/s or 1 hour of typical DTV MPEG2
in about 2 minutes.

The message
from "Bob Tidey" contains these words:

André Coutanche wrote:
Agamemnon wrote:

Does this imply that the Toppy is only compatible with USB 1. With
USB 2 you should theoretically be able to transfer an hour of
footage in about 10 minutes.

*****

It's nominally USB2 but doesn't actually achieve anywhere near the
theoretical maximum. It will interesting to know what the new Humax
can do.

André Coutanche

Yes, with USB2 the limitation should really be the HDD disk bandwidths. Even
allowing for reserving disk bandwidth to keep recordings and playback going
it should be possible to go at least 5 times faster than that if done
efficiently.

For comparison purposes transfers over 100Mbit Ethernet between my Media
Centre PC and a server go at about 8 Mbytes/s or 1 hour of typical DTV MPEG2
in about 2 minutes.

The problem with USB is that it, unlike the 20 odd year old proven
technology of ethernet harking back to the days of 80286 CPUs which
_couldn't_ spare the processing cycles required of PIO transfers and
thus used DMA from 'Day One', requires a lot of CPU cycles to implement
and is very klunky as a result.

If you regard USB as a 'Toy Interface' (or, more accurately, a 'Novelty
Interface'), you'll be less disappointed.

--
Regards, John.

To reply directly, please remove "buttplug" .Mail via the
"Reply Direct" button and Spam-bots will be rejected.

Johnny B Good wrote:
The message
from "Bob Tidey" contains these words:

Yes, with USB2 the limitation should really be the HDD disk
bandwidths. Even allowing for reserving disk bandwidth to keep
recordings and playback going it should be possible to go at least 5
times faster than that if done efficiently.

For comparison purposes transfers over 100Mbit Ethernet between my
Media Centre PC and a server go at about 8 Mbytes/s or 1 hour of
typical DTV MPEG2 in about 2 minutes.

The problem with USB is that it, unlike the 20 odd year old proven
technology of ethernet harking back to the days of 80286 CPUs which
_couldn't_ spare the processing cycles required of PIO transfers and
thus used DMA from 'Day One', requires a lot of CPU cycles to
implement and is very klunky as a result.

If you regard USB as a 'Toy Interface' (or, more accurately, a
'Novelty Interface'), you'll be less disappointed.

Whilst Ethernet is obviously a much more mature medium and it is rare to
find a 'bad' 100 Mb/s performance, USB 2.0 can give very good performance if
done correctly. Of course, it's got to be done right at both ends.

USB2 raw theoretical performance outstrips 100Mb Ethernet and you can get
good performance in practice. Witness the external USB2.0 connected drives
that give sustained 30.0 Mbytes/s performance (~50% USB bandwidth). I
couldn't achieve that over my LAN.

I'm not trying to recommend USB2.0 over Ethernet for this type of
application. A general Ethernet connection is much more useful and flexible
in my opinion. You would however need to go to Gigabit Ethernet to compete
with what USB2 could deliver. I will probably do just that at some point for
my home network. Wiring is already suitable, hubs are affordable. I'd just
need to fit a few cheap Gigabit adapters and find the time to do it.