ERD50
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How did it go with the device?
I was looking at video review on Amazon by a guy about a similar product
and he seemed pleased with that.
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Viewtv At-163 ATSC Digital TV Converter Box and Media Player w/ Recording PVR Function / HDMI Out / Coaxial Out / Composite Out / USB Input
Another small update: I did manage to get ~ 2 hours to play with this yesterday. Connected it, and it scanned and seems to have picked up all the channels our other TVs have. Picture looked as good to me through this box > HDMI of the TV as it did TV direct.
Next step was to connect some USB storage. I didn't have time to move data from one of my drives and reformat it to NTFS, I did try just reformatting the existing partition #1 to NTFS, but that was partitioned as GUID, and it didn't see it.
So I tried an 8GB thumb drive for a quick test. I was hesitant, as from what I've read, the thumb drive needs fast R/W specs to keep up with these data rates, and I buy cheap thumb drives. But it worked fine! 8GB only gives ~ 1 3/4 hours of recording at 1080i, so just a small test.
Live recording with pause, FF/RW worked fine. No skips or dropouts. I set up one timed recording from the EPG, and that started, but I inadvertently stopped it as I was doing other stuff with the remote just as the recording started (error on my part). So I just hit 'Rec' (like the 'instant record' on old VCRs), let it go for the hour, and then played it back. Played back perfectly.
The manual just gives the most basic info, but it really isn't that hard to figure out how to do things, the screen guides become pretty clear once you work through them.
I saw lots of complaints that the remote was such a narrow beam that it was hard to use (some suggested a piece of Scotch tape over the end to 'smear' the beam wider), but it seemed fine to me.
We will have to see about longer term about drop outs and quirks. A lot of people report problems with scheduled recording just getting dropped. But others report it works fine. I suspect that marginal signal quality is a factor. We will see once I get a hard drive set up and test daily/weekly recording.
One thing I've noticed, but need to verify - it seems the signal from the antenna loop-though to the TV degrades the signal significantly while recording. When I was recording, and then switched the TV back to the ANT input, so I could watch one show live OTA while recording another with the box, I lost many of the weaker channels. But these are fine while not recording. I'll need to verify this when I have more time, but I suspect that the box just creates some noise while recording. I think that simply using a splitter or distribution amplifier to get the signal to both the box and the TV, w/o routing it through the box will fix this.
But so far, so good.
-ERD50