Aldi - Technosonic PVR £99.99 - Freeview

andybiochem

shovon wrote:

But i am annoyed that Aldi chose to subtly change the advert wording at some point yesterday night so deceiving people who had already read leaflets or the special offers page earlier in the week and decided to get one first thing this morning.

That's called 'marketing'.

:mad:

Goatie

I got two this morning from the Kingsbury store ... seemed lots there.

I'm at work (!) so can't play with it, so it's great to be able to hear from you all trying it out!

I'm really disappointed too about the '1 + 1' rather than 2 tuners ... this means if you are recording one channel while watching a second, then you can't record and keep a copy of the second channel, only pause it and rewind etc but eventually you will lose it. Not really a twin tuner, in fact only one step up from a single tuner PVR with another STB for watching (since you can pause the watched programme).

Still not too bad for the money (if it keeps working), but for a bit more you can get a proper twin tuner model with chase play.

dc

shovon wrote:

Thanks for the original advert virgo. I was really looking forward to the 'two channel record' ability and this has just killed this for me.

So whats the next 'proper' twin tuner PVR available above this. Is it the Humax 9200 or the Inverto 7000?
.......

There is a Fusion 40gig twin tuner about £129, and a 80gig one for £159 at Currys and other places it is the Fusion 200t, made for one of the Pace partners who left after a fallout. Some of us thought the Aldi one might be a rebadged Fusion, but it is not. Unfortunately my Fusion HD developed dimenture swearing blind that it had 117% free space on hard drive and wouldnt let us access our recordings, Computers......... >eek.

However having had a look at this one, it seems to be from the same source as the Bush £99 single tuner pvr. Similar remote and pvr box button placements. Could be wrong tho, reasonable pedigree as Bush is a badge of the Alba group responsible for some good Freeview boxes, and Goodmans.

HTHs dc

dr_nick_uk

Earlier I set a program to record and it just started, all seemed ok. As I was in I thought I may as well watch it anyway so I switched to the PVR on my TV, the program came up OK and I good change channels while it was recording but there was no sound. I could pick any channel and still no sound, to fix the problem I had to stop the recording, switch off to standby and back on again. Checking the recorded program it had recorded ok with sound.
Also had the no signal problem earlier, change to any channel and the signal strength bar comes up and then dissapears and `no signal` comes up. All the channels were the same, I had to turn off the power to fix this problem.
I guess I'll hang on to it for a bit to see if an update comes out if not it can go back.

Goatie

Re the tuners, just looking at the manual again...

It says that while watching a channel you can press 'record' and it will record for 30mins, press again for 60mins, etc. Presumably you can do this at the same time as a scheduled recording on the other tuner?

If so, you CAN record 2 programs at the same time, with the limitation that one must be set up manually at the time of the recording.

Presumably you can't watch a previous recording while these 2 things are going on.

Anyone able to check this out?!

dr_nick_uk

Goatie wrote:

Re the tuners, just looking at the manual again...

It says that while watching a channel you can press 'record' and it will record for 30mins, press again for 60mins, etc. Presumably you can do this at the same time as a scheduled recording on the other tuner?

If so, you CAN record 2 programs at the same time, with the limitation that one must be set up manually at the time of the recording.

Presumably you can't watch a previous recording while these 2 things are going on.

Anyone able to check this out?!

Not on my box, if you press record while a set program is recording it asks you if you want to cancel the recording, so nope doesn't work like that.

Goatie

dr_nick_uk wrote:

Not on my box, if you press record while a set program is recording it asks you if you want to cancel the recording, so nope doesn't work like that.

Thanks dr_nick_uk!

Darn, that IS limited! So you can record a set program OR record and retain what you're watching, but not both at the same time! It's a bit odd that pressing 'pause' while watching a channel causes it to be recorded in the buffer, but then that buffer cannot be saved to the 'Record List'.

Really, for about £20 more, the Digifusion FVRT100 gives you much more flexibility, even if is only a 40Gb drive. Not quite the bargain it seemed!

jambooboo

Ditto with me.

I think I'm gonna keep hold of it. The user interface isn't as intuative as Sky Plus (what is?) and only being able to record one program at a time is a bit of a bummer but it is very rare that there is three things on at the same time that I want to watch. It's £80 cheaper than what I was going to go for (the Digifusion FRVT200) and I can maybe get £20 for my old Ferguson freeview on ebay.

jonbg

I've got the ITV sound problem plus when a recording is in progress I'm getting "no signal" when I flick through the channels.

just stopped the recording and got no signal, then onto standby and back on again and STILL no signal on all channels

The program info shows up and sometimes a second or two of the picture and then.....no signal

needed switching off at the plug to resolve.
It really is not now looking as good value as it did.
I'm going to see how it goes for a few days but I think it's going back :-(

jambooboo

I'm not getting the signal problem but ITV is no sound at times, until I channel hop and go back to it.