free sat boxes with usb recording

devizes18193

Hi my mother in law wants to do to free sat instead of sky .ive seen some boxes that will record to a usb drive , obvisouly bigger is better but what is the minimum to be useful .

Neil_Jones

Assuming these boxes can record to either USB pen drives or external drives, then just get the biggest drive you can afford, anything up to 4Tb should be adequate (for the boxes, if not for your wallet! ). As a guide its about 60hrs of HD recording for 250Gb, obviously more for SD.

wongataa

Why would you want to record to a USB drive? Recording boxes have built in hard drives.

googler

wongataa wrote: »

Why would you want to record to a USB drive? Recording boxes have built in hard drives.

Exactly. Why not just get a box with an internal drive (unless you want to take the USB stick away to play back elsewhere)?

devizes18193

the ladys on a buget of £99 we are waiting on black friday . Ive seen recivers with the usb feature but had no idea how it worked . and its the mother in law who is not techie so im exploreing options thats all . Her budget tight and if the bottom arange stuff is all there is then it all i can get .

Stoke

I own a Zgemma H2S one.... Zgemma have a bit of a reputation for being associated with pirates and what not, but the reason I actually bought it, is because it offers all the features of a normal Sky Box + USB recording and the recordings are in a format that can be decoded by a computer.

It even has some cool features that I didn't expect it to be able to do like smart tv addons and stuff.

psychic_teabag

Do you know for sure that she will use the recording feature ? My MIL has a TV that allows recording to a USB stick, and we set that up for her, but she never used it. Then we got a freeview PVR from a charity shop and set that up, but she only uses it occassionally. (Though to be fair, it didn't have the original remote control, and while I did set up a generic remote, it's not terribly user-friendly.)

A benefit of getting a unit with a USB stick is that you don't need to commit up-front to an enormous internal disk until you know it's needed. (Units with internal disks can usually be upgraded, but takes a little know-how and confidence.)

If you want to use an external USB disk (rather than stick), you should check whether it will be able to provide enough power - some may support a disk only if it is externally powered (or through a powered hub).

For SD recording on freeview, I think I get about 2Gb per hour - recordings from BBC channels tend to be a bit bigger than others.

(Sorry, a bit stream-of-thought here...) The fixed-disk PVRs may have better support for watching one channel while recording another. A box which is primarily just a freeset decoder which can also do recording might be limited to only decoding one channel at a time, whether to watch or record. Or it might not support playback of one program while recording another.

almillar

who is not techie

Hmm, messing about with USB sticks or drives sounds techie to me. I agree £99 might be a bit limiting with the budget, but you could start with a Humax Foxsat HDR, which is ancient these days but easy enough to use. They must be a decent price second hand by now. We're talking about actual Freesat here, not free satellite, which is what I think that ZGemma box above is, and I would imagine that's definitely too steep a learning curve for a non-techie.

zaax

My humax satbox, has a terabyte external hard drive attached to it.

Frozen_up_north

Another vote for Humax, we have one of their Freeview (terrestrial) recording boxes and it's been really good except for remotes... We are on our third.

Beware of using USB memory sticks for some recording functions, the hard disk recorders run the disk continuously allowing you to "rewind" the program you are viewing. Doing the same with a memory stick is likely to result in it failing due to not being able to continuously write to them. Our Samsung TV has a USB record capability and specifically states to only use a hard disk drive with it, although I ignored it and it (so far) seems OK with a USB 3 memory stick.

psychic_teabag

Frozen_up_north wrote: »

Another vote for Humax, we have one of their Freeview (terrestrial) recording boxes and it's been really good except for remotes... We are on our third.

I too have a humax for freeview. Really liked it when I first got it, but it now has an annoying habit of hanging for many seconds during UI operations. Eg moving through the EPG, you might get to move a few channels, then it would pause, then move some more. Still have it, but it's a backup for a different system I'm using now.

Beware of using USB memory sticks for some recording functions, the hard disk recorders run the disk continuously allowing you to "rewind" the program you are viewing. Doing the same with a memory stick is likely to result in it failing due to not being able to continuously write to them.

I mentioned that MIL had a TV that allowed a USB stick. I have a feeling that if you formatted it as FAT, then you could record and then see the files on another device. But (only) if you formatted it in a proprietry format could you use it for chase-playing, pausing live TV, etc. But I may be misremembering that.