Top Up TV Review

Overall Rating

Very easy to use, even my parents/grandparents could do it ... once you figured out the slightly unintuitive "record NOW" function (which got changed from simple OTR by some random software update)

Handy one-box DVB receiver and hard disc recorder solution for anyone who wants to move on up from terrestrial (or "downsize" from satellite / cable) and tape recording without changing their TV, having a great mess of cables, or dealing with the other headache that is DVD recording.

Nice readable text on menus (though having an option to make it smaller for those of us with good eyes and a will to get through stuff quicker / see more schedule at once would be nice)

No-nonsense arrangement of filing system. Everything just goes into one chronologically ordered pile.

Handy live-replay / tv pause function.

Twin tuners endlessly handy for clashing shows.

Good picture and sound quality.

Decent customisation options - picture shape & positioning, plasma/other screen types, languages, parental lock etc.

Handy readout of how much recording time _as a minimum_ is left on disc in all relevant menus... or at least, it _used_ to have this.

Top-Up TV offering is rubbish for the money charged. Never even bothered to go for the included free trial when I saw the lineup and what it would cost after the first month.

Reserves loads of space for various TUTV channels _by default_ EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION! Something like 1/2 or more of the disc space is given over to recording stuff you can't even watch.

Box. Is. So. Bloody. Unreliable.... you'd swear it was made by Sinclair in the early 80s or something. I don't think I've used another item of home electronics that's quite as flaky. Even our Linksys WRT54GC-v2 falls over less often. You simply cannot trust it to record anything you ask it to, or to be able to play it back later on. I don't know what the current problem with not being able to record is, but I wouldn't put it past them having used factory-second hard discs that are now developing major bad sectors. (Reportedly they use a rather old and retarded - but simplistic to program for - Linux filesystem that is very bad at handling errors)
They even had to make a new entry in one of the help menus for you to be able to turn off the video preview window in the programme library, in order to be able to delete corrupt recordings, because even previewing them would cause the box to lock up near-instantly. And there was no way of programming around it, it would seem.

Programming team quite unable to quickly fix what appear to be bleeding obvious and basic code errors. Though to give them credit, it might be that they're fighting a losing battle against rubbish hardware, and the gradual interface slowing is because they're having to shove in loads of inefficient code to avoid provoking crashes somehow.

Required a whole new aerial to work properly in my house when put in series on the RF cable with our digital-receiver TV. And even so, the signal is now *just* good enough to avoid breakups. Really bad weather causes it to lose the plot even though the TV - further along the chain! - has no issues.

Programme recording timings are next to useless sometimes. You may as well hand a monkey a watch and a schedule and ask him to hit the record button. Even setting the guard time to a wholly inefficient (and liable to cause tuner clashing) 5 minutes doesn't fix it sometimes.

On that note, the software handles said clashes in a really dumb way... Instead of cutting the start & end guard times to zero for progs that bookend each other and flicking across at the listed time, you'll get five minutes of trash on the end of one and lose five mins from the start of the other.

In use, it consumes a continuous 18 watts. In standby, 17 watts. WTF? That's a _huge_ power drain and makes standby a bit pointless. And everything in the cabinet gets pretty hot unless you leave the doors open and stack the machine on a couple stacks of your less valuable DVDs...

Takes forever to reboot when you are inevitably forced to kill the power, and longer still to repopulate the EPG (doesn't seem to keep a local copy on disc). And things won't record / can't be queued until this happens... However it always has some kind of TUTV advert to show you once the SCART output comes back online!

"Series link" function is, again, a bit like letting a monkey loose with the schedules rather than anything genuinely useful. This is apparently improved with the new 8-day "EPG Plus" option (instead of the old simple 14-day one), but I haven't had chance to test it as the change came in at about a week before it stopped recording entirely. Plenty of error messages indicating that it's *trying* to do it (and failing), though.

Recording capacity readout has recently gone from useful "minimum hours/minutes left" to a completely incomprehensible percentage based system. Why? All this means is we now have to do the mental maths to convert it and see whether we would be able to fit that entire series of Phoenix Nights into the disc or not, rather than having it fairly clear in front of us. Presumably some clod complained that the numbers rarely matched up to reality (as very few freeview programmes - generally just primetime stuff on BBC - are broadcast at the maximum rate, so you'll always have a little _extra_ leftover, no bad thing!), and they've taken the unusual step of listening to them rather than throwing the letter in the bin. There's no note next to each programme showing how much % of the disc it'll take up before you hit record, BTW.

It'd be oh so good if it actually worked reliably. Unfortunately it doesn't, so I've gone back to VHS for the time being! Though some of the sting is taken out of the failure by the fact that it was someone else's unwanted present, and that I was trialling it to take over from our Virgin cable box (the replay / iplayer feature is WELL worth the subscription fee - not much more than TUTV's, mind - all by itself)... so we can just use that to catch up anything significant that the tape recorder misses.

Had it about 18 months now and it's never really worked "right" at any point. It's good when it does, but it just breaks far too often, and it seems I'm by no means alone in this. Lockups, failure to record / incomplete / corrupt recordings (a _MASSIVE_ fault for something whose only mission is _to record stuff_ --- this includes the TUTV programming which is just broadcast on a hidden channel overnight then stored on the HDD), problems with playback, incomprehensible error messages, slow interface, etc. Successive over-the-air firmware updates have, on average, slowly fixed some of the more glaring errors (the occasional update making things FAR worse and having to be reverted), but it's a bit moot now as it's reached 14% free space ... and is refusing to record anything else unless we delete a lot of unwatched stuff. Meaning various series that were queued "just in case" in part of that 1/7th-of-the-disc space have been unceremoniously cut off, and I'm therefore very glad I have other options now.

It's just a huge disappointment. Avoid like swine plague. Plenty of other good quality home freeview (and now freesat) HDD recorders are available for not much more, or in fact less money, and all you lose (in the cheapest ones) is the CF-card based TUTV / premium channel decoding capability. Which has actually proved to be an utter white elephant, so it really makes no practical difference (and the encoding quality would be rubbish even so). Use Netflix / Lovefilm instead or get Sky (esp, Sky+ HD... again not too much more expensive than TUTV with the current special offers) if you really want them.

Members' Comments ontahrey's Review

• tahrey on 4th Jun 2009

  How I wish there was an edit button so I could put "this works a lot better if you view it on its own page" at the top of my screed. But I wish more that the line spacing / formatting would carry over to the main (collected reviews) page properly :p