Let’s start with a bit of background about my purchase of this Personal Video Recorder (PVR). Back in May of this year the Stockland Hill Transmitter underwent Digital Switchover. As back then my flat was served by a relay, it meant that I could receive the Freeview service for the first time. However this also meant that I’d not receive the full Freeview service, just the Public Service part of it (BBC channels, most ITV and C4 channels, and Channel 5), so in September the landlord turned the aerial round to point at the main transmitter. So from then on I had access to all Freeview channels, and just in time, as the great Retune to make way for HD (the UK government’s next big in thing) would have meant I’d have lost several channels…
So why did I chose this PVR. Well I’d been using Freesat up to that point, but the Freesat PVR was (and still is) out of my budget. So I decided to look at the Freeview PVRs instead. Now trying to find somewhere with a Freeview receiver in days before Digital Switchover (I couldn’t buy earlier because I wouldn’t have coverage until switchover). So I ended up in Comet and handed over the best part of £130 for the Sagem DTR 67250T ECO. Lets start with the specs.
- Twin DVB-T Tuners
- 250GB Hard Disk
- HDMI Output with up scaling
- USB socket for exporting recordings and playing music/photos from USB
- 8 Day EPG with Series Link
- Front panel LED Display
So first impressions of the unit. Like most DVB-T set top boxes it isn’t the prettiest of things, but I have seen much worse. The remote does feel very cheap and flimsy. The feeling of cheapness continues when you turn the unit on for the first time and after a prolonged boot sequence, the LED display shows “NEnU”. Yes they really are using standard seven segment displays rather then Alphanumeric or Matrix. Defiantly a feeling of every expense spared.
The PVR is capable of up scaling its output to HD over HDMI, In my opinion with the low broadcast bitrates and resolutions in the UK, this is a bit of a pointless feature. However I was curious to see if the box supported HD MPEG4 broadcast over DVB-T as used in mainland Europe (the UK is using the new DVB-T2 standard, which currently has no commercially available receivers), on checking the specs the PVR is SD MPEG2 only.
The PVR does have the ability to export recordings to USB devices, however its something I’ve rarely managed to get to work successfully, most of the time the export will fail with an error message. When it does work files are exported in TS format. Also as the box only supports the FAT file system, any exported files are limited to 4GB in size.
There are two ways to access radio stations on the PVR with different levels of functionality. The first way is through the “Radio” button on the remote, this brings up a mini menu of available stations. However there is no information about the current program or schedule. The second way is to use the TV EPG, this not only allows you to see the Now and Next data, it also allows the station to display additional information about the program using MHEG. You’ll probably find yourself using the TV EPG exclusively.
It is possible to play back mp3 music files from a USB stick, though like the radio you have two separate screens with differing functionality, similarly you have the Media view which just plays files on the stick and the MP3 view which displays the ID3 tags as well as the elapsed play time, however I had severe difficulty getting the box to recognise my USB flash drives so wasn’t able to test these out fully. Similarly with the photo menu I had trouble getting the box to recognise photos that weren’t in the root folder. Also there is no way to quickly remove the help bar overlay from slideshows, you have to go into a menu, change the option and then confirm it, when I’d much rather have a single button to show/hide it as necessary.
One big issue I have noticed with the remote is that it doesn’t seem to turn the box on first try, in fact it usually takes several presses (occasionally acknowledged by a flash on the display) in order to get the box to wake up. The EPG is also quite slow, with navigation requiring a ‘press, wait for reaction, press’ method of operation.
So overall the box does have a lot of issues, most I’d say are fixable with a firmware update, but Sagem don’t seem to issue Over the Air updates to iron out the bugs. An update was issued in November, but was rapidly pulled as it was bricking boxes. It is a pity that the more major and respected manufacturers don’t produce PVRs or set-top boxes, as aftercare from the cheaper manufacturers does seem to be lacking.
