Re: Humax or Topfield or (eek) Tevion?

The message <79Gdnd4vX4u_bmbanZ2dnUVZ8uWdnZ2d@plusnet>
from "André Coutanche" <andrec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

Agamemnon wrote:
"André Coutanche" wrote

I can only speak of the Topfield, but I understand that the Humax
is very similar. The getting off is easy in principle, if tedious.
You need a USB connection from the PVR to your PC, and a bit of
patience - the transfer speed is sluggish, say about a quarter to a
third real time, depending on the bit rate of the original
recording.

WHAT? 1/4 to 1/3 real time. So to transfer Ben Hur would take 16
hours?

No, the inverse. A one-hour programme will take round about 15-20
minutes to transfer - or less if you invoke the 'turbo' option on the
Topfield.

I thought USB was capable of 40Mbps sustained throughput which about
1/4 of SATA I and 1/8 of SATA II.

Much faster than that (we're considering USB2 - USB1 maxed out at a
mere 12Mbps), probably circa 320Mbps (about 35MB/s sustained).

Probably. But the USB transfer speed on the Topfield doesn't come near
theoretical maximum for various reasons.

Mainly on account USB is a dirty shitty little interface that eats cpu
cycles at a prodigious rate compared to more saner interface solutions
and the CPUs used in the Topfield and Humax (and other similar boxes)
don't need anywhere near the CPU power of even a 6 year old 'entry
level' PC to comfortably manage all of the various tasks required to
record 2 streams to hard disk and either read one stream from same or a
channel of data from a multiplex simultaneously (record 2, watch _and_
watch a third program).

If the PVR and the PC are a fair distance from each other (> 5
metres), then you have a number of options, all with their
interesting quirks:

Why on earth don't they just put a ETHERNET port on it?

I and others wish they would. But you'd have to ask them why they
don't.

Yes, ethernet, that was one of the other _sane_ interface solutions (in
this case, the most appropriate). The turbo mode available to the
Topfield tries to reduce CPU loading by the remote control interface to
make more processing power available to that clunky USB2 interface. It
still falls far short of actual requirements to allow the USB to run at
full speed, but it does make a hell of a difference (a tripling of the
"standard" speed, iircc).

The absence of a "No Brainer" ethernet port solution defies all logic.
It would have been just a matter of 'pennies' on the cost, and would
have given a fourfold boost over the turboed USB option _without_ the
need to use a 'turbo' mode. It's a crying shame that the most obvious
choice of interface was totally ignored.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.

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