Homecast HT8000 PVR

Design
The Homecast HT8000 PVR sits at a just-below premium price for a PVR at AU$699, and it carries a design that more or less confirms that status. The unit itself is a moderately small box (60x360x270mm, 3.4kg) that should fit into any entertainment cabinet easily enough. It has a small LED display panel on the slightly curved front with simple (and rather cheap feeling) silver buttons beneath. The front right-side panel flips open to reveal a single USB slot, used for media playback and firmware upgrades.

While the front of the Homecast HT8000 PVR is rather plain and not terribly busy — which may well suit some living room décor plans — the rear of the unit is highly crowded, with coaxial input and output, USB (Type A and Type B), a so-far unutilised 10/100 Ethernet port, HDMI, S-Video, component video, optical audio and a serial data port — again, like the Ethernet port, of no use currently to consumers.

The remote control is nicely laid out, with large buttons for common functions. At the base of the remote are the seemingly compulsory buttons for controlling a number of television models, once the correct three-digit code is entered. To its credit, we at least now know it's possible to buy a Harley Davidson-branded TV.

Features
The Homecast HT8000 PVR is a twin HD-tuner with a 320GB internal hard disk drive. This gives it a theoretical capability of up to 30 hours of HD content or 100 hours of SD content, although there's no way to select quality settings to eke out additional space, as you can with many hard disk-enabled DVD recorders.

While the Homecast HT8000 PVR supports HDMI, its actual support for HD content is limited to a top end of 1080i, not 1080p, which is disappointing, but will suffice for free-to-air HD content. It supports the free-to-air EPG, and it's through the free EPG that you can schedule recordings, although the interface for this is far more 80's VCR — with tiny icons to indicate recording frequency, and everything expressed in recording times, rather than program names, as you'd find on most other PVR models.

The Homecast HT8000 PVR also offers support for photo and music playback via the USB ports, although again the interface for this is comparatively clumsy.

Performance
Setting up the Homecast HT8000 PVR was quite simple. With the two HD tuners being internal it means you don't have to fiddle around with tiny lengths of cross-over coaxial cable, as is common in many twin tuner PVRs. We did hit an initial problem though, in that it wouldn't give us any sound output via HDMI. Switching down to 576p fixed this, and all was well back up at 720p and 1080i after that.

As a basic PVR, it does do everything you'd expect, but we often found ourselves irritated by either the slowness of the interface, or the rather unintuitive nature of certain functions. As an example, recording live TV is easy enough — you hit record, and because you're using a twin-tuner PVR, you can even surf away and keep recording your original channel. Stopping a live recording, however, involves more than just hitting stop. Once you've hit stop, you must then read the very small font, making sure you're selecting the program you wish to stop recording, hit OK to select it, and then finally, moving downwards and selecting "Yes". It's convoluted and annoying, even if it might stop you accidentally cancelling a recording you actually might want.

The use of the free EPG is good — if you're in an area where it'll come up properly — but the interface makes it very difficult to browse for anything beyond the next couple of programs easily. Likewise, the time-centric recording schedule and use of icons to indicate whether a program is being recorded once or everyday makes it hard to remember all of your recordings once you get above a few.

The Homecast HT8000 PVR does have a certain budget appeal, given its twin HD tuners and the rise of more free to air HD content, but the practicalities of using the unit make it a bit of a non-starter. We'd suggest that a single-tuner HD unit, such as the DViCO TVIX 5130, with its greater file support and easy ability to transfer files and install larger hard drives, would be a better buy.

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