In support of the Homeworx HW-150PVR

[Radioguy41]

I've had this box about 8 months or so and have been impressed with it. Good sensitivity, nice picture, and a nice mix of features. Yesterday I went ahead and put together an external harddrive and set up the PVR capabilities. I scheduled timers for two HD shows last evening and watched one of them at lunchtime today. The unit worked flawlessly and the image was every bit as good as the direct feed. All in all, in my opinion, it's a very cost effective HD DVR for OTA.

 

[FaT Air]

If my Magotbox HDD DVR dies, this is probably going to be it's replacement.

 

[Mr Tony]

I had one but its single tuner capability is what hindered me.

I tried it out my new location but one translator station has no guide info

 

[Radioguy41]

I should have pointed out that the whole kit & kaboodle ran me less than $75 for the box and externally powered USB harddrive (250Gb).

 

[DRCars]

I tried one. It was virtually unusable here as a PVR. The slightest hiccup in signal and the playback of the recording would stop. Perhaps in areas where the TV signals are much stronger this would be less of a problem. I tried probably 5-6 30 min.-60 min. recordings and never was able to get thru an entire recording. When recording, a plane (multipath), car, distant lightning or other interference would eventually cause a momentary dropout. I could hook the HDD to my computer and it would play the whole thing and you could see the small hiccup(s) in the recording. If I have to playback on the computer then I just as well record there in the first place, which is what I do.

The EPG would also mix up the show descriptions quite often. It would put the description of one show on another. It got show names correct though so that was not necessarily a deal breaker.

Anyway, glad it works well for you. You must have very good signal with no planes or multipath/interference issues.

DRCars

 

[jorgek]

It appears the quality of these units varies from excellent to a headache. The one I bought last Dec. has proven to be excellent. It records and plays back without a hitch using a 1TB HDD.

 

[Radioguy41]

Here's a little tip for those concerned with reports of delicate frontside USB ports, add a permanent dongle.

http://www.dx.com/p/usb-3-0-type-a-...male-adapter-hdd-data-cable-black-30cm-186120

 

[Mr Tony]

There have been a couple threads on this unit and one giant one over at AVS but I'll post some comments on it

I got one when they first came out and it has its pros and cons. But some of the issues I ran into were on some of my channels when I selected them it would bring up the picture, then it would "burp", like it had to rescan in the channels on that RF station, then it would be fine. This did it every time I selected those channels (it was more than one). So if I set up a timer for that station, I had to make sure the unit was on that channel already and the unit was still on. Otherwise it gave some weird settings for timers.
Now where I am located the EPG is useless on 3 of my stations. That is due to it being a low powered translator and apparently they dont put out a EPG on those 3 stations (I've posted about it in another thread)

I did like the fact that you could record one channel and watch another one in that mux (RF station). That was nice as one of the stations in Minneapolis has Me, This and AntennaTV as subchannels. So I could watch MeTV while recording Antenna TV.

 

[Mr Tony]

As I posted before, the unit is great for the person who occasionally records a program. But for the person who records a lot, there are other options out there.

 

[Radioguy41]

For pure recording enmasse I'll take my Polaroid DRM-2001G DVR/DVD burner, even though it's SD only, but it ran out of inputs. So, I needed something for the occassional OTA and for less than about $75 it does what I need it to do and, in my opinion, it does it very well. The lack of a built-in clock is a PITA but there are workarounds. A nice side feature is I can unplug the HD and connect it to my PC, convert the HD video file and burn it to a Blu-Ray disc.