Pace giveth and Freeview taketh away

net1

Inthe troubled world of digital video recorders, owners of the Pace Twin Freeview recorder are still waiting for the service to work as expected, two years after its launch.

Essentially a Freeview version of Sky+, the Pace Twin relies on TV listings being broadcast as part of the Freeview signal.

But in the run-up to the product's launch for the Christmas 2002 market, Pace somehow neglected to warn customers that the requisite listings info was not being broadcast and, despite optimistic press releases, there was no certainty that it ever would be.

In late 2004 the listings broadcast finally began, but was soon dropped from some channels. Pace Twin users are now unable to record any programmes from those channels as the units report that there is a fault.

Users report a slew of other faults with the Pace Twin units, such as ITV and Channel 4 being omitted from the channel line-up, the instant record feature not working due to missing programme details, lock-ups caused by a known memory overflow issue, and a variety of other crashes and glitches that by some accounts have transformed the service into a cut-down version of Freeview costing ten times the price

easysat

On the DTT forum Philips DVD Recorder WITH Freeview Tuner (DVDR745/05) someone mentioned that Philips seems to have delayed the launch of their DVD recorder with digital tuner. I wonder if this might also be related to the EPG problem on Freeview.

__________________
pc::

cjgall

The Philips analogue DVD recorders use GUIDE Plus+, an analogue equivalent to the digital EPG. They do not solely rely on this though, you can still enter a channel number and start- end time along with mpeg quality to record. To be honest I don't see what the problem is. All the none Sky PVR satellite receivers I have come accross allow you to set the recording time manually as well as through the EPG. My Topfield 4000PVR only shows now and next on UK and Dutch channels so I rely on being ably to set the timer manually. I assume that the Topfield DVB-T boxes being sold over here work in the same way.