Home Entertainment System

Our favourite piece of home entertainment technology, a digihome freeview box and HDD recorder stopped working the other day. It was a few years old so we simply decided to buy another one. After looking around it didn’t seem possible to find one that was quite as good.

At first we looked for an all in one digibox, HDD recorder and DVD recorder and did find a Wharfedale model that looked like it fitted the bill but further investigation showed that the ‘library’ of recordings didn’t actually tell you the titles of the programs you had recorded. It just listed them as ‘Title 1’, ‘Title 2’, ‘Title 3’…. Not ideal, and it sounds like a major oversight so we didn’t want to take the risk with this one, as that is what we would mainly use it for (keeping a library of TV recordings). So, as we liked the Digihome one so much we decided to stick with it and simply order a replacement with a 80Gb Hard Drive rather than the 40Gb hard drive of our broken one.

Whilst researching we were also tempted to update our now quite old TV. We fancied a slightly largr (32″) flat panel LCD TV which may give us a little more room in the lounge and a larger screen. We also thought that getting one with HDMI input ports would be a good idea. A little shopping around and we found one that suited our requirements for a little under £280.

Of course, the digibox and HDD recorder didn’t have an HDMI output so that will still connect via SCART, but it would seem as though you can’t have everything. At least you can’t if you ant to be able to afford to eat as well!

Our DVD player is about 10 years old and very temperamental too so as we couldn’t get an all in one solution we decided to by a cheap DVD player as well and found one with HDMI output (Well I have to use the HDMI ports on the TV for something!) 1080p upscaling and also a USB port and AD card slot so that we could in theory hook up a USB hard drive to it and watch HD content from that. I wonder if it will play content from my iPod as well via the USB port?

The new toys haven’t arrived yet but i’ll let you know how we get on with them once they do.

Actually, we do have the new digibox and HDD recorder and in most respects it is the same as the old one, except for a few little quirks. First up, it is a lot slower to respond so entering the EPG take a while and when you do so you can no longer hear the sound from the channel you were watching. It does allow you to record two programs at once though and of course has a lot more storage space.

We don’t spend lots of money on such things normally and all of this only came to around £350 so we’re not exactly talking high end home entertainment and cinema style quality but hopefully it’ll be better than we’re used to and will save some room in the lounge. Now all I have to do is find some HD content to see what all the fuss is about.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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