Technisat HDFS Freesat HD receiver Among the various HD Freesat receivers emerging this year is Technisat’s HDFS, that its German manufacturer has the claim to fame of being the first such device to be able to access the BBC's iPlayer service wirelessly. However, the devil is in the detail. Technisat HDFS Technisat's HDFS touts wireless iPlayer features, but …
On behalf of all Germans I would like to sincerely apologize for this product. We try to keep such things from happening, but from time to time, Management just takes over. Again I'm sorry that this device won't record onto network shares, or USB mass storage devices, or does anything one is used from a satellite reciever.
Ok, so I get Iplayer over wireless - but what does this mean:
It's USP as the only device which can deliver BBC iPlayer via Freesat over a wireless connection
It delivers Iplayer via wireless IP over the internet - not over freesat and then does freesat as well, ok one box - but I've been watching iplayer over wireless plugged into my tv from my wii or my meidacentre for years... the mediacentre also does freeview and pvr as well .. hmm not so a U if a SP
Small correciton to the article, Channel 4 HD is not available on Freesat only as Free to View if you have a Sky HD box and card. It is broadcast encrypted.
Hopefully it will become available on Freesat at some point, but as far as I'm aware no plans have so far been announced.
This box is marketed as being so much more than a tuner (recorder, media player etc.). the only problem is that the implementation of all of the additional features has a real beta quality feel to it.
As the article states, format support is pretty limited for media playback.
It supports MPEG2 video only and as the average film is > 4GB in MPEG2 (i.e. ripped from your DVDs) and
1) they won't fit on FAT32 formatted media i.e. your USB drive (due to FAT32's 4GB file size limit)
2) for some reason Technisat enabled CIFS with the SAMBA legacy 4GB limit to file size
So it's pretty useless at playing *your movies* as stated in their glossy What Hi-Fi advert 8 months ago.
The recordings it makes are all encrypted, and even though the device offers to let you save recordings on a USB stick/drive onto your local network, the files take an age to transfer, and are not playable by anything else. This restriction includes the HDFS itself, which forces you to transfer them back locally (another glacial transfer) before you can play them.
Maplin had no quibbles in giving me a refund after 4 months of promised fixes and improvements from Technisat.
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