Try the Panasonic DMR-HW100
I connecting the Humax HDR-FOX T2 to my Yamaha RX V3900 AV receiver and got HDMI handshake problems. The blinking was so bad it could have caused a seizure! Look at the egg box packaging it comes in, not a good sign of quality. It went straight back to John Lewis. The HDCP implementation is probably at fault. Forums have said this is the best of a bad bunch, but if you plan on routing it through an AV receiver it might cause handshake problems. I could have connected it to the TV directly and fed the optical audio out back to the receiver, but didn't bother because in the few moments of stability the HD picture quality didn't seem as good as the TV's built in freesat HD picture, and I'd had enough pantomime.
The good news is that I replaced it with Panasonic's DMR-HW100 which has no HDMI problems whatsoever with the AV receiver and has been working flawlessly. The quality of HD live and recorded viewing is excellent. SD PQ is as good as my Panasonic PZ81 TV, which is very good. As the review says, 5.1 surround sound works. Tried the Acetrax movies; streamed an 'HD' movie at a claimed 5Mbits/sec and it was fine except for one brief buffering lasting a few seconds - which was probably down to my o2 ADSL2+ broadband connection having a dip on a Friday evening. Not tried Skype or YouTube. Box as server cannot see my PC, because its Win XP and manual states only works with Win 7. As client, came up with my AV receiver only, which is not much use.
However, I am very happy, and it shows how Panasonic tend to get the basics right, even if they infuriate with the rationing of Viera Connect and iPlayer. This is coming from someone who waited 3 years to get BBC iplayer on his Panasonic TV. Incidentally, to be fair, I have a Humax freesat HD box, elsewhere in the house, connected directly to another Panasonic TV, which works great. It has both iplayer and ITV player. The later is dire but came in useful for the World cup rugby before I got the DMR-HW100.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
