It's been a couple of weeks now and really I am loving the Magic TV unit. I find it simple to use and fantastic to just be able to record what I want and watch TV when it's convenient for me, not TVNZ or whoever.  I have always found Friday night fantastic TV night and previously this has dictated me staying in a bit more than I would like, but having the DTR has allowed me to watch those shows whenever I want.

I have had few issues with this unit on the whole really. Although I think something funky happened last night as the picture kept cutting in and out – but I am blaming this on my television as after turning it off and on all was good in the world of Freeview again.

I have been trying to fill my hard-drive as quickly as possible to see how well it will handle it. Every time you go into the recordings it gives you the hours left to record in both standard and high definition, which is really handy. When full this unit will automatically start deleting old shows. First from your deleted items, which is really a recycling bin folder for your set top box.  Once these are all deleted it will start deleting the oldest shows first. There are multiple options to save those shows you really love, so you can always protect that movie you just can’t get enough of, or a really funny episode of 7 days.

What else is there to say? I will keep testing this unit even if it means spending time watching even those terribly trashy shows, like Rock of Love, over and over again – all for Geekzone and not my own guilty pleasure of course. What I would love to know though is if there is anything that you fellow geeks are particularly interested in knowing? Let me do the testing before you decide whether this unit is for you.

About the author: Suzi Heath is a 20 year old university student studying towards a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration majoring in Information Systems and E-Commerce. As a retail electronics sales consultant, she has spent many an hour explaining the finer points of Freeview to customers, but up until now has not dabbled much in it herself. Suzi is looking forward to feeding her currently dormant trashy television habit and also showing everyone that you don’t need an abundance of testosterone and long career in IT to take charge of some technology!

Despite the fact that I don't watch too much TV I was very happy when I was offered the chance to review a MyFreeview|HD product.

I have owned a Freeview receiver for quite some time now and moving to a MyFreeview|HD product was going to be the next step for me anyway for reasons that I will make more clear over a few blog posts.

For those who are not very familiar with the terminology around Freeview Satellite, MyFreeview Satellite, Freeview|HD and MyFreeview|HD here's a very quick reference:

- Freeview stands for free-to-air digital television. Free-to-air basically means there is no ongoing license/fee that you need to pay in order to keep watching.

- Free-to-air broadcasts (Freeview) can be received in two ways: via satellite (wherever you might be in NZ) or via UHF (terrestrial). The terrestrial broadcast is in High Definition (HD). You can check your coverage here to see what is available in your part of the country.

Regardless of which Freeview option you go for (Satellite or HD) you have the option of getting a "smarter" receiver, that can also record (even 2 programmes at a time) TV so that you can view it later. MyFreeview is the term used to specify such a device. In conclusion there are two more terms for you: MyFreeview Satellite and MyFreeview|HD.

Choosing HD (terrestrial) over standard definition (Satellite) should be an obvious choice, but it isn't. On Freeview|HD you (currently) don't have Cue, Stratos and Te Reo TV channels and George FM radio station. While on Satellite you don't get TV Central and Chinese TV. Refer to this list for up to date information. Having a satellite dish already or a working UHF aerial might also weigh the balance towards one choice or another.

Freeview (and me for that matter) recommend that you choose HD whenever possible. The investments seem to be going towards HD and the quality is much better (at least for TV One, TV2 and TV3). I have had Freeview satellite but once I installed my first Freeview|HD receiver I just knew there was no going back.

Truth be told, if you don't have a HD TV you are less likely to notice the difference, but one day you will be upgrading that TV and having a HD receiver will make your view experience a whole lot better.

But why MyFreeview|HD? The promise is that:

- you'll be able to watch your content whenever you want, rather than when it is broadcast
- you'll never miss an episode from your favourite TV series
- you'll be able to pause TV to open that cold beer that's been sitting in the fridge without missing a single beat
- you'll never have to choose between two programmes: you'll be able to record them both, or watch one while recording the other (actually, there are even more options)

Does it deliver? We'll soon find out. Stay tuned...

About the author: Nick Parfene was born in Romania and emigrated to NZ in 2005. He is a consultant for a Wellington based IT company 4 days a week and spends most of his spare time building mobile solutions for a small start-up called Tmro. He adores his partner and his Goddaughter, loves playing adventure games on his PS3, sports, sci-fi, animals (has a dog called Haiduc) and travelling. He is slowly being drawn into the field of photography but has no regrets. If can follow Nick via his Twitter account @nicktmro or his blog http://www.tmro.net/blog.

A couple of days in and so far the Magic TV is really awesome. Recording have a buffer/delay options so you can choose to start recordings a couple of minutes early and finish them a bit late too, which is perfect seems nothing runs on time. It's easy to access and play the recorded movies and I can also be watching a previously recorded show while recording two new ones!

I decided to bring in my mother for the “Grandma” test. I reset the machine, unplugged her and let her loose. She found the plug in instructions very easy and only got stuck on the part of the setup involving the video formats and admitted at this stage she would have asked for help. She then went on to have a play with timeshift and easy record which again she breezed through (Once I taught her what a pause button looked like)

Next we had a try at recording from the guide and here we had a bit of a hitch – the buttons they suggest you use on screen, and the actual buttons are different shapes – as you can see from the pictures below (see arrows) the record, next day and next week are in square boxes, but they correspond to the coloured circular buttons at the bottom of the remote.



Most of us here would work this one out for ourselves but this did have my mother stumped. Once we sorted out the button matchings though she was zooming through the guide and setting up recordings like a pro. This unit gets two thumbs up for me on the beginner users test, as my mum is very beginner and even she felt confident using it.

I must admit though there have been teething issues.

- The first autoscan did not pick up prime tv, the second scan try didn’t make it to the autoscanning screen but the third scan did it. Not sure why this happened but it did.
- A couple of my recording moved folders on me, they have been put in a user1 folder but I thought I had placed them in comedy. I can not be 100% sure on my folder accessing skills, but as they are series I will be interested to see where the next recordings end up.

About the author: Suzi Heath is a 20 year old university student studying towards a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration majoring in Information Systems and E-Commerce. As a retail electronics sales consultant, she has spent many an hour explaining the finer points of Freeview to customers, but up until now has not dabbled much in it herself. Suzi is looking forward to feeding her currently dormant trashy television habit and also showing everyone that you don’t need an abundance of testosterone and long career in IT to take charge of some technology!

So the Magic TV box has arrived… and at first glance this thing is, well sexy! I love how it looks, very sleek black box, which matches my tv and PS3 perfectly. The unit is run through the remote only, so no buttons defacing the LCD panel. Which brings me to an interesting point – this unit has one slight problem, if your remote is broken or MIA, you are unable to use it.

On Sunday I plug it in, very simple instructions for how to do this which even the least technical minded people could do, I may even test this theory on my anti-technology mother and lo and behold, my remote seems to be DOA. Bummer.

Today I had a lovely Scottish fellow (who is on Geekzone) come and set up an aerial, as I discovered my aerial only connects up to half the house… the wrong house. At the same time he managed to work some “magic” of his own on the remote, no idea what he did but it’s alive!

So onto the actual setup of the machine, to be honest this has to be the easiest setup menu I have ever seen. It is highly user friendly and very quick. Choose your language. Choose your viewing quality (options in both 50 and 60Hz). Choose your aspect ratio and then it auto scans all the channels in for you! What more could you want?

That’s the setup done really, 10 minutes and I am happily watching Freeview|HD either natively or upscaled to 1080p. The channels have ~3 sec delay when changing channels which seems pretty reasonable.

I wish there was more to say, but there really isn’t any more setup to it so nothing more to write! Time to begin the road testing me thinks! If anyone has anything in particular they would like to test chuck a comment and I will try my hardest to give it a go.

 About the author: Suzi Heath is a 20 year old university student studying towards a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration majoring in Information Systems and E-Commerce. As a retail electronics sales consultant, she has spent many an hour explaining the finer points of Freeview to customers, but up until now has not dabbled much in it herself. Suzi is looking forward to feeding her currently dormant trashy television habit and also showing everyone that you don’t need an abundance of testosterone and long career in IT to take charge of some technology!

The Homecast HT9200DTR has been fantastically reliable*, with all recordings occurring as they should, graceful and quick recovery from power cuts, and 100% glitch free audio & video (as far as I can tell). I have been in hospital a bit recently, and it was nice to come home and find all my programs waiting for me, and a friendly on-screen reminder that the hard drive was 90% full (I have been deliberately filling the drive up with dozens of shows as part of the testing process).

The more I use it, the more I appreciate the simplicity of the unit. I am a bit of a gadget-head, and though I love tweaking and tinkering, the fact is, that Homecast have covered off 95% of functions you would expect in a device like this, for 95% of average ‘Joe Public’ users. If you don’t want to spend a zillion hours playing with it, and you just to use it, then it is a great choice.

The remote control has taken a little getting used to still – it works okay, but the button pushes need to be clear and concise, and you can’t operate it from extreme angles away from the unit. I will set it up with my Logitech Harmony 525 Programmable Remote soon, and see if that is better.

When I first set the unit up in a dead quiet room, I was a little concerned about the noise, but now I do not notice it. It is not excessively noisy, but if you like your devices to be absolutely whisper quiet, then you might not appreciate the low-but-discernible fan noise if there are no other sources of noise in your home. As soon as you have any content playing at any level of volume, it is unnoticeable.

Despite these few incredibly minor annoyances, I would definitely give this device a 99% rating for usability and reliability, which are two metrics that are going to be really important to most users, especially your mom and dad when you give them a new DTR for Christmas. (You know you can’t leave them using a VCR forever, with the analogue switch-off looming in a few years!).

* With the exception of a seemingly one-off freezing glitch that occurred the first time (but not subsequent times), that the hard drive became full. Please note though, that I received a pre-release unit, with a different model & size of hard drive to what is on sale in New Zealand, so this may have been part of the issue.

About the author: Tony Hughes is a self-employed financial & IT consultant, based in Hawkes Bay. As a busy, working parent of young children, I am enjoying the family & child oriented content available on Freeview, as well as the odd Sci-Fi series as well (Primeval for starters!). I often find I miss shows, as I do not glue myself to the tv every night, so I am looking forward to trying out the Homecast PVR from Freeview.