Vantage HD6000T/NZ DVB-T (Freeview) PVR 50% discount for Geekzone users

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#204433 31-Mar-2009 14:53

Deev8:
dtvs: Special will expire at midnight on the 31st and will not be extended.
Right up to the last moment of the financial year.

It's doubtful that the New Zealand economy will rocket out of recession any time soon (and that's unfortunate). But it does mean that we will probably be seeing other promotions for other products in the not-to-distant future as companies turn their attention to making it through the 2009-10 financial year intact.

Don't you mean tax year? I thought a financial year typically ran 1 Jul-30 Jun.

Jonathan the Pedant

PS - my Vantage unit turned up today, as did the new external HD - now can't wait to get home to play with the new toy... Now I won't have to stay up to the witching hour (ie, after 10 o'clock! This does qualify as late for those with babies!) to watch Flight of the Conchords live, because we have a double booking (my wife just has to have Brothers and Sisters taped at the same time).

benaltoft

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#204435 31-Mar-2009 14:57

I had an issue with mine last night where if I had a file or directory name with a special character in it - [] square brackets in my case - the unit would spontaneously reboot when navigating to the file.
A simple rename fixed the problem.

bazzer

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#204445 31-Mar-2009 15:42

Spong: I bought two of these last week, and delivery was very fast. I must say these are a far more solid performer than the other boxes I've tried. It's worth installing the latest firmware which fixes the very few problems I saw when I had a loan unit last year. Highly recommended and if anyone's sitting on the fence, I'd urge you jump now. This is a really classy and mature product. For the money, I don't think anything comes close.
I particularly like the way DTV Solutions have supported these with a level of professionalism sadly lacking by a certain importer of a competing box, now banned here at Geekzone.

I guess it's just a shame for those of us stuck with the ET. Any chance of a refund due to the many problems associated with these? I wouldn't mind switching to the Vantage.

jonathan18

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#204448 31-Mar-2009 15:52

bazzer:
Spong: I bought two of these last week, and delivery was very fast. I must say these are a far more solid performer than the other boxes I've tried. It's worth installing the latest firmware which fixes the very few problems I saw when I had a loan unit last year. Highly recommended and if anyone's sitting on the fence, I'd urge you jump now. This is a really classy and mature product. For the money, I don't think anything comes close.
I particularly like the way DTV Solutions have supported these with a level of professionalism sadly lacking by a certain importer of a competing box, now banned here at Geekzone.

I guess it's just a shame for those of us stuck with the ET. Any chance of a refund due to the many problems associated with these? I wouldn't mind switching to the Vantage.

I'm sure many of you would have a pretty water-tight case under the CGA, it's just a matter of enforcing that. Inevitably, I'd imagine taking on Pete for more than a partial refund (which seems to be what he's offered in many cases) would require going to the Disputes Tribunal, with all the costs (time, financial) that go with that. Would be worth it, though, to show sellers they can't always get away with treating their customers like dumb-arses. Anyway, I'm looking forward to a relatively trouble-free PVR experience with the Vantage!

Deev8

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#204482 31-Mar-2009 17:27

jonathan18:
Deev8:
dtvs: Special will expire at midnight on the 31st and will not be extended.
Right up to the last moment of the financial year.

Don't you mean tax year? I thought a financial year typically ran 1 Jul-30 Jun.

By and large businesses can choose whatever year-end date they want for their accounting year, and for the sake of convenience quite a few choose 31st March. But it's correct that a lot do choose 30th June (and it's the relevant date for government departments), and a lot choose 31st December.

It's relatively common for companies to be eager to bring in as many orders as possible by the end of their accounting year, and be less keen and less likely to offer a discount for orders after that date - that's where the throwaway comment came from, without knowing anything specific about this particular promotion.

Spong

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#204488 31-Mar-2009 17:46

A possible alternative to the excellent Vantage receiver, being released soon, is the JCMatthew DVB-TB01 box complete with MHEG5 and PVR capability via USB. RRP is given as $399 incl the new firmware and HDMI cable. It looks like the street price will be around $350. This is due early April. I have no idea how good the box is, but it would need to be very good to better the Vantage. Hopefully the Vantage will get a proper EPG at some stage.

Tivo upgrades to operate with the new OzTivo EPG, support and service. Over 400 performed here so far. See: www.hillcrest.net.nz

AliExpress

Shop now on AliExpress (affiliate link).

hangon

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#204642 1-Apr-2009 11:43

The delivery was fast!

So after i got the box, I pulled out an UHF antenna ($50 ish from DSE) from garage and fixed it on top of my VHF. I removed the existing cabling (no descriptions on the sleeve) from the VHF and connected to the UHF fishbone. pointed it to roughly where waiatarua is and went back home.

During channel scan, I got signal level of 1%~55% (the numbers can be hard to read on my CRT). It took about 2 minutes to pick up most of the channels.

The problem is, my TV in the lounge is a Sony 32" widescreen CRT with 100Hz scan. The component video output seems bugged with 100Hz thingy, I got 2 images side by side and both had color distortions.

So I switched to composite video. TV1 and CTV8 are better than before with VHF only, TV3 is about same, but TV2 is worse than VHF, the images is a bit grainy, lacking of color depth, zigzag artifacts, and looks like not well compressed video files. And the freeview HD test channel doesn't look impressive neither.

The video setting was set to 576p, and OSD shows signel level of around 60, quality around 80.

So, what can I do to improve the quality (particularly on TV2)? Better antenna/alignment? Better cabling? Does S-video work better than composite (I thought S-video has limited bandwidth as well)? I have no plan to ditch the TV yet, and nothing in the home has an HDMI port.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

I also had trouble with USB drives. I got several portable disks and USB drives at home but everything is formatted in NTFS. I used a tool to format a 250GB drive in FAT32 and recording lasted a sec then display "media not connected". I'll give it another try tonight but it would be nice to just support NTFS...

fahrenheit

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#204917 2-Apr-2009 15:36

hangon:

So, what can I do to improve the quality (particularly on TV2)? Better antenna/alignment? Better cabling? Does S-video work better than composite (I thought S-video has limited bandwidth as well)? I have no plan to ditch the TV yet, and nothing in the home has an HDMI port.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

There isn't much you can do. The chipset the Vantage uses (and all other STBs that use the same) is lousy with SD resolutions.

Setting it to 576i might make it a little easier to swallow.
Here's a shot of mine showing the difference.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y64/faranheit/Vantage_HDvsSD.jpg

hangon

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#204926 2-Apr-2009 16:06

fahrenheit:
Here's a shot of mine showing the difference.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y64/faranheit/Vantage_HDvsSD.jpg

Thanks... that picture is worth a thousand words. My issues can be demonstrated in the SD, around "AirWick", and around the elbow andn nose. the HD just looks so much better.

I better upgrade the TV sooner...

Oh I did replace the old ~12m cable between wall and receiver with a 2m cheap DSE cable, signal/quality jumped to 70/99. I switched to S-Video but no dramatic improvement. I guess after all it's a HD box, and SD output is not tweaked.

And the USB connectivity issue, it seems unlike simply plug n play. The manual mentioned whenever you connect or disconnect the USB jack, the receiver has to be in stand by mode. I followed that and my drive got recognized. finger crossed for recording test tonight.

FPR

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#204935 2-Apr-2009 16:56

Hi,
Welll the vantage crashed last night (rebooted) while I was watching underbelly (recorded) & recording Prison Break at the same time. I had just finished fast forwarding some adds & it rebooted for no reason. Because of this random reboot it failed to record Prison Break.

DTVS guy, any idea's why this would happen?

on a side note
Upgraded firmware the other day & can no longer watch Xvid encoded *.avi's

dtvs

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#205036 2-Apr-2009 23:16

FPR: Hi,
Welll the vantage crashed last night (rebooted) while I was watching underbelly (recorded) & recording Prison Break at the same time. I had just finished fast forwarding some adds & it rebooted for no reason. Because of this random reboot it failed to record Prison Break.

DTVS guy, any idea's why this would happen?

on a side note
Upgraded firmware the other day & can no longer watch Xvid encoded *.avi's

Hi,

Was the crash with old version software or new version?? Also email us with your config including HDD brand and model. We will look into it. A small sample of your Xvid file will also help.

AH

HP

Shop now for HP laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

juliant

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#205157 3-Apr-2009 15:19

Appears to be a few people having some issues with the PVR side of the Vantage - look on DTVNZ forum also. I bought one two weeks ago along with a new external hard drive and have had issues where it has failed to record - or the recording disappeared. Better now I used the format function on the Vantage to format the drive again, but still ocassions where nothing appears in recorded TV folder, but then if I reboot they come back again. One on-going problem is it often fails to record two programs on the same mux - does one but not the other. However not all the time - did a test this morning recording TV1 and 2 at the same time and it worked.
On speaking to them they recommend (and they are keen to assist) using the H2format utility to format the drive - if so can I suggest they put this somewhere obvious on the website with a link perhaps? Also make it clear somewhere they recommend the 2nd last software version - not the latest.
For $250 I can live with the odd gltich in recording 2 channels at once but I'd be less happy if I'd spent $500. As an aside - great we now have TV3+1 as often TVNZ and TV3 have shows you want to watch at the same time, and now even with a single tuner you can record them both

Spong

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#205176 3-Apr-2009 16:32

juliant: Appears to be a few people having some issues with the PVR side of the Vantage - look on DTVNZ forum also. I bought one two weeks ago along with a new external hard drive and have had issues where it has failed to record - or the recording disappeared. Better now I used the format function on the Vantage to format the drive again, but still ocassions where nothing appears in recorded TV folder, but then if I reboot they come back again. One on-going problem is it often fails to record two programs on the same mux - does one but not the other. However not all the time - did a test this morning recording TV1 and 2 at the same time and it worked.
On speaking to them they recommend (and they are keen to assist) using the H2format utility to format the drive - if so can I suggest they put this somewhere obvious on the website with a link perhaps? Also make it clear somewhere they recommend the 2nd last software version - not the latest.
For $250 I can live with the odd gltich in recording 2 channels at once but I'd be less happy if I'd spent $500. As an aside - great we now have TV3+1 as often TVNZ and TV3 have shows you want to watch at the same time, and now even with a single tuner you can record them both

Have you been using a 2.5" bus powered hard disk or a 3.5" seperately powered drive? I've found I get good results with a WD MyBook 3.5" drive, including power down when not needed, but a Seagate bus powered 2.5" drive is hopeless, with similar symptoms as yours. DTVNZ in facy don't recommend using bus powered drives with the Vantage.

Tivo upgrades to operate with the new OzTivo EPG, support and service. Over 400 performed here so far. See: www.hillcrest.net.nz

juliant

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#205288 4-Apr-2009 14:33

Its a Seagate Freeagent 500mb drive and is 3.5 inch with external power. Tested again today and was able to record TV1 and 2 at the same time whilst watching a previously recorded program - so thats good. In case you're wondering whether signal strength/quality could be an issue - strength is 65 and quality 94 so should be sufficient...

Stewart

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#206402 10-Apr-2009 23:42

any updates on whether the unit is likely to get a firmware flash enabling EPG data? I know very little about the format but figure it can't be that hard to program in if most of the other boxes support. Reverse engineer one of theirs? :)

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