Review: S8100-ZA Freeview Satellite receiver

Mostly it works great. There are lots of odd UI choices, but mostly it seems to do what it is told to. Connected up a USB hard drive and it has been retty good at simultaneous recording of one channel and playback of an existing recording, or stream following.

There is only one major annoyance, which is that if you are recording then you can only watch another channel in the same group of channels. So we start watching a programme, then half way through a recording starts which is not in that channel group, so the receiver changes channel and you can't keep watching your programme.

Bought for $110 on special, so happy with bang for buck.

robocat:

 

There is only one major annoyance, which is that if you are recording then you can only watch another channel in the same group of channels. So we start watching a programme, then half way through a recording starts which is not in that channel group, so the receiver changes channel and you can't keep watching your programme.

 

That sounds like it only has one DVB-S tuner.  Each frequency has multiple channels broadcast on it - you can broadcast as many channels as you like, up to the bandwidth available on that frequency in the DVB-S protocol.  So when the tuner is on one frequency, you should be able (if the software allows) to record any and all of the channels on that frequency.  Or record some and play one of them.  With only one USB (presumably USB 2) hard drive, the limit is likely the USB 2.  Recording more than one channel at once to a USB 2 drive is not a good idea as USB 2 is not fast enough.

But if it needs to switch frequency to do a recording, then you are out of luck with just one tuner.  There are three DVB-S frequencies used by Freeview - two are broadcast by Freeview and the other one is broadcast by Sky and has Prime, Prime+1, RNZ and a few other miscellaneous channels.  So to make sure you will always be able to play something and record everything you want at the same time, you need three DVB-S tuners.  Similarly, for Freeview HD (DVB-T) there are five frequencies, so to guarantee no conflicts you need five DVB-T tuners.