Chopman - you asked how I knew my Toppy's drive had failed... My Toppy started to fail to boot correctly. It would freeze while it was loading MyStuff. When I listened to it I could hear that the drive had stopped spinning. At first it did this every few days and then it started to do it every day. It obviously also caused recordings to fail. To be honest it could be that power to the drive failed rather than a drive failure. It could be that changing capacitors would have fixed it. The Toppy had given me good service over many years so I decided to bin it and buy a more modern box rather than try and fix it.

Faust - 1 minute ago  » 

grahamlthompson - 2 hours ago  » 

Faust - 1 hour ago  » 
I think you will find that for the main terrestrial broadcasters 240 seconds is about bang on for the lenght of an ad break.
I have my Freesat box set to this length and find it brilliant. As an example on some programmes the 'sofology' sponsor will play the intro into an ad break. If I hit the 'skip' button right at that point it's an almost seamless 'sofology' intro back into your programme. <img src="https://myhumax.org/forum/my-plugins/bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" />

Some programmes incorporate a 120 second ad break. It makes no difference satellite/Freeview delivered content is the same when viewing the same channel.
In that event it's a pain to go back in 5 second steps. I prefer 2 mins to check before a second skip.

I find a 120 second ad break is something of a rarity though Graham. I have only come across a shorter ad break on an infrequent basis if I'm honest. In fact some channels like 'Pick' or 'Film4' run longer than 240 seconds.
Having said that we don't watch much commercial broadcasting as we tend to stick mainly to BBC2 and BBC4 with some BBC1 content thrown in.
I think the last programmes we watched on commercial TV was Gogglebox and Maigret at Christmas.
That is one of the issues that irks me with our BT Youview box i.e. the maximum skip is only 60 seconds, so four presses of the remote. I usually use this as an excuse for popping another chocolate into my mouth in order to keep my strength up. At least that's what I tell the wife. <img src="https://myhumax.org/forum/my-plugins/bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" />

There's always one in The Chase.

grahamlthompson - 2 hours ago  » 

Faust - 1 hour ago  » 
I think you will find that for the main terrestrial broadcasters 240 seconds is about bang on for the lenght of an ad break.
I have my Freesat box set to this length and find it brilliant. As an example on some programmes the 'sofology' sponsor will play the intro into an ad break. If I hit the 'skip' button right at that point it's an almost seamless 'sofology' intro back into your programme. <img src="https://myhumax.org/forum/my-plugins/bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" />

Some programmes incorporate a 120 second ad break. It makes no difference satellite/Freeview delivered content is the same when viewing the same channel.
In that event it's a pain to go back in 5 second steps. I prefer 2 mins to check before a second skip.

I find a 120 second ad break is something of a rarity though Graham. I have only come across a shorter ad break on an infrequent basis if I'm honest. In fact some channels like 'Pick' or 'Film4' run longer than 240 seconds.

Having said that we don't watch much commercial broadcasting as we tend to stick mainly to BBC2 and BBC4 with some BBC1 content thrown in.

I think the last programmes we watched on commercial TV was Gogglebox and Maigret at Christmas.

That is one of the issues that irks me with our BT Youview box i.e. the maximum skip is only 60 seconds, so four presses of the remote. I usually use this as an excuse for popping another chocolate into my mouth in order to keep my strength up. At least that's what I tell the wife. <img src="https://myhumax.org/forum/my-plugins/bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" />

Faust - 1 hour ago  » 
I think you will find that for the main terrestrial broadcasters 240 seconds is about bang on for the lenght of an ad break.
I have my Freesat box set to this length and find it brilliant. As an example on some programmes the 'sofology' sponsor will play the intro into an ad break. If I hit the 'skip' button right at that point it's an almost seamless 'sofology' intro back into your programme. <img src="https://myhumax.org/forum/my-plugins/bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" />

Some programmes incorporate a 120 second ad break. It makes no difference satellite/Freeview delivered content is the same when viewing the same channel.

In that event it's a pain to go back in 5 second steps. I prefer 2 mins to check before a second skip.

I think you will find that for the main terrestrial broadcasters 240 seconds is about bang on for the lenght of an ad break.

I have my Freesat box set to this length and find it brilliant. As an example on some programmes the 'sofology' sponsor will play the intro into an ad break. If I hit the 'skip' button right at that point it's an almost seamless 'sofology' intro back into your programme. <img src="https://myhumax.org/forum/my-plugins/bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" />

Thanks for all the comments about this.

It sounds like the skip forwards/backwards capability is liveable with, but not as good as a customised Toppy could give. Maybe I’ll try raising a feature request with Humax, not that I’d expect much success. There must be free remote-control buttons during playback that could be assigned for 1 click skips.

The lack of automatic keyword searching is disappointing. I suspect something could be done using IFTTT and Google Sheets or something similar, accessing the remote recorder capability, but it’s a bit of effort to sort it out! Or maybe the myhumax portal already does it?

Out of interest CSA, how do you know your Toppy hard drive failed? I’m getting occasional crashes and failed recordings that I put down to the power supply capacitors failing, so I replaced the ones that are recommended and it’s much better now, but not perfect. I recall someone put instructions on the Toppy forum about changing the hard disk, and maybe that’s an option if the disk is the problem.

john1 - 3 hours ago  » 
I think you'll find the forward skip can be set to 30 seconds,60,120, or240

Yes but only 1 at a time. You have to go into the menus and change it if sometimes you want a small skip and sometimes you want a larger skip, thus CSA's explanation in post #4 of the process he(?) now uses.

I think you'll find the forward skip can be set to 30 seconds,60,120, or240

A couple of months ago I was in exactly the same position I bought a Humax 5000T to replace a Toppy running MyStuff. To be honest I still prefer Toppy + MyStuff but since the drive failed I had to find a replacement and the Humax 5000T seems to be the best box on the market.

I also had lots of word searches setup in MyStuff that automatically set timers. My word searches included series names, actors names, keywords (e.g animal) that would be in the title/description. If you pick a keyword from the title carefully it will also find and record programs that are associated with the main program. I never needed to check the TV schedules!

On the Humax I believe that Series Link will record the next series if it is within 13 weeks but if it is after 13 weeks you have to set the Series Link again. I have not owned the Humax long enough to test this. With the Humax I now have to scan a TV schedule website to find each individual series I want to record.

On the Humax you can change the skip duration as mentioned but it can only be set to one duration forward and a different duration to skip back. On the Toppy I would use a big duration jump forward then small duration jump forwards & backwards until I found the end of the adverts. On the Humax you need to press right arrow - check that the blue highlight is on the timecode if it isn't on the timecode press up arrow to move onto timecode - then press right arrow and left arrow to skip forward & backwards until you find the end of the adverts. You can press and hold to do multiple jumps. I have found that a 1 min jump forward then press and hold briefly to jump forward several minutes - then individual presses of right and left arrow to do individual jumps to find the end of the adverts. Sounds fiddly but I have got used to it and it works OK.

One area where the Humax is a big improvement ... on MyStuff I always used padding to start before and end after the scheduled start time. Do NOT do this on the Humax. Let the Humax start and end the recording automatically. On the channels I normally record this means that the recording will start when the programme starts.

I have got used to the Humax now but you will miss your Toppy + MyStuff!

Nearest box to a Toppy is a HDR-FOX-T2 running the custom firmware add on. Out of production but you may find a decent second hand model.