Having used the 5000T for several days I have to say that I'm a little frustrated with the way it handles the playback of recorded programmes.
On my PVR9150T I pressed a single button on the remote and a transparent list of recorded programmes would appear onscreen.
Each programme was clearly marked with the date and time of recording. I highlighted a programme and at the press of a single button it would play from the beginning or automatically resume play from the last position. Or I could press another button to delete the programme. The entire process took less than two seconds.
But the 5000T is a very different proposition.
If I want to play a recorded programme in the 5000T the first step is to press the "Recordings" button on the remote - which only works about half of the time, and then only after several presses.
So usually, I just press the remote's "FreeviewPlay" button, scroll along to the "Recordings" option and press the "OK" button to get to where the "Recordings" button should have taken me. Only then can I see the list of recorded programmes and with either method it takes about three seconds for that to happen. It appeared instantaneously in the PVR9150T.
The list has no information about the time of any recording, so if I'm following a breaking news story I might see half-a-dozen recordings simply labelled "Sky News". Only by highlighting an individual programme and pressing "OK" yet again can I see the time it was recorded (but that's easily forgotten when I return to the list of many identically labelled programmes).
Now, you might suppose that having finally identified and highlighted the programme I want to watch, all that remains is to press the "OK" button one last time in order to actually play the selection.
You would be mistaken.
All that pressing the "OK" button does is bring up yet another dialogue box inquiring whether I want to "play this programme", "delete this program" or (if it's part of series) "Cancel whole series".
Only when one of these options is selected and the "OK" button pressed again will the programme finally play - unless I happen to have to already watched some of it, in which case pressing "OK" will bring up yet another multiple-choice quiz: "Do you want to watch this programme from where you left off?", "Watch from the beginning?".
And if you happen to click on a programme that's in the process of being recorded you're presented with an even more bewildering array of choices:
- Play This Programme
- Watch Live TV
- Stop Recording
If I wanted to watch live TV or stop a recording why would I be wasting time in the "Recordings" section's maze of dialogues instead of simply playing the channel or pressing the remote's "Stop" button to terminate the recording?
It must also be said that the menus in the "Recordings" section are pretty sluggish - a fact of which Humax is presumably well aware as an extraordinary message imploring the user to "Please Wait" appears when he clicks on any option. Whoever heard of such a thing in a PVR? I half expected the box to emit a tinny blast of Mozart or Vivaldi to soothe me while I waited for a menu to appear.
I wish that Humax had focused their energies on streamlining the playback process rather than on creating a message to apologise for its slowness.
To add to the general user-unfriendliness of the "Recordings" section, in contrast with the PVR9150T's recorded programme list the 5000T's doesn't cycle. You can't jump from the top to the bottom with a single press of the "up" arrow button and vice versa.
When you reach the top of the list you come to an abrupt halt. Scrolling back to the bottom is a jerky process that takes a full 17 seconds with the 27 entries that I have in the recorded programme list. This a very frustrating waste of time when you go to the list wanting to play one of the older recordings.
The sad thing is that with the PVR9150T Humax have already demonstrated that they're more than capable of designing a PVR that can select and play any recorded program in less than three seconds with only two mouse-clicks.
The 5000T requires at least twice as many and it takes a minimum of 13 seconds after pressing the "Recordings" button (when it works first time) before the file actually starts to play (I just timed it with an online stop watch to make sure that I'm not exaggerating).
In fairness I should point out that these disadvantages are likely to be of less consequence to users who just want to record and watch a few full-length programmes every day rather than whizz back and forth through a dozen short news bulletins every few hours. Nor do they detract from the many excellent features of the 5000T which I praised in an earlier post.
It would very easy to return my 5000T to Argos on some pretext and get a full refund but I won't be doing that as notwithstanding the above, I don't regret the purchase in the least.
The bottom line is that the 5000T is still an excellent PVR in every other way and it flawlessly records every programme in superb HD. And the ability to record four channels at once is of great use to me and very much appreciated.
I only mention these deficiencies in the hope that Humax will address them and implement a simple two-click "select and play" option for recorded programmes without requiring the user to respond to multiple irrelevant dialogues when he simply wishes to play a file, which is, after all, what most of us purchase a PVR to do.
More complex playback and recording options that are seldom required should be accessed through separate menus and dialogues and not interfere with the speed and simplicity of playing back a recorded programme.
