I made some enquires with Manhattan who very swiftly replied (take note Humax) about any future plans for a box with an additional tuner. There current position is as follows:
We have no plans for a model with a 3rd tuner or a 2TB drive option. We use Western Digital AV-class Hard Drives with a 1 million hour MTBF and there are no such 2TB drives available. The Toshiba drives other companies use are much poorer and rated at only 600,000 hours.
The T3-R can record programmes on two channels simultaneously while you watch one of these channels, a recording or use an app (iPlayer, YouTube etc) at the same time. It's worth noting that all of the live BBC channels are available in iPlayer to be streamed and we make it easy watch that way: when browsing our TV Guide press the red button to open the selected channel directly in iPlayer. Freeview advise that further channels will be supporting this feature next year.
When recording on two channels, a software update later this year will make it possible to watch and live pause a 3rd channel. The available channels will depend on the two that are recording:
• If they are on the same multiplex then you can watch any channel
• If they are on two different multiplexes then you can watch any channel that's also on one of these two multiplexes
Useful to know and will keep monitoring any future developments. I can't imagine they would tell me of any future product plans, I guess that's reserved for an appropriate press launch.
I can't imagine adding a third tuner to the Manhattan would be too difficult, the existing quad-core processor could handle it and they seem pretty clued up on the software side, I suppose we will have to keep our fingers crossed and hope Manhattan pull a product rabbit out of the hat, or by some miracle, Humax rewrite a much better performing version of the UI code.
| Thu 11 Jun 2020 17:36:15
#24 |