ePVision PHD-VRX Owners Thread - Page 3

I installed the partition magic and fs-Driver freeware apps you mentioned.

I took an old USB flash drive and partitioned it to ext2. I went into Explorerer and copied an .mpg file over to the flash drive. I ran VideoReDo and it could open the .mpg file in the ext2 partition.

So, it looks like a PC can access the PHD-VRX recordings without resulting to a 2nd drive formatted NTFS.

I'll be keeping a keen eye of interest on this thread. Great job so far.

My impressions so far after using the box over this past weekend. Out-of-the-box experience somewhat poor. Default settings for the tuner are not usable, took forever to experiment with settings that would produce an acceptable picture. This has to be done for each tuner, media player, etc. The changes do seem to stick, so that much is good. I'm not real big on re-inventing the wheel, so was not terribly interested in the DVR features, but I did make some short test recordings from the tuners. The recordings did not play back well, lots of artifacts and pixelizing. I was using a large NTFS externaI drive that is very full, so perhaps a fairer test with a smaller, fresher drive is in order. I was not interested in the VRX as a DVR, since I already am using WMC for DVR and have the HDHomeRun dual tuner on the network for that purpose. What I wanted to do was use the VRX box as an extender for WMC. In fact, I had emailed the ePVision support with that question, and they indicated that it would "probably" work that way. Wrong-o, it does not.
I had used an X-box as an extender for WMC in the past, but no longer have one. It would access all my WMC and other content on my Windows Home Server and stream it very nicely so I could view all my family pictures and movies on the big TV. The VRX box will connect to the content, it takes a very long time (at least 5 minutes or more) for it to index before it can be accessed (this happens each time you change modes or folders) only to be told that these are unsupported files.
Really? Jpegs and Avi's are not supported? Wow. Would not even stream music mp3 files.
On the plus side it will play a movie in MP4 (.m4v) files. But the down side of that for me was it would lose connection with the device (home server) for some reason and would I have to start the movie again, after going through the connection/browse process again. Finally copied the movie to a usb drive to get around the network/device connection problem. I will reserve judgment on that one as it could be a networking problem on my end, but when I was playing my content on the Xbox, this was never an issue. (This is a wired 10/100 connection.)
There is one built-in steaming connection available, the "net" button takes you to YouTube, but there is not a way to access any other site, bummer.
One of the few positives is that the tuners seem to be very robust and stable. My previous generation HD tuner was prone to break-up due to reflections and otherwise weak signals. The tuners seem to handle that much better.
Over all, mostly disappointed with this half-baked product. Hopefully future firmware upgrades will introduce better features and make the existing ones work correctly.
In any event, I will keep the box as a superior tuner, but may have to go back to MS for another X-box. At least then I would get ESPN-3 back.

Thanks for the feedback. Since you mentioned ESPN-3, would that mean you have a cable feed?

ESPN3 + XBox = ESPN3 over the Internet.

What he said. ESPN3 is a streaming service available through certain ISPs. The downside is to access ESPN3 via XBox, a Live or Live Gold account is required, more monthly fees.

Thank you. I suffer from a lack of knowledge of the XBox/PSx world. I did play pong once.

Ordered this unit last Friday but am concerned after reading your "review." I really want this primarily as a tuner and hopefully they will keep the until updated regarding other features. Keep the posts coming as to how best to address "bugs." THANKS!

I had another round of email with the people at ePVision. They continue to say that you can manually schedule a recording even if guide data is available and that when you schedule a recording using the guide that both the start and end time can be adjusted.

Kansas_Tom, That was the point I was trying to make in my earlier post here.
The way I read the manual, the procedure for "manual recording" is different in the way you navigate through the menu. videobruce has assured me that his machine can not achieve this. Now I am wondering if it is a problem in videobruce's specific unit.
Can someone that has received their unit please try the manual record procedure from the recording guide and report you findings? Page 2 procedure 3.

I do not want to muddy up this thread with another device, but would the PHD-HM5 Advanced Network HD Media Player have met your needs? It seems your using an unproven multi-tool for a specific result that is not the primary function of the device.

There is every indication that this device would have been a good choice if I had been interested in only one feature. I am using an early HD display unit, the Toshiba 46H84. Since it pre-dates DTV and ATSC, the built in tuner is useless. So, with only 1 HDMI port, 1 component HD in, I really need an "all in one" box to feed it. I've also got to remember other members of the household and not make selecting the inputs a nightmare of multiple remotes and patches. So I was really hoping ePVision had put as much effort into the media player portion of the VRX as they had put into the PHD-HM5; but alas, apparently not.
I will amend one statement made regarding the performance of the media player: I said it would not play mp3's. Not true, it will. Apparently the limited browse capability of the box managed to find an empty playlist, that is just names of songs, not the actual files. Once I realized this I was able to find actual mp3 files and they play just fine. Still cannot view my pictures which are just common jpegs.
Edit:
Maybe I can muddy up this thread a little bit myself. I just happened across this thing, maybe it is what I have been looking for all along? Probably not, looks like vaporware at this time anyway.
Edited by tvoldtimer - 6/12/12 at 12:41pm

I have not spent any time other than a few on the fly recordings of local newscasts. I really have no plans for the DVR features of this box. The VRX was shipped with 242.18.10. My display is a Toshiba 46H84 (CRT projection) which by the way brings up another gripe. The Toshiba will only does 1080i, the VRX only 1080p, therefore I am forced to 720p. Bummer. Oh, and one other thing, my chassis also had the "knockouts" for additional connectors.
Edited by tvoldtimer - 6/12/12 at 11:48am

Already explained this, but again all I had was a very full 2TB drive that is NTFS. It took almost an hour for it to come online since it has to index everything on the drive. Until I do further testing with a smaller uncluttered drive, I will reserve final judgement.

Yes, you can schedule a future recording the way you've described. No info has to be in the guide. Just go to Menu/Schedule Recordings/Manual Schedule and then set the timer.

Is there a way to browse through the guide without having the channel change?

Also, does anyone have any idea why the picture breaks up/sound drops out whenever I use the time-shifting feature?

USB drive throughput?

It has USB 2.0 = 60 MB/s... should be plenty of throughput capacity?

Perhaps, should the unit be a big seller, they will offer a paid internet guide. Then "locking" the display might be an option. I have that option on my Sony DHG (V8 TVGOS) and my Sony TV (TVGOS V10) & Tivo guide work that way. Future improvements.

Without a PSIP, I wonder what happens?

I found a useful little utility to test the speed of USB devices among other things.

USBDeview v2.11

This may be so obvious that it goes without saying, which is perhaps why I saw nothing anywhere here or in the "manuals" referencing it, but I assume that 4 of the 6 inputs are display-only, and not recordable? I.e., composite, component, VGA, and HDMI are only inputs to the switcher? You can't record from those sources, even though the Input menu does not discriminate in any way. And of course, it's not "just" a switcher, since it has to perform A/D on the analog sources, and transcode the component input, to be able to output them all uniformly.

Secondly, I am a bit surprised at the absence of some extremely simple, but very common functions. E.g., you can press Record, and select Now, and it will record until you press Stop, or the hard drive is full. What happens if I won't be available in an hour to shut it off? I have to waste time going through setting up a manual timing event (and missing content). Commonly, most recording devices have 'one-touch' recording, so that pressing Record again while a manual recording is in progress, sets the duration to 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes, etc. Pretty trivial to implement, but a huge user-benefit.

Lastly, there doesn't seem to be much discussion of what format the video files are recorded in on the hard drive. They seem to be named with an .mpg extension, yet somehow they're NOT playable in VLC? Just what kind of "mpg" file is that, exactly? Also, I can see not wanting to record an entire MUX in a transport stream (though it would be handy for me on cable, since I could record all 4 networks using just 2 tuners), but stripping it down to a program stream and discarding all the error-recovery and resync information seems like a really bad idea to me. It should not be that hard to simply select one PID out of the TS, and record a TS as output. TSreader has always managed to do it pretty well.

[Oh, and I really liked the suggestion from one commenter here to provide a RecordList in a specific file (simple .CVS). If this file could also be located on a network drive, then there wouldn't even be any need to push it to the box periodically. Great idea, RamKat!

Re: the overall Guide, personally, I find PSIP-based EPGs nearly useless (if not less so, due to timer-inaccuracies), and if the company provided a mechanism to allow Guide Info to be user-supplied, they could leverage the power of the community to greatly enhance their device. This could be as simple as a GuideUpdate file, which contained info on programs and channels of interest to the owner, which the device would then read (and auto-delete), extract, and merge into it's own internal guide database for display and selection. The interface layer would be nothing more than a standardized file format (perhaps in XML, so it could ignore any fields it currently had no use for, but might use in a later update). By opening things like this up, their device could really take off, while requiring minimal investment on their part.]