Humax DTR-T2100 500gb BT YouView Recorder Unit (Dual Tuner)

Product Information

As you'd expect, the broadcast Freeview HD TV comes in via the aerial and then you have a choice of connections for output. You can either subscribe to this or pay per view, and there’s a handy shortcut – the green button on the remote – that filters the view so you see only content that’s included in your package. I don't want sales/sport/religion/children's/motors/homosexual/dating/foreign news channels cluttering up my menu system.

Reset, keeping recordings’ does indeed work for many problems, but if you recast the name as ‘Reset, keeping possibly corrupted recording structure’ you will see what its limitations in your case are. Unless you’re right next to the box, this is inaudible, so it’s ideal for bedrooms as well as the living room or kitchen.The constant writing to disk by the Youview box, even when not recording a programme, will quickly wear out an SSD and it will fail. Even when I was trying to use my DTR-T2100 as my prime device I had to keep my HDR-FOX T2 fully running in parallel for radio programmes. Struggled to persuade the box to go into Maintenance Mode but after a number of attempts – switch off, press down etc, it eventually did and all up and running now. It has the easy-to-use YouView interface, but in a much smaller, faster, quieter package than its predecessor. I ran a series of test and could predict with 100% accurately which recordings would fail and which would be OK.

There's potential to make it far more exciting by offering controls over the network, for example, so you wouldn't need to grab the remote, or to offer wider second-screen choices. We won't dwell too much on the nuts and bolts of what YouView offers, except where needed for clarity and completeness.

Wouldn’t it be good if you could combine the simplicity and value of Freeview with the choice and convenience of catch-up and on-demand services – all on your own TV? Looking at your photos of inside the box there is a large plate on the underside – is that easy to remove? Inside the unit, despite it having an external power adapter, the DTR almost certainly has other power converter circuits to produce a variety of voltages and separate voltage rails.

Unfortunately it turned out that it wasn’t the HDD causing a T4000 to enter a Maintenance Mode spiral-of-death. The hard disk is only used for storing recordings, including a live stream of whatever you are watching to enable live-pause and rewind. The important thing is to ensure you know what you're getting from the outset and make sure you don't end up paying for TV services you don't need. We like the heft of it: it's the sort of remote you can use day-in day-out and it now has buttons to take you direct to BT services, as well as the more useful YouView button. The YouView Recordable TV Box Wall Bracket is another great addition to our line of Original innovative Mounting Solutions.

An SSD might be quieter, however SSD’s only have a limited lifespan in terms of total gigabytes written to the disk. The unit is small, discrete, and quiet with a well designed and quality-feeling remote, that can be programmed to also turn the TV on and off and control volume and AV inputs.