I own a Topfield TF7700 HSCI satellite receiver since half a year. One day I was surfing on the web, when I accidentally got to your homepage and saw the news from the PVR supporting firmware. Okay, users should sometimes visit the equipment manufacturer’s website, but I don’t think most of them do so. As long as I considered this as an unplanned extra function, I wasn’t upset, but later I discovered that the LCD screen contained the HDD status bar, I decided to express my thoughts. You should have noticed your costumers, that the receiver in the box is not PVR capable, but you plan to develop a new firmware that can record, so keep visiting the website. That would have raised the selling, I think. In addition it’s horrible to use PVR function with the old remote control. Yes, new builds are packed with PVR supporting (play, pause, rewind, forward buttons, etc) ones. What would have cost to ship all models with PVR ready remotes and the leaflet mentioned above?

Now, after realising how lucky I was to have discovered the update, I ran to my device and flashed the firmware from a pendrive. Everything worked well. I recorded different sorts and types of broadcasting, and found out that some have disappeared from the root directory. There were some that were never displayed in the listing, and the other type, that could be seen, replayed well, but were overwritten later. After moving those to a subdirectory solved a problem, but this cannot be a solution.

Next week I’ve purchased a portable USB2.0 rack for my existing 20GB IDE hard drive. It was quickly recognized by the receiver but I could hardly record anything. Shows were immediately gone from the file list as I stopped the recording. Some did survive this, but the replay ended after a few seconds, although the file size was relatively large. When switching on the time shift function, pressing the pause button stopped live feed and started recording, but when I pressed it again, saw some flashing and later the live feed. I could not replay any recorded, not live programme at all. Formatting the drive didn’t help either, but everything worked fine when I was using it with the computer. Time shifting didn’t work with my flash drive, I know, those devices are hard to read and write at the same time.

The other function I missed very much was the playback function. Although many codecs (video and audio) are supported in the device, none of the files very accepted by the player, I tried to play, although I converted them to TS files, tried to rename it to REC, but did not achieve success. AVI files were declined immediately. Please develop a firmware that supports at least TS containers with already supported MPEG2, MPEG4 or H264 video codecs and AC3 or DTS audio codecs.

Furthermore Hungarian localization is a very thankful and greeted feature in the firmware – in the newest as well, but the translation is very poor and incomplete. Special Hungarian and other characters in European languages are not displayed at all, or replaced with crap in the electronic programme guide, in teletext pages or in file names. Please correct those mistakes!

I’m looking forward to those bugfixes and feature extension packs that would make the TF7700HSCI a very good working HD receiver, recorder and even a player.