Icecrypt T2400 Freeview HD DVR
Media savvy?
Review Icecrypt is a little known name in the UK. Their T2200 Freeview HD box was made by Topfield and the T2400 is in fact a UK version of a product from Korean PVR maker HomeCast. It’s a twin tuner unit for FreeviewHD, available with hard drives of 500GB, 1TB or 2TB.
Icecrypt's T2400: the click wheel can be used to change volume and channel when the remote goes AWOL
The unit itself is slim with a front panel VFD readout – which is not so bright as to be annoying – showing a selection of icons to let you know the disk is in use, the channel or recording name, and other info. To the right is a flap concealing a USB port, and to the left is a click wheel with two small buttons below it. You can change the volume, or channel, and even access all the menus without the remote, although navigating the menus is a little fiddly at first.
The rear panel offers a power switch, HDMI out, twin Scarts, analogue stereo, composite video, optical SPDIF, Ethernet, USB and a serial port. There’s no fan and the unit is very quiet in operation. The remote is fairly large, the buttons have a positive click feel when pressed and aren’t as rubbery as some. It can also be used to control the TV.
Setup of the Icecrypt T2400 is straightforward, and once tuned the picture quality for both SD and HD channels is excellent, and you can opt to have 4:3 material pillarboxed properly, too. Although the HD picture is great, unfortunately there’s no Dolby Digital transcoding, so you won’t get a surround sound signal from the SPDIF connection, and it’s not yet apparent if that will come later in an update.
The remote can be programmed to control your TV as well
Most of the user interface is fairly clear and straightforward to use, with some nice touches – switch to BBC1, for example, when a programme’s on that’s flagged as being in HD, and you’ll be prompted to choose the HD version of the channel instead – the same is true of setting recordings. The EPG supports searching by genre or keyword, as well.
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COMMENTS
Well ...
I've been using it since November, in fact. And I did answer some of those questions in the review for you.
Why
can't we have a box that contains twin tuners, a HDD AND a DVD burner?
With all this digital technology why can't we record a programme from the time it starts until the time it finishes without getting a three minute news bulletin and a bunch of prerecorded trails on the beginning and then getting the end chopped off.
twin tuners, a HDD AND a DVD burner?
> can't we have a box that contains twin tuners, a HDD AND a DVD burner?
You can, it's the Panasonic XW-380, or BW-780 if you want a Blu-ray burner rather than DVD. The XW-380 costs about the same as this box, but only has a 250Gb drive. It's got VieraCast as well, so does YouTube etc.
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"There's too much missed out."
Did you actually bother reading the review? Do you understand anything about the product?
"Is there any way of getting programmes off except in analogue (plus s/p-dif sound)? "
SD recordings can be copied to a USB drive
"Can you edit the scheduled recording time so that you can avoid news summaries and allow for overruns? Can you schedule series recording? And without overwriting the previous episode? Can you record programmes that jump channels e.g. sports that switch from BBC1 to BBC2 or vice versa?"
It carries the Freeview+ branding so must meet the Freeview+ spec. That includes series recording and signalled start/end (which won't be 100% accurate other than on the BBC but is far more convenient than manual padding.
"Will it record two pregrammes that share a common junction but on different channels whilst recording something on the other tuner?"
Suspect that will depend on the broadcaster signalling - if there's an overlap then it won't.
"Why doesn't it have a DVD recorder"
What do you use your DVDs for? it's got a 1TB hard drive - that's an enormous amount of SD TV. If you do need to burn to DVD you can take it off on USB memory and take you your PC.
HDMI, certainly
It certainly records from standby as far as the HDMI port is concerned, though given the HD nature of the beast, I've not played extensively with the SCARTs, so I'll have to check that for you. There's no audio or video on the HDMI outputs when it's recording in standby, until you press the power button.
On power up, it's taking me back to the last channel watched, however again there are quite a few possible combinations that could affect that, so I'll schedule recordings on two different muxes, then shut down while viewing a third mux to see, and report back later.
