R
RMD
Guest
Hi All,
I have a friend who I still take VHS video tapes with me when I visit.
It seemed to me I'd be better off taking a USB thumb drive with video
on it, rather than VHS tapes.
I can buy 64G USB thumb drives for about $30 from MSY now, and a
Thompson STB with USB record is $39 from K-Mart now. (Just btw the
Thompson USB STB is about the size of a VHS cassette.)
The Thompson STB records *.mts files, which can be played by VLC,
turned into DVD's by Nero 7 onwards, and even be played by other PVR's
like the Telefunken 500G PVR also sold by K-Mart for $149.
Anyway I trialled a Thompson STB to see how it worked and eventually
bought quite a few of them so I have more than an "heir plus a spare"
situation. I need to be sure I can continue to use them for a
reasonable period of time, including maybe unexpected failures.
On my tests the Thompson STB's work quite well once they have about
the right signal level fed into them. (Two lights and above on the
Jaycar digital TV signal strength meter.)
However, I did find using a cheap MSY HDMI cable that they self
interfered from the MSY el-cheapo HDMI cable. (I'm in a somewhat dodgy
signal strength area, and this may not be an issue in a stronger
signal strength area.) The Thopmson STB worked well enough with a
better quality HDMI cable, but it worked best of all with the standard
yellow-red-white AV cable.
I ended up using the yellow-red-white AV outputs instead of the HDMI
output.
Anyway, I think these Thompson STB's combined with a fairly cheap 64G
USB drive make quite a cheap way of transferring video about
geographically, either house to house or room to room.
I store the Thompson video on my PC hard drives as the 64G drive fills
up, and don;t find the 64G size is too small for my purposes. The 64G
drive holds about 30 hours of video.
The Telefunken 500G PVR's also seem to have some good features for not
a lot of money.
However, it is important to ring the Telefunken help line and get the
latest firmware sent to your email address, since the firmware
supplied out-of-the-box has bugs in it and is out-of-date. The first
thing top do is upgrade the Telefunken firware before doing anything
else.
The 500G Telefunken PVR's seem to work quite reliably with the updated
firmware, based on the two examples I have bought. They are twin
tuner, but will only record one program at a time.
They will play most video file formats like wmv, flv, mpg, mts etc
from the front USB drive which I think is quite a useful feature.
I'm planning to buy another two of them, once my local K-Mart stores
re-stock the Telefunken's.
Ross
I have a friend who I still take VHS video tapes with me when I visit.
It seemed to me I'd be better off taking a USB thumb drive with video
on it, rather than VHS tapes.
I can buy 64G USB thumb drives for about $30 from MSY now, and a
Thompson STB with USB record is $39 from K-Mart now. (Just btw the
Thompson USB STB is about the size of a VHS cassette.)
The Thompson STB records *.mts files, which can be played by VLC,
turned into DVD's by Nero 7 onwards, and even be played by other PVR's
like the Telefunken 500G PVR also sold by K-Mart for $149.
Anyway I trialled a Thompson STB to see how it worked and eventually
bought quite a few of them so I have more than an "heir plus a spare"
situation. I need to be sure I can continue to use them for a
reasonable period of time, including maybe unexpected failures.
On my tests the Thompson STB's work quite well once they have about
the right signal level fed into them. (Two lights and above on the
Jaycar digital TV signal strength meter.)
However, I did find using a cheap MSY HDMI cable that they self
interfered from the MSY el-cheapo HDMI cable. (I'm in a somewhat dodgy
signal strength area, and this may not be an issue in a stronger
signal strength area.) The Thopmson STB worked well enough with a
better quality HDMI cable, but it worked best of all with the standard
yellow-red-white AV cable.
I ended up using the yellow-red-white AV outputs instead of the HDMI
output.
Anyway, I think these Thompson STB's combined with a fairly cheap 64G
USB drive make quite a cheap way of transferring video about
geographically, either house to house or room to room.
I store the Thompson video on my PC hard drives as the 64G drive fills
up, and don;t find the 64G size is too small for my purposes. The 64G
drive holds about 30 hours of video.
The Telefunken 500G PVR's also seem to have some good features for not
a lot of money.
However, it is important to ring the Telefunken help line and get the
latest firmware sent to your email address, since the firmware
supplied out-of-the-box has bugs in it and is out-of-date. The first
thing top do is upgrade the Telefunken firware before doing anything
else.
The 500G Telefunken PVR's seem to work quite reliably with the updated
firmware, based on the two examples I have bought. They are twin
tuner, but will only record one program at a time.
They will play most video file formats like wmv, flv, mpg, mts etc
from the front USB drive which I think is quite a useful feature.
I'm planning to buy another two of them, once my local K-Mart stores
re-stock the Telefunken's.
Ross