Review: Evesham iPlayer HD PVR

After successful trials in the summer of 2006, you can now look forward to free high-definition content through your aerial - hopefully sometime later this year.

The Evesham iPlayer pre-empts the rush to supply the 1.4million HD televisions out there with an HD signal.

The grey box is an ugly affair and won't complement the attractive LCD or plasma TV it hopes to sit under. To the rear of the unit you'll find outputs including two Scart, an HDMI, RF in and loop-through, Ethernet, an optical digital audio socket and a standard 3.5mm audio jack. On the side of the unit lies a single USB2 port and a smartcard slot for Topup TV broadcasts.

The iPlayer doesn't have wireless built in. Instead Evesham recommends Ethernet over mains (such as Netgear's HDX-101 or Panasonic's BL-PA100KT)and have also included a 10m Ethernet cable.

An obvious disadvantage is the lack of a second tuner. Evesham tried to counter our disappointment by saying most people with an HD TV will already have a digital tuner inbuilt, but we feel this is not acceptable for a £300 product - you don't want to be faffing about with different remotes, settings and schedules.

We managed to receive the HD test signal from the Crystal Palace Freeview transmitter and the results looked good. Even on a standard definition TV the picture looked better than normal Freeview due to the higher bit-rate and Mpeg4 encoding.

Evesham states retail units will not be able to view the Freeview HD trial because of a licensing issue; however, it will be compatible with any final Freeview HD service through a firmware update.

When hooked up to a 32in HD TV via an HDMI cable (not included) we thought the HD picture looked crisp and vibrant. The Freeview upscalling is an average affair and increases compression artefacts and jaggies as well as anything else.

We found Freeview HD's average bit-rate to be 20Mbits/sec. However, all broadcasts are variable and it occasionally dipped to 18Mbits/sec and peaked at 21Mbits/sec. This compares favourably with Sky HD channels - these broadcast at an average of either 15.3Mbits/sec or 23Mbits/sec per channel.

A 14-minute recording took up 2GB of hard disk space, which means you can only record nine hours of high-definition content on the 80GB hard disk, however you can back up recordings to a PC. There are no compression options to reduce the file sizes.

Netgem, the manufacturer of this box, says its seven day electronic programming guide (EPG) is the best in the business. In our opinion, it's very good, but certainly not perfect. For example, thanks to it shortening channel names you can't tell the difference between any of the BBC or ITV channels - BBC1,2,3 and 4 are shortened to just BBC.

At one point, when we stopped recording a program and turned off the box, we lost some of our recordings. This only happened the once but is a worry and suggests the recording software isn't bullet proof.

The hard disk is always recording live content. This means you can always rewind everything you've seen for several hours which, as anyone who has Sky+ will testify, is an incredibly useful feature.

However, after a week's usage we noticed occasional stuttering when watching live TV. In a diagnostic test we noticed the entire hard disk was full with automatically recorded content, suggesting the stuttering came about due to fragmentation and the continuous freeing up of space.

It's not possible to set it only to record a specific period (for example the past hour), but you can turn it off completely or manually delete the history to free up hard drive space.

The USB2 socket on the side of the device allows you to connect external hard disks, USB sticks and keyboards. We plugged a 1GB USB stick in and accessed the stored video and music without a problem. But we had less success with a 40GB external hard disk, although we quickly realised this is because the iPlayer doesn't support NTFS.

Evesham is also keen to stress the benefits of viewing photos on the iPlayer since the content is outputted at a very high resolution of 1,920x1,080. However, photo viewing was slow, even over a USB2 memory stick.

By connecting the unit into a router and plugging in a wireless keyboard into the USB port, it's possible to browse the internet from your sofa. But it's not something you'd want to do for any length of time since the formatting consistently went awry. Even major websites like the BBC weren't displayed correctly.

Meanwhile, selecting the TvMax option lets you listen to radio and podcasts. This worked well except when we used it on the HD TV, but there were problems with blurred text when Freeview HD was previewed, making navigation difficult.

Using Windows Media Connect software we managed to stream standard definition content from a Windows XP computer with ease. Streaming high definition content didn't work well though, even over an Ethernet connection. When we viewed 720p content frames were frequently dropped.

The iPlayer is a good product, but until Freeview HD arrives there is very little point in buying one. A flurry of minor flaws and the lack of a second tuner means most people will be best off waiting for a better box.

Also consider:
Humax HDCI-2000 PVR
Feed your HD display with the content it craves, without getting Sky involved

Sony Vaio VGX-XL202
The first Media Center to house a Blu-ray drive, but don't expect to use them together

Humax PVR-9200T
If you don’t want to be tied to a Sky+ subscription, this Freeview recorder might be the answer

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