Thomson DTI 6300-16 TopUp TV Anytime DVR

dont buy this box - its badly made and noisy

I bought this book from Comet last week and ended up taking it back the next day.

Why ?

1) because the fan noise was far too high for a sitting room box. unbearable in fact like an old pentium 4 desktop of mine.

2) very poor plastic buttons on front.

I ended up going for a Topview 5800 250 gig box, which is more expensive but almost silent, since unlike the Thomson, it has no fan.

So far i am happy with the Topview althought SlingBox users like myself wil find the lack of ful remote support a little irritating.

What they don't tell you....

is that you can actually only use these DVR's while your a subscriber. If you cancel you can't get into them - just a big old message on the screen telling you to subscribe before you can use it.

So you end up paying for something you can't use outside of TopUpTV

Re What they don't tell you

Sorry but that's total BS, I was recording quite happily on this piece

of kit straight out of the box and before I'd even re-registered my old

TUTV card to start the "Anytime" service. I'm also told by other folks

with this box that if you do buy the box from a 3rd party retailer and

decide not to subscribe to Anytime you can delete all the service

subscription listings and you do get all the hard drive space for your

own recordings. My own first impressions of this box have been

very good.

Neil

It's pretty good

Must admit having had this box since the service started last year, that it is pretty good. There were teehting problems with the software but on the whole I'm very happy with it. Would have liked a slightly larger hard drive but you can't have everything.

How do i delete the software

I recently got this box from Argos and would like to delete the Top Up TV software so I can use the whole of the hard drive for personal recordings. Can anyone enlighten me as to how to do this. So far all i've been able to do is de activate all the extra channels but that still only leaves about 60% of the drive for personal use.

Any help and advice appreciated.

SG

Re What they don't tell you

I too was recording on the unit straight out of the box, but when you have used the unit with the tutv card and then remove the card you can not use it to record, unless you can do some kind of reset,

I have done a master reset, menu > help > green button > red button.

I have reverted back to the old software and also looked on the engineers page, menu > help > 1397.

And still no joy. So if you can use the device with out subscription I am All ears.

Any advice would to great so I can use this plastic box to do the job I got it for.

This box sucks

We've got one, and it's been nothing but trouble since the day we got it. It crashes every damn day, the only solution is to pull the power and wait for it to reset.

We waited with baited breath for the first software update, TUTV were good enough to write to us explaining that they had experienced troubles with a lot of boxes and the update would correct these issues. No, it didn't. It still crashes, it still sucks.

I have been sorely tempted to connect that USB port up to my *nix box to see what's hidden away. Perhaps an install of MythTV might do a better job.