Yes, it’s certainly annoying, and probably because some use cases have not been thoroughly thought through, and there’s no common way in which different manufacturers store material on external drives – they use different formats, different ways of storing meta-data, and so on.

Of course, that still leaves the problem of a replacement unit, as you mentioned. The counter to that, most likely, would be to point out that, under UK copyright law, you don’t have a right to keep backups of material, and the guidance on video recordings does explicitly say that making a recording to put in an archive for repeated viewing is not one of the allowable exceptions to copyright.

So, given that, I suppose it’s not actually too much of a surprise that manufacturers are doing things in the way that they are (the Digital Stream too works like this).

BUT… all the recordings copied to external drives are encrypted in such a way they will only play back on the identical HDR Fox T2 that made them.

This means if our particular HDR Fox T2 has a fault and needs replacing, even if we have back-up the recordings, the HD ones will not play on any replacement.

To me it seems that Humax have gone too far with the encryption. As it stands now, Humax have implemented it in such a way that a program flagged as copy once, and one flagged as copy many, are essentially no different for the end user, as either way, they will only play back on the same single device.

Surely a copy once flagged program should allow the copy to play back on any device supporting the same DRM system, so any other HD Freeview PVR, but other PVRs wouldn’t allow a further copy, and those that are not copy restricted, can be copied as many times as you like.

I would be surprised though, if you will be able to edit programs down in the same way people are used to doing with the Toppy right now, at least in HD.

It’s perhaps instructional to take a look at what you can do with the current Panasonic recorders. For example, most HD programmes can be copied once to Blu-Ray, so you can make a copy to keep for as long as you want.

You can copy to DVD too, by reencoding to SD, and you can do that as many times as you want. You could then take that SD copy – which is probably still likely to be better than anything you’ll get on Freeview SD – and do whatever you want with it.

In the home, if you have the latest Panasonic recorders and TVs, you’ll be able to stream between devices too. So, with the new Freeview HD recorder, you can record something on that in the living room, and play it back over your home network, on a compatible set in the bedroom, still in HD.

In the Freesat world, where you have similar content controls already, you can export material from the Humax PVR, in high definition, to a removable hard drive, but you can only play that material on the same PVR; you can’t, for instance, take the drive to a friend’s house, and play from it, even if they have the same model of Humax PVR.

A lot will depend on what the manufacturers built in to the various bits of equipment; and in terms of streaming within the home, I think it remains to be seen how broadly compatible things are – for example, if you’ll ever be able to stream from a Panasonic recorder to a Humax set top box, or if you’ll need to stick with one brand.

So, very much still an evolving scenario; not as bleak as some people are suggesting in my view, but not as open as people have been used to with SD kit in the past.

I do have a question however regarding this content control system. Let’s say I bought a Freeview HD recorder, and recorded a good HD documentary. Now let’s say I wanted to transfer it across to my PC (either on a removable drive or through the network) to make an archived copy of it, either a straight burn to BluRay, or I wanted to grab it, edit out the adverts, then maybe re-encode it to save space, maybe into an HD Matroska file or even a re-encode down to an SD MPEG2 or DivX file, can I do all of this? At the moment with my SD Toppy it is so easy to download to my PC via my NSLU2, edit in VideoRedo then burn an archived copy to DVD. Ideally when I finally replace my Toppy with its HD equivalent, I’d like to keep that same kind of functionality.