Freeview HD recorders are starting to appear with more and more regularity; one of the ones that’s garnered a fair bit of interest is the Icecrypt T2400. The T2200 from Icecrypt is a pretty reasonable set top box, and is made for them by Topfield.
However that’s not the case with the T2400. Icecrypt, if you don’t know, is the brand name that’s used by Turbosat who are the UK importers/distributors for Topfield, as well as some other products. They brand various products as Icecrypt, including some standard def Freeview boxes in the past, and with Freeview HD being such a hot product, it’s perhaps not a surprise that they’re putting their name to a couple of products.
A few people around the net have assumed that, since the set top box was from Topfield, the same must be true of the PVR. I can reveal that that’s not the case, and the PVR is being made by Homecast. It appears to be a version of the Homecast HT9300 – you can see the similarity in the photos below, and the specs on the Homecast site also make it clear that the model support’s the UK’s MHEG5 interactive services, used for the ‘red button’ functions. I understand that the MHEG software in the unit is S&T’s RedKey, which is also used by other leading manufacturers such as Humax, for their Freesat products.
Apparently work is proceeding apace on the T2400/HT9300, and Homecast engineers have been in the UK working on final tweaks to the unit’s firmware – something that’s always more easily done with the ‘real world’ broadcast signals than with test streams in a Korean lab. I understand it should be going for DTG testing around the time this article is published.
So is this bad news for Toppy 5800\5810 owners that are looking for a HD-PVR that will run TAPs?
I don’t think it means anything in particular on that front – just that this is what Turbosat/Icecrypt has decided to go with for the first PVR with their own name on. Without being privy to their discussions, we can’t draw any conclusions; it might have been a decision based on price, or time to market, or something else.
Rest assured, as soon as there’s any information about a Topfield product, I shall be letting people know.
Hi Nigel
I’ve seen it reported that release is now looking to be the end of October. Have you heard anything?
I have indeed heard all the details; I think some people have been a little over-optimistic in their estimates of when this would appear.
There has been a delay in testing – the DTG isn’t a large organisation and there’s a lot of kit to get through at the moment, with so many Freeview HD products appearing – and it’s clearly not going to make a September date.
As for exactly when, I hope to get a first look at a box in the next couple of weeks, but I’m not going to hazard a guess as to availability in shops – I don’t know quite how long it takes to get these into retail, once the final software build is tested and ready.
It’s now November, any update on this Nigel?
thanks.
I’ve put a first look on the site, which you can find via the tags on the front page. I’ll see if there have been many more firmware updates.
Thanks Nigel I just saw that. It’s all bleeding edge stuff! Good review so far.
What I’m really looking for is my next logical upgrade from my Toppy 5800. I would easily buy another Toppy if that had a similar offering, but it doesn’t seem to yet, and I don’t see anything in the pipeline. So this Icecrypt is quite enticing – however the only thing that scares me is that lack of API support (like the TAPs).
As these boxes are very complex computers, if anything goes wrong (as it did with the toppy) I wonder how quick they will be with firmware fixes. The toppy forum is unsurpassed in helping people with issues and has fixed many of mine. I would miss that support.