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.
