Toppy replacement?

P

Paulie-J

New Member
I'm currently the owner of a Toppy and have been for 7 years. Its been a great PVR but think time is running out for these. They don't exist for sale other than second hand any more and they are limited by the tech of 10 years ago. Over the years I've had a few problems with the disc being corrupted but not too often, but I'm now on my 3rd crash this year and feel it may be time to replace. So back in the days when they were still available to buy the Humax was the rival brand so seems the way to go when these have survived and Topfield is, well, not sure. They still have a share value but don't seem to be making anything....

I have a 5810, with SATA HD at 1.5TB, running Mystuff tap. I record lots of TV both series and singles, this drive is about 90% full. What would anyone suggest as a good replacement Humax model to take its place?

Also, some general questions:
Is the firmware on them updated by Humax regularly to fix any problems/add functionality (I haven't had an 'official' toppy update in all the years I've owned it)?
Can you install additional programs to give it more functionality or are these more locked down than Toppy's?
If I buy a box with a small drive can I replace it myself with a larger drive or will they only run on what they are supplied with (not sure if the drive needs to be configured in a special way to work with a Humax)?

Thanks in advance to any insight or suggestions people can give! And sorry for probably very newbie questions :)
 
We (that doesn't mean me) have unlocked the Humax HDR-FOX T2, and provisioned it with an ecosystem that should keep you happy - but the HDR-FOX is only available second hand too. Exploits have not been found for the newer (and available) models, not that anyone has tried very hard but we suspect Humax has learned from our success (a paradox - the custom firmware has made the HDR-FOX a sought after product, but Humax dropped it and locked down subsequent products even tighter making them less desirable... but I guess they are appeasing the content providers).

If I understand correctly, the big drawback of the Toppy is that it is StDef only - you gain access to HiDef with the HDR-FOX. On the other hand, Topfield actually provides an API (maybe why they can't do HiDef) whereas the capability of our custom firmware is limited by the extent to which we have been able to break in.

There is plenty to read on the forum already:


The only alternative is to investigate open-source solutions:


This isn't really the place to be asking - the Hummy Arms is our off-topic chat area and your question is relevant to the technical sections.
 
Here is a discussion on what other Toppy users have been moving on to

http://forum.toppy.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21135

BTW you could possibly resurrect your Toppy by replacing the PSU caps as is also discussed on that site. But as has been said, being an SD only box I think its time has past even it continues to serve as the gold standard for what a UI could be when used in conjunction with MyStuff.
 
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