Televisions

[elsie]

Someone, I believe, mentioned a firestick earlier on. I had a conversation with someone about a year or so ago, if I bought one of these firesticks from Amazon he would come round and for a fee of 50€ would put some app on the device, which would allow me to obtain all the sky channels and various other pay for services for free. Anyone know if this was a con or can it be done, also what do you get with these firestick things channel wise?

The Firestick is just a computer running software. It is the software which decided which channels you can view. So you need to add iPlayer, ITV Hub, All4, My5, Netflix, Disney, YouTube, BritBox, etc. You will need a VPN for the UK channels (and also possibly need to change the Firestick time) and some of those also require a subscription.

If you search for "sky on a firestick" you will find various suggestions. If they work I doubt they'll work for long and I certainly wouldn't pay anything unless it was a long post-dated cheque!

[RobertArthur]

@ Char,

Picture #1: nice Seagate 500 GB hard disk, two electrolytic caps visible, not any sign of leakage or bulging.

Picture #2: same as above, two visible (220 μF, 16 V). Perhaps two more on the other side of the pcb, see circles and the + signs.

Picture #3: one electrolytic capacitor visible, another might be hiding on the other side.

It looks clean, perhaps gentle knocking and reseating of connectors to localize the problem.

Back to the race.........

[elsie]

There are lots of forum discussions on various HDR-1100s problems. I have one in my UK house. It stopped recording although it still worked as a receiver. Humax have stopped offering repairs and no longer make Freesat boxes. I did look at replacing it with one of the new Aris Freesat boxes but there seem to be a lot of problems with them. In the end I bought a second-hand Humax Foxsat box on eBay to replace it for recording.

[Char]

Well we've had a look and can't see anything that looks like it might have come un-soldered or anything untoward. The only thing we wonder is that we had temporarily stood a small speaker on top of it when we put the new tele on the cupboard, and maybe it overheated although it didn't feel hot.
We've also twiddled with the connectors to see if any of those had come unseated but it still doesn't work - so we'll take it to the electronics fixing shop after Christmas, if he's still there.

We only use it for recording and playing back as we rarely watch anything when it's actually being shown. 'tis annoying though I have 30+ episodes of Hawaii five 0 on it along with other stuff and also loads of Bowie interviews and concerts that I haven't watched yet. I hope they've got some decent films on French tele over Christmas.

Hey ho - these things normally go in threes so t'was the tele now the humax I dread to think what's going to be next.
Thanks all.

[RobertArthur]

Char, if your fixing shop brings the Humax back to life it might be a good idea to try to back up (some of) the content of your Seagate drive to USB memory. If it turns out to be a one way trip to the déchetterie you can always install the hard disk in an external USB box (Inside: SATA connection). Recovery of the heavily encoded recordings will probably be next to impossible when connecting to your computer. Being only an almost one-minute-Humax-expert I'm a bit surprised by the lack of a decent service client of Humax, no circuit diagrams available, silence when it comes to questions about supposed hard disk failures (in fact a faulty resistor or sata driver problem).

[Char]

Thanks RobertArthur, I'll give that a go and see what happens. I'm hoping that the electronics wizard will be able to fix it without losing the stuff on the hard drive, but it's best to be safe.

[Pachapapa]

Just wondered. Did you try a factory reset after lifting Hard drive. Or perhaps a dud button cell for a CMOS bootloader.

[elsie]

AV Forums now have their Best TVs of 2021 - Editor's Choice Awards list https://www.avforums.com/news/best-tvs- ... ards.19332
If anyone is interested, a lottery/Premium bond prize might be useful as the average price is over £2500 !

[Hotrodder]

And after spending that sort of dosh you're expected to cough up more money for a monthly subscription to access something worth watching.

[basquesteve]

Buy a TV screen size you are happy with, big or small check the colours when working and ensure it has a HDMI port for your computer I watch all my TV from all over the world via internet