The Strong SRT 6500 combines PVR and Blu-ray technology in one affordable box, writes Stephen Dawson.

For reasons which are by no means clear, the personal video recorder market in Australia is dominated by relatively small specialist manufacturers – the likes of Strong and Topfield and Beyonwiz – while Blu-ray players are largely the province of the mega-manufacturers, from Panasonic, through LG to Sony and Samsung. Some of the latter dabble in combo players, but the Strong SRT 6500 is the first I’ve seen from the former group.

And the truth is, while I was confident the PVR part would be fine, I feared that the disc player section would turn out to be a dog, as has been the case with the rare DVD/PVR combo I’ve previously seen from such manufacturers.

But it turns out that both the PVR and the Blu-ray player are nicely competent. And in addition, the Blu-ray has a rare feature: the ability to play DVDs and Blu-ray discs from other regions.

Facilities
The SRT 6500 is a twin tuner personal video recorder with support for high definition TV stations. There’s a 500GB hard disk built in for recording. You can set the unit to time shift – that is, buffer whatever you’re watching so that you can rewind live TV. You can program recordings from the EPG and you can record up to three programs at once. Because there are two tuners, two of those recordings must be on the same frequency band. So you can record SBS One, say, and both ABC 1 and ABC News 24 at the same time.

Meanwhile, the Blu-ray/DVD/CD player is implemented almost as though it was a separate device within the box, just happening to share the same connections and power supply.

The unit fires up in PVR mode and has to be explicitly switched to BD mode to play a disk. The ‘Menu’ key brings up the main settings menu in PVR mode, but the disc’s menu in Blu-ray mode. There’s a separate ‘Settings’ key for the disc spinner. And there’s also a dedicated ‘Pop Up’ key for pop-up menus on Blu-ray discs.

Some Settings
I had the unit conduct an Auto Scan of the airwaves to capture the TV stations in my area. SBS is available here from two different transmitters. This unit picked up the first one it came to – the weaker of the two – and must have decided that it therefore didn’t need the second occurrence. That left SBS dropping out from time to time. To correct this I had to delete the SBS stations (easy to do from the Channel List) and did a manual scan of the frequency band in which the stronger version resided.

Otherwise, most of the default settings are fine. You will need to do some setting up for WiFi in the usual way if you’re going to use that for the network functions. And if you’re using a home theatre receiver you ought to go into the AV output settings (for the PVR) and change the audio from PCM to Bitstream, so that those stations with Dolby Digital sound can deliver that directly to your receiver. Some PVRs don’t permit this over HDMI, but this unit had no trouble on that front.

One setting in the Blu-ray setup menus intrigued me. It had to do with audio handling for ‘SACD’. Cool! Super Audio CDs! I popped in the non-hybrid (i.e. SACD only, with no CD layer) Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company. The disc spinning logo appeared on the front display, and that’s all that happened. It stayed there. There player wouldn’t switch off. The disc wouldn’t eject. Eventually I pulled the power cord, the reapplied power, after which I could eject it.

One other piece of inelegance was that the unit didn’t close the disc drawer when it is set to standby.

Catch-up
The recording and playback functions of the PVR worked very nicely. In addition to the usual repeat functions for programmed recording (Weekly, Daily, Once etc), there’s also an ‘S.REC’ key, which stands for ‘Series Record’. Highlight an item on the EPG and hit this one, and the unit will automatically record all programs by that name (so long as the unit is switched on from time to time to allow the EPG to refresh itself with new information).

There is a setting so that you can add ‘Padding’ to your recordings so that they will start early and finish late, making sure that you don’t miss anything. This did not work during the test, though, so I found it best to go into the timer list and edit each setting. There you can adjust the early start and delayed ending for a recording.

Playback of recordings worked smoothly and, as with the PVR itself, the picture quality was very good. Remember, all a PVR has to do is lay down the transport stream digital signal onto the hard disk. There is no conversion of any kind, so the quality on playback is identical to that of the original broadcast.

I had the unit’s output set to 1080p, so it was responsible for progressive scan conversion as well as upscaling, and it did both well. As we’ll see with Blu-ray, the unit is pretty good at choosing the correct deinterlacing strategy.

With playback you can zoom around the file with fast forwards and rewind by up to 32 times, or use the left and right arrows to go even faster. The skip keys jump by thirty seconds. Using up and down arrows during playback skips to the previous or next recording. You can edit your recordings, sort of, but this merely marks sections not to be played, so there is no saving of disk space.

Blu-ray
With regular Blu-ray discs, performance was entirely unexceptional. I did manage to jam the unit up to the point of having to switch if off and restart it. But that was once only and when I tried to replicate the circumstances, it worked perfectly.

It was mostly a pleasure to use with quick response to keystrokes on the remote. There are five fast forward and reverse speeds, quick chapter selections using the numeric keypad and the ability to jump to a specific time.

But while you can pause playback, you cannot step through the disc frame by frame, nor run it in slow motion.

The problem with some Blu-ray players is with the occasional 1080i50 Australian Blu-ray, and the great majority of Australian DVDs, with their video in 576i50. Both of these require smart circuitry to correctly detect whether they are in film or video mode to determine how the picture can be converted to progressive scan at maximum quality.

Just about no automatic circuits get it perfectly right, although some very nearly do. This unit was up near the top tier of players on this front, only getting tricked by the very hardest of my test clips (that is, the ones in which film or video sourcing was most ambiguous). It was very impressive.

And, yes, this is a rare unit that can play discs from other regions. By default it fires up with multi-region DVD support and the Blu-ray set to Region B. But instructions in the ‘Troubleshooting’ section of the manual tell you how to enter a code to access the Factory Settings part of the menu and change the region codes. It worked. A couple of American Region A Blu-ray discs I bought in error played fine.

Sharing
The unit offers quite a few media sharing options, including the ability to share both recorded and live TV to portable devices on your network. You need to download various apps (paid in the case of iOS) and do a bit of setting up. I tried with the Android version, but I could not it to work. That was because the unit disappeared from the list of available network resources (for my whole system) after a while for no reason I could work out. It was there, then it wasn’t. Restarting the unit didn’t change the situation.

That said, perhaps it was my rather crowded network environment that was the problem.

You can also set up folders on your computer/s to share with the unit so it can play media from them. This involved getting right under the security settings hood on a Windows computer to an extent that made me uncomfortable, seemingly providing ‘guests’ on the local network the right to do pretty much anything they wanted. So I gave that a miss as well.

It’s easy enough, anyway, to copy any recordings either way by means of a USB flash drive.

While the unit went and remained invisible on my network, it still had access to internet radio. The portal used isn’t indicated, but it worked well and had all the stations I wanted. A hint: rather than working through the menus, just hit the red key and type what you want into the search box. That brought up the stations I wanted very quickly.

The Blu-ray part of the unit supports BD-Live, so it can use the network for those functions (you’ll need to put some flash memory in the rear USB port as well for that function).

Conclusion
The Strong SRT 6500 packs both a solid twin tuner high definition PVR and a good multi-region Blu-ray player in a unit that costs little more than a standalone PVR. Very good indeed for the budget-conscious.