The Topfield TRF-2460 Masterpiece HD Plus is set apart, writes Stephen Dawson. It comes with a terabyte hard disk drive, WiFi (and wired networking), and the ability to record up to four TV programs at the same time, while playing back yet another.

Topfield has been in the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) game in Australia for many years, and was also very early in the networked PVR field. Indeed, some years back it even offered a standard definition PVR with built-in WiFi. The name tag ‘Masterpiece’ was used to set it apart.

BASICS

Let’s start with the fundamental function of the unit: as a high definition digital TV receiver and recorder. It has two HD TV tuners, as is the norm for modern units, but the quadruple recording is unusual. The trick is due to the way that each broadcast frequency – say 746.5MHz which, here in the south of Canberra, carries ABC – has several channels packed into it. The ABC frequency has four: ABC1, ABC2, ABC3 and ABC News 24. This unit is capable of recording two of those from the one tuner. Plus two more from a different (or the same) frequency using the other tuner. It is even versatile enough to allow you to record three from one frequency and one from the other. What you can’t do is record channels from ABC, SBS, Nine and Ten at the same time.

The terabyte hard disk offers a notional recording time of between 140 and 200 hours for high definition stations, and an even more extraordinary 340 to 500 hours for standard definition. If, somehow, that proves to be insufficient, then you can simply add additional external recording capacity. There are three USB sockets and an eSATA one. You can transfer recordings and other media files from the internal disk to external ones and vice versa, or simply record directly to the external drive. The full four channel recording works even with a USB-connected hard disk drive. You have to format it using the unit’s own facilities first, and this applies a Linux-style format. If you wish to transfer recordings to a Windows computer, you will need to Google for drivers to allow Windows to recognise it.

RECORDING AND EDITING

The unit also defaults to allowing time-shift operation. That is, you can rewind live TV because it buffers this to the hard disk. You can set it to allow up to five hours of buffering. You might as well: there’s no more wear and tear on the hard disk than with one hour of instantly retrievable material, and it may one day let you get back to something important.

That is mostly a momentary convenience, and no provision is made for turning the material buffered into a normal recording for viewing on a later date. So it’s a good idea to set up the recordings accurately.

You can of course record manually by hitting the record button while you’re watching something. You can set up a default record time, but this is easily adjustable after the recording has started.

If you’re enthusiastic, you can manually set up timer recordings, but it is far easier to simply select a program from the electronic program guide and hit the record key. Hitting the same key again pops up a panel with detailed recording information which you can adjust, such as setting the recording for various repeat options, or changing the file name (which defaults to the program name shown in the EPG).

In the setup menus you can specify ‘padding’ times, which automatically extend the recording so that it starts a little early and finishes late, to account for the vagaries of the TV broadcast stations.

You can also automate your recording schedule. Like a number of other network-capable PVRs, the Topfield supports the IceTV subscription EPG. This offers a very full EPG service at a modest cost, remote programming (via the web) of your recordings, and intelligent automatic recording (the system can keep its eye out for your specified programs and record them when they appear.)

But Topfield also has a highly unusual capability: its PVRs can be programmed with little applications called TAPs (Topfield Apps). Clever people create these and give them away for free. One such is called ‘AutoSched’, currently at version 1.08. With this you can enter the names of the programs that you want recorded and the unit will use its EPG to find these and record them automatically.

The recording was utterly reliable. The only time I missed anything was on one occasion when the TV station managed to get its own schedule so wrong that the twenty minute buffer at the end of the scheduled time was exceeded.

Playing back recordings is from a basic file menu. You can select a number of recordings for sequential playback, and during playback you can set bookmarks, which are retained with the recording until such time as you delete them. The unit makes provision for editing recordings, but this is bit of fudge because no physical changes are applied. The unit simply notes various markers to control which parts of the recording are played back. So you can’t trim the ends of files to save space. But with one terabyte of storage, that hardly matters.

Navigating recordings is a very strong point with this unit. There are plenty of fast forward and rewind speeds, and jump keys for which you can set values, but the real trick is that you can key in two digits on the remote and the playback will instantly switch to that point in the recording as a percentage.

If you’re inclined to move recordings to your computer, then you can use either a web interface or an FTP program. If the files are bigger than 4GB, then the latter is necessary. Any FTP client program works okay. I tried it out with both the WiFi connection and with the wired network. The former worked adequately (using a ‘g’ network) but the latter was so impressively fast I relied mostly on this.

OTHER STUFF

One vitally important part of devices such as this is their ability to deliver a decent quality picture to your system. This one was better than most in this regard. HDTV programs were simply excellent, but even SDTV was generally respectable. I mostly used the unit with its output set to 1080i (it doesn’t offer 1080p), and its upscaling of SDTV was reasonably good. But the unit can also be set to other specific output resolutions, or to ‘Auto’.

With this setting the output resolution is fixed at the broadcast resolution of whatever station is selected. This is useful if your display equipment has particularly high quality upscaling and deinterlacing.

Other media support is provided by copying music files, photos and video files to predefined folders on the unit. These can then be played back on the unit. The music sounded good, but the photos seemed pretty soft compared to other devices, almost as though they were being read at standard definition and upscaled to 1080i output.

You also get direct access to YouTube via the network, along with Flickr online photos and SHOUTcast Internet radio stations. This last worked okay at one point, but then ceased to work as I was writing up this review. When it did work, the stations available were there by the thousands, but the Australian offerings seemed rather limited compared to some other Internet radio providers. There’s also a weather application for summary information.

The one significant weakness of the unit is the remote control. The keys are poorly organised and all too often repeat themselves, cancelling what you’re trying to do. You learn to stab them quickly to avoid this.

In the past the Topfield TRF-2460 was a very high quality PVR that offered some good extras, but was scary simply due to its cost. Now, however, it is excellent value for money.

In short, this is a great PVR.