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Free To Air Digital Satellite Receiver - Korea
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hmm disapointing, just did a search on pvr in hong-kong (my other travel destination, hehe) and turned up bugger all...
Guess expecting too much, HK is small (population is like less than 4m?), korea is like 40m. haha.
anyway interesting google stats on number of pages.
2,320,000 from com.hk
15,800,000 from co.kr
hehe.
Results 1 - 50 of 87 English pages from com.hk for pvr.
Results 1 - 50 of about 312 from com.hk for pvr.
Searched All. turned up nothing of interest (except some crap chinese STB's, lol)
ok so back to FTA sat.
Fired off an email to hooktech.co.nz, notice they are distributing the topfield.co.kr boxes heh. $1400 for the TF5000PVR. phew expensive anyways..
Will try and cull any nz info on FTA sat user info or likely groups involved etc and report back along with maybe investigation into some of those korean boxes.
TiM
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You might want to do a search on http://www.globalsources.com/
They publish series of trade "magazines", which are basically 99.99% ads for products from Asia (They are HK based)
Mainly Electronics, Computers and Widgets.
I found it quite useful in the past.
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thanks for that. Just did a search, had a handful of PVR's. See below..
Will definately bookmark that site for future reference for other ideas as it could be useful :)
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http://www.kaonmedia.com
Another Korean PVR maker. (damn .com addresses LOL)
http://www.samwin.com.hk/eng/main.htm
Hong-Kong. Product's n range don't seem anything special tho.
http://www.bright-computech.com.tw
Taiwan. (Not on my travel list). Semi-interesting looking little box but single tv tuner. Not close to Tivo replacement but might be interesting little box nevertheless, similar to other media appliances cropping up these days, eg/ala Nokia Media Centre et al.
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4 Attachment(s)
Hi all,
Bit stretched for time in Korea with g/f comitments etc. Only managed to visit one PVR maker, dgstation.co.kr but was definately worthwhile.
So anyway some background info.
3/4 hr on subway and three line changes later I made it to the subway stop. A quick stop in an Internet cafe and I managed to get instructions written in Korean for the place I had to be which I gave to the Taxi driver. The area is called Bundang Technopark (basically an R&D hub) and consisted of around maybe 10-12 not particularly nice high-rise buildings. Kinda interesting, the one I had to go in, the bottom floor was mostly a restaurant area, I was there near to lunch time and it was quite busy, alot of young barely 20 something boys and girls eating/chatting away. Bet they live and breath work, long work hrs etc... poor bastards.
So anyway the shop itself. Find it on the fourth floor, go in and a confused woman greats me, a few heads spin around I guess. I try to explain the purpose of my visit but her English was pretty bad, give her my business card (I work for local government, LOL) and she takes it away and shortly arrives the owner/director hehe he was equally surprised but seemed pleased to see me. We go into his office and he turns around the monitor screen which has a tv picture showing, lo and behold what do I see? Hard core American porn, haha. He quickly changes channel and I nervously laugh a little.
Now the details itself. Remember this is the dual tuner linux unit. Reasonably good functionality, had a rather unique fastforward/rewind method that enabled it to coast thru recordings very fast, could'nt quite figure it out but can skim thru long recordings (eg 24hr etc) very speedily. As for Tivo like functionality it was definately lacking which is a bit of a disapointment. I asked about the EPG, it's stored in an (SQL Lite?) database and easily accessible as is the Linux OS which is very cool. So yeah, not too much else to say. oh price..
Basic unit (not the dual tuner tho) was $309 Euro's. Not bad price considering HookTech.co.nz are selling the Topfield unit for $1500NZ. Anyway, I asked if I could buy one but he was rather hesitant. Saying that development was only about 70%. Ie essentially finished but not quite ready for production. hehe. Anyway, will follow this up and the other units (as best I can online). and report back to ya at a later stage. Need to be very sure it will work in NZ, ie FTA Ku band Sat. etc. Dont know much about that but should'nt be hard to find out. So when I have recouped my finances a bit i'll be keen to buy a unit or two. hehe
Well thats all folks. Have attached a few pics just for fun. Nothing particularly exciting... (ps pic quality is crap due to 40k limit. sorry)
Oh, found some cool gadgets here tho, one I quite like is a USB 2.0 to IDE cable. Comes with power pack. Enables you to hotswap IDE drives. Cost was just over $10. I brought five of them, hehe.
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You're a geek Tim! Hehehe ;) I wonder if those hot-swap type cables would be of any benefit for TiVo usage.
Their offices look pretty low-tech!
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yeah i am what i am...
Nah those cables are only good for PC. Not sure if you could access the drive from the Tivo setup CD, seriously would'nt want to try. I see those cables on trademe, heh and a few other items I've seen at the markets. hehe some little buggers trying to make a few bucks. lol
Oh, one more feature I think is interesting with these PVR units, tho I dont think the dgstation supports it is onscreen editing. Almost all DVR DVD recorder based units support editing of recordings (which is necessary because they're more aimed for home dvd making than PVR). Anyway, would be a nice feature to be able to chop out the ads and trim start/end prior to archiving or sharing online. Of course having ads removed in the first place would be even better but lets not dream to high..
TiM
