Danny I suggest you phone them. I called this morning and it’s a straight exchange or nothing deal. You give them the unit serial number and make a payment of £55 and they do the rest.

The new box has wireless so it’s not all bad.

0344 318 8800, 3, 1

The music on hold is very soothing.

rwb: I don’t have a desktop PC just now so don’t think I can connect the drive to test it. I suspect if the drive itself is dead I have no chance of recovering my data anyway. There are no HDD noises at all now, complete silence, so the chances are it is the control circuitry on the motherboard ie. the dreaded HDR fault. Humax have admitted there is a design fault with these units and their repair solution was not reliable so they are now exchanging units without quibble. I did have the Humax app loaded as I tried it out with a cheap tablet years ago. I never used the app after that and the tablet was not powered on but I now understand why, even with the Humax powered down (power save mode, red light on) I could hear the hard drive waking up and working almost every 5 minutes and lots of router activity on the Humax port, even at night. I now understand that the app was still active on the Humax and it was probably causing the HDD to constantly keep firing up which probably hugely affected the mtbf and brought the fault much earlier to failure. Even after numerous factory resets I see the app is still active with my subscription (good old social engineering) and it has to be specifically deleted which I have done now.

The problem is that there are all sorts of tools to recover/repair HDD data but the encryption key for HD recordings is with my Humax box which is probably dead so my recordings are locked and there seems to be no way to either repair the box or decrypt the recordings.

Ironically, as I had a 1Tb drive, I recorded everything in HD as space wasn’t an issue, whereas SD programs could probably be recovered with some effort.

Martin: Yes, I wish I had bought a T2 now, all I want to do is archive off to an external HDD recorded programs to watch later as the Humax drive becomes full. I have no issue with Freesat rules and would watch the archived programmes via the same Humax box with the same encryption key.

I have no techy pals but I do have a soldering iron so I was looking for last gasp attempt to bodge an RS Components/Farnell 10p fix!

I now unplug the box from mains and internet and tv at night and leave it off to see if the ‘magic’ fix happens, even it temporarily, but no luck so far.

I might open the box up and ‘fiddle’ with the components as a last resort. I have a multimeter and google.

I called Humax again this morning but Mr Nice from yesterday was busy and I got Mr ‘Computer says no, and I’ve got a Masters degree and really don’t want to work in a call centre in Belfast’.

The position is that Humax will no longer attempt any repairs as they were not reliable and the offer is £55 payment for an exchange HDR1100S, take it or leave it. The hard drive size will exactly match the size of the old unit according to it’s serial number data.

The returned unit has to have it’s hard drive included so I can’t keep the HDD and try for a fix later.

The evidence that quite a lot of units seem to be failing when the drives are nearly full is just from my own experience, mine was at 95%, and from spending a few hours on this forum, hummy, digitalspy, techadvisor, avforums, even an ebay advert for a dead unit. I typed into google “Humax HDR1000S lost recordings” and real the litany of tales and quite a number stated their drive was getting full.

As my drive went over 90% I noticed the Humax wasn’t behaving so well, menus a bit sluggish, the Resume option on part-viewed programmes didn’t seem to work, occasional lock-ups. I had the July 2017 software.

There are 5 dead HDR1000S on ebay now as I write and one says the drive was nearly full so I was starting to get this impression but I agree that it could be that all the units are around 2 years old (just out of warranty) and so are often quite full due to the inability of the box to archive to external storage.

The external storage could still hold the data encrypted and so could only be played on the original Humax box so there would be no copyright issues. The fact that the film, say the BBC only had a 90 day licence for it, could be stored for years is the same as storing it on the Humax for years.

Anyway, I just want the 2 years 1Tb of recordings accessible again and it looks like I’ve had that. I will just have to get over this loss and curse Humax.

I’ll probably take the £55 deal and get an 1100S as 2nd hand 1Tb Humax units go for around this anyway, and the new unit will have some warranty.

Because of my experience I will never buy a Humax again until there is an archive facility.

As the guru of the boards, who I have been stalking across numerous forums, Graham (GLT) has stated the copy protection at this level is a bit of a joke.

I am a latecomer to many TV series as I had enough entertainment on terrestrial TV but now, as the BBC spew out rubbish and repeats and I get home after 10pm when there’s not much on, I have managed to download from a certain nautical website all of Breaking Bad, Better call Saul, Game of Thrones, Twin Peaks, etc etc which I store on an external HDD and watched via the Humax! Quite a few people I know have ‘special’ £40 Amazon Firesticks and watch every channel under the sun for free and all I wanted to do was watch programmes I had paid for via my BBC licence fee.

As well as lots of programmes, I had around 30 movies recorded for future watching, and to allow me to skip adverts, and now they are gone so this might encourage one to obtain them by unscrupulous means rather than wait for them to be broadcast again so the encryption may be having a negative effect.

Thanks for reading this rant, I feel a bit better now.

It’s probably good to loose 500 hours of recordings as my ‘todo’ list is back to zero and TV is no substitute for real life.

AndrewB – 1 hour ago  » 

Danny: out of interest, how full was your hard drive and did you have the Humax app paired to any devices?

Hi Andrew,

My hard drive had hardly anything on it (compared to others) at its peak I think it was only about 14% full. I did have it paired to the freesat app on my phone. Just been reading your other reply about it causing the HDD to spin up all the time. I did wonder why the box was doing that even though it wasn’t ‘on’ so I guess that’s it. I hardly use the app but it was handy for setting something to record when I wasn’t at home.

I’ve had an email response from Humax asking for confirmation of “what is stated under storage in your settings” – no idea why. I think I’ll probably be better calling them but I need to find time to do it as I’m not at home right now.

Danny, I guess Humax want to know your hard drive size and perhaps if it doesn’t match the spec from the serial number then they can say the drive has been upgraded and so the warranty is invalid!

A less cycnical view would be that they want to prep your new box with the correct size drive.

Good luck.

On a Foxsat-HDR SD recordings are not encrypted. HD ones are encrypted when recorded in Freesat mode. However HD recordings made in Non Freesat mode (like other FTA boxes) aren’t encrypted and can be used just like SD ones.

VLC and many other media players will play them. I prefer Splash Pro from Myrillis.

Can’t discuss the CF ramifications re HD encryption here. However the CF does have a DLNA server add on. As a result you can view unencrypted recordings made on it directly using a 2nd generation box. It even improves HD picture quality over the direct HDMI output from the Foxsat.

On the G2 boxes even the file system is encrypted (believed to be Luks encrypted).

Faust – 27 minutes ago  » 

I think people need to educate themselves or a disclaimer added to the sales blurb that this modern generation of PVRs should not be seen as media archivers but as short term storage.

I have material on my 1000s which I have had almost from box release date which I know full well will be lost when the box finally dies. It’s annoying but there’s little to be done about it. Most if not all modern PVRs are going the same way.

The business model appears to be either stream content or buy. Store TV programmes for ‘free’ but only in the short to medium term.

There is dozens of generic FTA satellite pvrs or pvr ready boxes. None of them encrypt. Some even have a fully functioning epg.

If you wanted to be a pirate which would you buy ?

Same issue on my HDR-1000S. I guess its 3 or 4 years old. Spoke to support and they didnt admit to knowing anything about this fault. Suggested I try a new HDD which I did. Called back and told them it didn’t fax it and they responded by saying. “we have a repair centre but you cant send it back as you have opened it.” Told me to throw it away.

Very poor after sales service in my view. I would have expected more life out of it.