Apologies for the ‘necro’, but having just set up my dear old mum’s now 15 year-old (!) 9150T with a new TV that has no SCART, thought I’d make the following known;

I tried a couple of SCART-to-HDMI converters (on my own equipment) so you don’t have to – they are dismally bad. Terrible colours, incorrect scaling, you name it. Their sole purpose is really just to connect old games consoles. [ETA >> I gather there are some competent ones out there but they cost as much as a new PVR]

I ended up using the ‘Side AV’ composite input on the TV which is a 4-pole (TRRS) 3.5mm jack, using a SCART to RCA adapter on the Humax and a TRRS-to-female RCA adapter on the TV. Needed some trial-and-error to get the three connections (video and stereo audio) right.

I used a ‘proper’ 75 Ohm coaxial lead for the video connection which I recommend always doing for composite video – even with the other connections in the way (on the adapters at each end), it gets rid of much of the ‘ringing’ edge artifacts that composite is prone to when using cheap ‘shoelace’ leads.

I also dismantled the SCART adapter, deleted the IN/OUT selector switch and soldered the wires (Composite Video, Audio L/R and Ground) directly from the appropriate SCART pins to the RCA sockets.

To my surprise (considering the ‘budget’ TV), with some tweaking in the TV’s settings the picture quality is almost as good as it used to be via SCART RGB, and the TV’s scaling of 576i is perfect.

BTW, this is on a 43″ HD (1080) LCD, which replaced a 32″ after its backlight failed.

Replacing the original 160GB WD ‘Green Power’ HDD with a NOS 500GB Seagate ‘Pipeline’ (still available and very cheep!) has given the old Humax a new lease on life.

The old WD has total power-on hours of 7.44 years (65182 hours), an ‘Uncorrectable Sector Count’ of 81 and a ‘Current Pending Sector Count’ of 33.

Much more responsive and no freezes in the couple of weeks since the Seagate was installed (they had been getting more frequent, presumably because the EPG is stored on the HDD).

All capacitors look healthy, I was intending to replace the PSU smoothing caps but they appear to be the later, Japanese TK’s rather than the crappy ‘Capxons’ that were known to cause problems in (presumably) earlier production units.

Mark777 – 13 hours ago  » 

Incidentally, before installing the new HDD I ran two zero-fills (doesn’t matter what kind, but I did a long Windows format and a simple erase with Seatools).

I advise this with all new HDD’s, in any context, if at all possible. Run with the drives in a physical environment that keeps them under c. 42 degrees if possible.

Run Diskpart > Clean in Windows CMD before installing the HDD in whatever its home will be.

That is a wise thing to do with a cheap “new” HDD but I don’t think it is necessary with brand new drives.

Mark777 – 1 hour ago  » 

Well, that’s been my habit for maybe 15 years or more, even with recent 4 and 8 TB drives which need overnight to complete.

I think of it as a break-in for all the internals, but particularly the read-arm servo.

It could indeed be pointless, but I’ve never had an HDD fail in what’s now over two decades, and more of them than I could count (with the exception of one WD 2.5″ after very few, occasional hours a couple of years back), and I have quite a few 500GB and 1TB Seagates, WD’s and Hitachis a decade or more old, with power-on hours of many years each, that still perform (and sound) like new when I occasionally use them as ‘scratch’ disks in SATA hot-swap or USB bays.

I have 40 years experience of using hard drives and I too have had very few failures, mainly in the early days when hard drives were not as reliable as they are today, and typically I have done nothing more than format the drive.