In reply to Fraser:
Sorry, on holiday at the moment so not able to respond promptly.
> Thanks for the suggestions Martin. Looks like what I'd lose on the 2000T is the non-iPlayer catch-up services and some HD space.
I wouldn't get too hung up on the disc space. I have a 500GB disc in my HDR-Fox T2 and I know that if I ever let it fill up I'd never get around to watching what was on it. You just have to be a bit ruthless in culling stuff that you've kept because "I want to watch it one day". You almost never do - and in the end it's only telly anyway.
A single hard disc is not a good place to store stuff you want to keep forever. They can and do fail, and when they do everything on them is toast. Everything I want to keep gets burned to DVD - something that's not easy with the YouView boxes because there's no way to move recorded content off to another device.
From what I've read on the YouView forums e.g. this thread
https://community.youview.com/youview/topics/goodbye-1e4erz the catch-up services don't work terribly well, which rather undermines the point of the box. The most satisfied users seem to be the ones who got a box from TalkTalk or BT, since they get other networked TV services from those providers. However, the focus on functionality for subscribers seems to have left people who bought the box outright somewhat out in the cold.
As I said before, for less than the cost of the YouView box you could get a decent PVR (the HDR-2000T) and a Roku/Sky Now box for the basic catch-services. (A higher-spec Roku/Sky Now would give you access to even more online TV services.) FYI the HDR-2000T does support IP TV services linked from the Freeview EPG, which the YouView box doesn't. AFAIK there is
no commercially available STB which give you access to
all online TV services in one place (and, as I described before, I'd have reservations about relying on such a device anyway).
> What were the "basic PVR functions" you think are lost with the T1010?
There's a list here:
http://hummy.tv/forum/threads/dtr-t1000-youview-shortcomings.1960/
(quite an old thread so some things might have been fixed since it was last edited in January 2013)
and anther one here:
https://community.youview.com/youview/topics/consolidated_list_of_improveme...
The most basic function which was missing at day one was being able to schedule a recording manually. That might had been fixed now, but managing to omit it in the first place - and the existence of a long list of desired features which don't seem to have been provided - doesn't give me confidence that they understand users' requirements particularly well.
> As it turns out, the box seems to have (almost) righted itself in that I can now view non-4:3 programmes in the correct 16:9 aspect ratio via the PVR. The 4:3 recordings are still stretched, but I could probably live with that.
It seems (from scanning forum posts) that "stretchyvision" is an inherent feature of the YouView firmware.
Bear in mind that all these shortcomings are down to YouView, since they write the code for the boxes with their brand name on. Humax don't get any say in it, they just provide hardware that meets the spec required to run it.
Finally: YouView was a mess for along time, and was seriously delayed before finally being pushed kicking and screaming over the line thanks to intervention from Alan Sugar. Read in to that what you will.
Post edited at 20:56