I would like to add my experience of owning a Videocon d2h hd recorder box. I bought Videocon d2h HD with recording in July because I wanted ESPN HD. I have been completely dissatisfied with the stb. I will list some of the problems I have faced for all to know:1. My set top box does not display any picture when I try to start it, unless I switch off the mains and switch it on again. At this point it takes a couple of minutes to "Check the hard drive" before I can use it. If I try to power on the box from standby without switching the main power supply off and back on, I only see a flashing black and white screen. My stb runs into my Denon amp via HDMI and from there to my
Panasonic plasma via HDMI again. There is some incompatibility with my Panasonic plasma, because I can hear the audio through the amp if I switch off the
tv, but if I turn the tv on, I need to hard power off and on the stb to get a video signal. I have already had one stb replaced by Videocon for this issue, but even this one has the same problem and nobody knows how to fix it other than recommending that I don't use HDMI cables. If I had wanted to use multiple old component cables, I wouldn't have bought this box. This issue alone makes this box utterly useless for recording programs, because the programs will not record unless you can hard power off and on the box 20-30 mins before the scheduled recording time.2. I have had issues where programs that were meant to be recorded did not record and I missed watching them altogether because of this. It showed an exclamation mark next to the name of the program that was to be recorded, but no recording was made.3. When playing-back recorded programs, the program will freeze at random every so often. During a typical F1 race, the playback will freeze at least 3-4 times on average and I have to restart the recorded program from the beginning to continue watching it.4. What makes it worse is that when you playback a recorded program you cannot fast forward at more than 4x or max 8x or the program will just freeze. While the box officially supports up to 64x fast forward, the feature is utterly useless, because at 16x and above the fast forward simply freezes. Often when you press play (while fast forwarding) it doesn't record the key press and you fast forward too far, then have to rewind again (and run a real risk of having everything freeze at that point).5. They blatantly lie about how many hours of HD recording the box is capable of.6. You cannot get multi channel audio over HDMI. I have my stb hooked up to my Denon amp via HDMI, but I can only get Stereo sound this way even if I set it up to output multi channel sound. In order to get multi channel sound I have to use a coax cable, I'm told. For what? What's the point in having the HDMI interface if you need to run separate cables to get proper sound?7. The compression in their HD channels makes the image quality quite poor. It is definitely better than SD image quality by a long shot, but definitely not as good as HD channels should look. There are compression artifacts especially on fast moving pan shots like you have in F1 and in cricket. I will say, however, that the image quality on ESPN HD is now much better than it was in July when I bought the stb.In short the software on the
Tata Sky box is infinitely better (because it's a tried and tested Sky product). Now that
Tata Sky Plus HD has ESPN HD, I am going to switch back to them. In fact I am looking to sell my Videocon d2h (three months old) with HD and recording, so if anybody is interested in buying it, please do PM me. I can offer it to anyone in Pune / Mumbai region.