Astromax - My Review

I was tempted to write a review of Astromax the day after I got it but didn't think it would be fair so I decided to wait a month before doing it.

Astromax has been a blessing. In just 4 weeks I managed to fill up my 80GB drive to 70% or approximately 40 hours of shows. Yes my Max is loaded because my life doesn't revolve around Astro's schedule, which is the primary reason why I got Astromax in the first place. I suppose the same reason made the ubiquitous VCR a success in the old days.

Max comes with a lot of nice features you would expect. One immediate thing I noticed was how the video output was sharper than my old decoder. I use S video connectors and a 32" flat screen TV on both. Although subtle, the difference was noticeable enough for me.

Here are more things to like about the Max:

1. You can peruse Astro's program schedule on your TV. It is updated by satellite daily.
2. One touch programming. Just use the cursor to point to any slot in the shedule and click on record. The recording starts and stops by itself.
3. Decent sound quality.
4. Watch one channel while recording another.
5. Time shifting feature. Press pause during live broadcast, answer the phone and press play to continue without losing a second.
6. Optical output jack (haven't used it yet though)
7. Say goodbye to VHS tapes. Everything's recorded on hard disk.

In this review I'll set aside the barely-passable aesthetics of the box to focus on something more important - the inbuilt PVR software. This is the Personal Video Recorder program that gives you the blue-hued interactive menus and fancy features.

Menu navigation is fairly intuitive and most home users will find themselves frequenting two areas, the Planner where you define your recording schedules and My Max which lists all the stuff you've recorded. You play back your recordings by choosing a title in My Max and clicking on "Play from the start". Since Astromax's controls can be learnt in a few minutes without reverting to the manual, it is user friendly in my books.

Program management in the Max is a breeze. You can delete any recorded show anytime by going to My Max, choosing a title and hitting delete. If you attempt to record programs on a full disk, I'm told it will overwrite the oldest shows stored but I haven't got that far yet. What I do find is that because the Max is so easy to use, I've become trigger-happy with recordings. It's like going to a buffet. You end up loading so many things on your plate you know you can't possibly finish. My bad. Hopefully it's a habit that'll correct itself in time.

The Max is certainly not perfect yet and here is my wish list.

An escape button
I wish all menus have a global "escape" button whereby with just one click I can exit from whatever I'm doing and go back to the last live channel I was watching. There is a "back" and "exit" button on the remote but they don't always work as expected.

Synchronization problems
I wish they used a better algorithm to deal with the lag between the scheduled program time and actual broadcast time. Let me explain. Lets say you've set the device to record something scheduled at 10-11pm. In reality, the show comes on air 10:05-11:05pm. The machine faithfully stops recording at precisely 11pm and the result? You lose the last 5 minutes of your show. I've lost many a drama episode this way. A real anticlimax.

To deal with this, Astromax gives you an option to extend a recording's end-time by a few minutes. Yes it solves the problem but creates a new one - by creating a conflict with any back-to-back recording you may have programmed. To illustrate, let's say you are trying to record these shows.

10:00-11:05 pm, Program A (You've manually extended the recording stop time by 5 mins to avoid losing the ending)
11:00-12:00 am, Program B

This attempt will fail because overlapped recordings aren't possible on Astromax.

When such conflicts happen, the system will ask you to choose between "shortening" the first recording (which I think undoes the time extension you chose) or canceling the second one. Hmm.. keep this or dump that or dump this and keep that. Whatever, solving one problem by creating another is no solution to me, especially if you don't know when the show's next rerun is going to be.

If back-to-back recordings clash, the obvious solution is to allow the user to batch-shift ALL affected slots forward in one go, meaning shift all their start and end times by the same amount, instead of just allowing users to manipulate end-times only as is currently done. Its like dealing with a railway coach. The only way to move one car foward a metre is to move the the next coach and the next forward by the same distance. Since satellite broadcast lag is fairly constant at 2-5 minutes for every program, a batch move-forward feature should safely solve the problem.

Recording the same show many times inadvertently
How do you decided whether to record a program or not? If you decide based on the program's synopsis like I do, then you better pray that the synopsis provided is sufficient. Unfortunately this is not always the case with Astro.

This is more an issue with Astro the service provider rather than Astromax the hardware manufacturer (apparently its a Thomson box) but because Astro is the distributor I'll treat them as the same.

We all know that Astro shows lots of reruns and that's good for people who haven't got a VCR or Astromax. The problem is if their synopsis doesn't tell you if it's a repeat or even give a proper description about the episode, you're left wondering if you're about to record something you've already seen. For example, for shows like 30 Seconds to Fame, you'll notice the synopses are always the same. While non Max users can just click to another channel, it is a problem if you're away and have recordings scheduled. I've ended up recording the same episode 3 or 4 times because I didn't know they were reruns. What a waste of precious disk space and a source of annoyance.

To be fair, the Max software does provide an option to display rerun information but I'm told Astro has not activated the feature yet. Solution: while waiting for it to be activated, can't they at least provide the episode number for each show. I mean, Star Wars can have Episode 1, II, etc., how hard is it to type it into drama series synopses?

Software Hang
This is probably my biggest gripe about Astromax. It hangs (freezes) a tad more frequently than I would like it to and when it does, the only thing you can do to unfreeze it is to power it off and back on again - basically a cold restart. The fact that my set hangs on me every 2-3 days disturbs me. I suspect the firmware needs a lot more testing.

I do realize we're talking about Astromax version 1 and for that I don't expect a perfect 10. However in other countries, this technology has been around for years and the manufacturers are not without experience. So I hope to see improvements the next version.

I will write a review on the hardware aspect of Astromax when I have the time.