TV's with onboard twin tuners.

funkey_monkey

Is it possible to purchase a 26" TV with onboard twin HD/MPEG4 tuners so that I can record two stations or watch one & record another?

My current TV has a single tuner which in my ignorance didn't realise that it would not let me watch one and record another! (Nor does it receive RTE but that's another thread!!!).

The TV was purchased as it was cheaper than buying a receiver box + TV. The storage is external via USB.

Thanks.

excollier

Not sure if such a thing exists. Bigger screens with DVB-T2 / DVB-S2 on board is as close as I can think of.

watty

High end sets maybe for Picture in Picture. After all they first came out in Germany for Analogue (though the earliest one had a small 2nd B&W CRT for second channel. Really two TVs in one box!).

But even the basic boxes are not great for recording. A decent recorder uses an internal HDD.

I've not seen one. IMO more use than so called "3D" which is no more than Stereoscopic. What will they call real 3D?

Peter Rhea

funkey_monkey wrote: »

Is it possible to purchase a 26" TV with onboard twin HD/MPEG4 tuners so that I can record two stations or watch one & record another?

Don't know of anything current. There were 'Freeview Playback' (original name, before 'Freeview+') tvs a few years back with twin tuners & HDD, but they were a short-lived thing.

FREETV

watty wrote: »

High end sets maybe for Picture in Picture. After all they first came out in Germany for Analogue (though the earliest one had a small 2nd B&W CRT for second channel. Really two TVs in one box!).

But even the basic boxes are not great for recording. A decent recorder uses an internal HDD.

I've not seen one. IMO more use than so called "3D" which is no more than Stereoscopic. What will they call real 3D?

Holographic 3D maybe?

lawhec

A few have existed in the UK, but none have sold well. Humax once made one a number of years back but it flopped and pulled out of making TV displays afterwards. LG also had one in the past that was quietly on the market while JVC also had one based on the Humax PVR-T9xxx firmware range. Both the JVC and LG models had 160GB hard drives, but also had a disadvantage of their displays being only 1366x768. JVC have now left the TV market in the UK. There are none out there with Freeview+ HD capability.

Most new LCD & LED TV's can function as a very basic single-tuner PVR. However you're restricted to recording what you're watching if the tuner is being used, and you don't have the benefit of Freeview+ features (Saorview should have such capabilities in future for compatible PVRs) which allow for the right start and end times to be initiated by the broadcaster.

It's not the greatest of ideas to have a hard drive inside the TV casing for a few reasons, one if you want to upgrade or replace it, another is that especially with LED TVs the depth profile is made thicker. Not to mention the extra space required for an additional tuner, extra circuitry and processing power etc. You could have say an external hard drive connected, but that would very likely need an additional power supply running to it and not have the same recording reliability being over USB rather than say SATA. At that stage, you'd be just be better either getting a proper twin-tuner PVR, or maybe a DVD or HD recorder with Saorview or Freeview+ built in which can take on the recordings like a traditional VCR leaving the tuner in the TV for general viewing.

Maybe when the price of solid-state memory becomes cheaper with bigger capacities and longer lifespans, along with better energy efficiency and scaling of sizes, some TV's will become available in the future that can handle true PVR functions on either Saorview, Freeview and/or Freesat. I reckon that scenario is a few years down the line, perhaps longer for them to become commonplace. By that stage we might be looking at Ultra HDTV with video compression using HEVC/h.265 (4k practical over DVB-T2 transmission, but 8k using current and future compression likely limited to cable & possibly satellite).

watty

FREETV wrote: »

Holographic 3D maybe?

Except the practical real 3D colour displays are not Holographic, but several hundred 2D images layered. Holographic images need millions of times more data than 2D. A compressed true 3D image might only be 20 to 50 times more data than 2D. Current so called 3D (stereoscopic) are often transmitted as a pair of 960 x 1080 images, so take up no extra data, but barely HD. Disk can use pairs of 1920 x 1080 by doubling frame rate.

But there is little compelling content and that is unlikely to change soon.

LED Backlight LCD
Really they need to make them x4 fatter or more, to fit decent loudspeakers. They are all useless without a separate speaker system. Also they are all LCD tv. There OLED TVs (very small and not "real" LEDs), LED panels (discrete LEDS and minimum about 3m diagonal, used for halls and Stadiums) and one real LED TV from Sony that you can't buy yet.

Sam Russell

I do not know whether this was a proposal or a real product. A TV that uses the 3D technology to allow two different channels to be displayed on the one TV, where one set of glasses choose the 'left' signal and the second set views the 'right' signa. Sound is a problem, but a nice idea. I think at least one need earphones.

That TV would need dual tuners.

winston_1

Several TV's had dual analogue tuners but I've not come across one with dual digital tuners.

JonathonS

funkey_monkey wrote: »

Is it possible to purchase a 26" TV with onboard twin HD/MPEG4 tuners so that I can record two stations or watch one & record another?

Wait till 2013, but you will have to go bigger than 26in......;)