HDIUM, pronounced as “hatchium” just like

someone is sneezing (just kidding), is a new brand

launched in 2010 by the Australian media player
distributor Eurodigital in 2010. The challenge is clear,
compete with the other Dual DVB-T loaded player
from “DViCo” that comes at higher cost as the
HDIUM is yours for about €100 less and integrates
the DUAL DVB-T tuner by default which is optional
on the competition’s version of Dual DVB-T HD
Media player so from that point of view, what can
possibly go wrong? A lot more affordable thus, but is
it up to the task convincing us (me) this is a better
choice as a recorder, media player or even both…
Let’s find out!

DUO PVR HD Media Player

Hi-Jack

The HDIUM DUO PVR is a player that tries to incorporate
everything. It is your regular media player and recorder and
delivers that below the €200 price range (€179). That’s quite
something we want to see.
Hardware wise the unit is a little higher than the usual boxes
we see due to the design of the hard drive cage that allows
easily adding or removing a hard drive (SATA) from the left
hand side.
The front is sober but strikes as “too simple” thanks to its “no
integration of a display” or using the front space for
incorporating a closed cabinet for connections like USB and
maybe even video input. The only part that is used is the big
blue power led in the middle accompanied by a card reader at
the right side and the IR receiver window on the left.
The right hand side incorporates a “silent” fan, it’s hardly
audible when sitting next to the unit so it won’t disturb during
video playback either. We however know the risk that comes
with fans, silent at first and then... they wear off and make
noise. The fan is however needed to cool the unit. Besides the
fan, there’s the possibility to connect a SATA drive by exterior
using the cable in the box however it is not a real eSATA
connection. It’s best
described as the one
you find on regular
HDD drives and DVD-
Rom’s…
That may lead to some inconvenience if you own regular
eSATA enclosures or for those having running kids around.
Connecting a naked drive is just a bit too much…
The rear end is where we first get acquainted with the
recording abilities of the HDIUM DUO PVR finding the antenna
connection and loop holes. You can connect external devices
for recording (input) over composite, there’s video output over
Composite and HDMI 1.3. (Notice, a cable is included HDMI 1.4
however the player is 1.3).
Besides the quirky SATA connection externally placed on the
right hand side, we find 2 USB connections in the rear just on
top of the 10/100 network close to the USB Slave port and
power switch. For audio we get Optical and Coaxial outputs.
The player is as mentioned a bit bigger than the usual in height
due to the design which leaves an “empty” front view. The
HDIUM DUO PVR measures 8cm height, 18,5cm deep and
22.5cm width. Box contents include HDMI 1.4 cable, remote,
player, power adapter, remote, sata connection cable and
Composite. Wireless USB can be acquired separately as option.
The player is built in tones of black plastic (hard and less hard)
which is normal in this price range especially since the dual
tuner is integrated, HDIUM must have squeezed out all extra
additional costs. HDIUM does deliver on the “wow” factor as
far as the promising operations are concerned.
So in all, the box contents are reasonable
and considered complete besides remote
batteries we are left wishing for (trouble
shipping batteries overseas lately). From design point of view,
the player matches the price, there’s only so much we can
expect for the money spend but we did find us wishing for a
little more appeal for the front facia and a proper eSATA
connector integrated for external disks.
We must mention, the blue led (player is on) and red led
(player is off) in front are bright and when placed close to the
TV, they do disturb your view due to it’s size. One could
provide an option in Setup to dim the brightness of this led
maybe or even shut it off when a movie starts playing
automatically.

The best player can be rubbish if there’s no convenience in
handling files and delivery of options to make the use of a
player convenient. On the other hand, lately if any player uses
to much “defaults” from Realtek stock interface, interest can
be killed rather quickly by judgment it is more “of the same
general stuff”. Luckily the HDIUM already has the DUAL DVB-T
Tuner as an advantage and a lot has to go wrong before we
forget the value of the package… so let’s explore.
Powering on the player reveals the splash screen and the
rather appealing logo of HDIUM. The Orange does it for me I
guess.
Once the player is finished booting up, we come to the home
menu where a list of icons are available (top bar) each holding
their own sub options. So we are already certain a little effort
has gone into redesigning stock layout which is only a good
thing.
We navigate down to the setup and explore all the options we
have there to tune the HDIUM DUO PVR into our personal
preferences… There are no less than 8 categories we can fiddle
with to tune the player from TV, to BD/DVD to Miscellaneous.
We run through all the options offering you the ability to learn
exactly what’s hot and what’s not!
The TV section is offering TV Region Setup
and lists all the countries and the option
“don’t care”. A fun little entry in an
important selection I believe which
determines the operation of DVB-T per
country? Besides the selection of country you can start the
channel scan from here and play around with the channel
setup which seems limited to swapping channels or delete
them. No renaming unfortunately.
Audio selection offers the usual night
mode which reduces the volume in noisier
scenes, we have HDMI output featuring
down mix, multi-channel or bit stream
and SPDI offering down mix to PCM and bit stream.
The “Advanced” audio setup allows you to tweak settings per
codec for AC3, DTS. AAC and WMA Pro which is a feature we
like.
Video options. The ever so important
feature to lift convenience allows selection
of TV type by regular 4:3 and wide screen
selection, HDMI auto / NTSC / PAL or fixed
settings for 480p, 576p, 720p/1080i and 1080p with 50/60HZ
selection. Even though PAL/NTSC is already covered in HDMI
output, there’s a SD video output selection featuring PAL/NTSC
selection once more. In addition to all these, yet another
selection offers the 24HZ option which can be set to ON or
OFF. I assume it auto detects everything needed.
What we haven’t seen that often is de “Scan Mode” featuring
Full Pixel, CRT TV or LCD TV followed by the BCS controls
including Brightness, Contrast, Hue, Saturation and Digital
Noise Reduction. These have no use in the setup though as
they are required to be available during playback. How else do
we see the effect on the video when adjusting?
Recording, one of the 2 major targets of the
HDIUM DUO PVR besides being a HD media
player, offers the selection of recording
quality between HQ or SP. There could be
few more options provided but living in the HD ERA I assume
we are ok with this selection. Time shift is featured and can be
switched on or off which affects the unit’s automatic Time Shift
feature to start when pausing a TV channel. The user remains
in control to use time-shift by selection as it only disables the
“automatic Time Shifting”. I do wonder though, why would
anyone pause a channel without Time-Shifting as pausing
would indicate you want to continue where you left off, isn’t
it?
The last feature in the recording section is selecting the target
destination of recordings which can be the HDD or a USB
source. It makes me wonder… what about the external SATA
connector? Is this seen as HDD too or only the internal
connected drive is possible to be used… and if seen as HDD,
why isn’t USB seen as HDD? If both SATA internally and
externally are connected, how would we pick the right HDD?
I’m sorry… Am I confusing you? Let’s just go for a simple
solution… If we can record to the externally connected hard
drive over SATA, lets’ add it in this menu for selection. Coming
to think of it… maybe the SATA is only mend for connecting an
external DVD-ROM drive…
Considering currently there is no hard drive connected, the
unit should detect it and not offer it up for selection. It’s all
about flexibility of a unit showing what can be used and not
showing what can’t at this time…
Network, huge importance and like many
others, we are talking about regular
10/100 connection. GBIT only comes in a
year or so…
We can use the regular Static
and DHCP options and
selection between wireless
and cabled LAN. Also here,
the flexibility I mentioned in
the record section is valid as Wireless, we can start setting it up
a few steps down the wizard driven menus even when wireless
is not connected. In addition, we never liked having three
different connection options as if we have three different
WLAN’s running at home or use the player in different
locations due to its sheer size. Not a problem Hi-Jack… some
people may like it so shut your mouth! There’s also PPPoE
setup provided if needed…
 The system setup is as usual selecting
languages and text encoding features. A
feature I haven’t seen before is the
“Subtitle Automation Recognition”
which sounds like a great feature, if only I knew what it does…
We checked with HDIUM and found out… they didn’t know it
either and had to check but we both came to the same
suspect: “Load subtitles automatically or not”. 
Luckily they kept the next one simple and not turned it into
“Flexible Character Pump Up Mechanism”, it’s called ”Subtitle
Font” where we can select the font used from three available
fonts for subs.
Then there’s a login control option which I’m not quite sure
where to place. Is it a login for the setup section, the whole
player or a folder? We are left unaware at this time as there’s
no guidance besides selecting on/off. It turns out to be for the
SMB server integrated…
Further options we find here include system info which tells
me bit torrent is not installed and SAMBA server is not installed
despite I just activated the “login control” that refers to being
Samba Server. We’ll find out later how all this works but I tell
you this, I’d be very surprised if Samba and Torrent are
required to be “installed” separately…
The ink of my last sentence hasn’t even dried up when entering
the “firmware” section and here we find the option for a
“Extension Package Upgrade” we cannot install before
formatting the hard drive. This format can be done from the
player and allows up to 4 hours disk space being used by the
time shift format (4GB /Hour) and the rest is formatted as user
disk.
After the formatting, the player requires a reboot. Once done,
we re-enter the setup and check “System Info” revealing both
SMB server and torrent are running now.
We then quickly return to the firmware update section to try
out the “Extension Package Upgrade” which now seems to
work too and upgrades the player’s Samba and Torrent client it
seems… So nothing real “extra” is acquired besides updating
the components (or reinstalls them).
What strikes me as odd
is that this “extension
package upgrade” may
very well be the regular update function of the player with all
the fancy naming going round as besides this option we find
“System Reinstall” but not regular “Firmware Upgrade” is listed
here…
When we move on, we can select the system startup in Set Top Now what can possibly be the BD/DVD
Box or Media Center mode, which means as much as selecting section here? We see the unit can
the TV / Recording part or the regular media player part on handle commercial playback due to the
boot. licensing and it can hold a DVD drive on
which you can play regular and protected DVD contents. The
real fun is the player supports DVD ISO and BD folder playback
(BDLite). We’ll be testing this later on in the media playback
section.

For now, we can mention the unit allows setting the default
audio language and subtitles, auto play for R/RW disks, angle
marks and automatic folder playback for Blu-Ray. Although it
mentions BD only, it is applicable to DVD as well… (VIDEO_TS
and BDMV folders)

A p[parental control option (4 digits) is available to set the

player up for the kids and keep them away from your “nature”
movies although I would have wished some “locked folder”
mechanism to be featured on the side. Who’s to say we won’t
find it later on further in the setup…

Six pages filled already and we haven’t yet reached the end.
There’s one more section to explore…

The title says it all, miscellaneous settings,

but they can be fun. We get the option to
alter the transition effects of the scrolling
menu to fast, normal and slow, bookmarks
are set to on or off, slide show timing is provided from 2
Last but not least another feature I like. You can select the RC
seconds to 2 minutes and we get a list of transition effects to
power off mode to put the player off with or without a warning
choose from or have it run randomly. The cherry on top is a
message… and then last, there’s a “Factory Default” setting.
Ken Burns option.
The HDIUM DUO PVR offers the option to enable “seamless
playback” for TS files, has a background music function for
slideshows based on Folder / PlayList, a screensaver, movie
preview can be enabled / disabled. Last but not least, we can
set the navigation keys on the remote to operate subtitles or
playback control…
The HDIUM DUO PVR provides a range of background images
we can set as the background of the player. Most of these
backgrounds look ok however when activated become too
dark. Let’s see an example of the green bright background for
instance… This is how it looks in preview and real mode.

We have a reasonable good setup here which seems extensive

but incorporates a lot of stuff. HDIUM DUO PVR seems to have
some issues with naming the options properly and has a few
awkward methods like the update system they should address
as there is no online update mechanism and the menus are a
bit unclear about it as well.
We like the general options however the layout is simple and
dull, it could have had some more appeal in general for a HD
player and so could the menu system be enhanced.
There is a mechanism integrated that dims the background
while moving around in the menus and if you sit still for 2
seconds, the brightness is adjusted making the screen
unreadable. Sure it’s nice to have some background up for
selection but this is absolutely horrible and nothing short of a
reason to not use it at all.

My main grieve with the setup is the fact we cannot add firm
mappings to network sources over SMB / NFS, nowhere are
there options to be found in setup to do just that even though
both SMB and NFS are supported, based on an “auto detect”
mechanism. The trouble with that is you may get a whole list of
sources of which you actually need only 1. I wish these RTL
players would build a flexible home menu where we can add
firm mappings so they are accessible directly without all the
extra clicking. The auto detect is fine but in general there
should be a manual configuration option. (ex: Hidden shares)
 GoTo / TimeSearch is divided into titles and chapters (if
supported) or by regular time selection. Pressing the GoTo
There are two types and functions, functions made to have twice reveals a scroll bar where you can use the left and right
them and functions made to work. From what I’ve seen so far, arrow buttons. The only thing I dislike is that we must press
we are going to be pleased and disappointed with some so let’s “return” to get rid of the OSD’s as they do not disappear by
run ’m down. themselves.
The arrow keys as mentioned in the setup can be set to
handling subtitles. Left and right increase and decrease font
size, up and down shifts the subs up and down. The navigation
keys can only do so much so there is a subtitle button calling all
the other options in an OSD. This option includes the SYNC
options and offset, colors and more… The sync option works
with 100ms (0.1 second) increments so that’s good. For other navigation options we get slow playback, step by
step, play / pause and obviously the usual FF/RW functions.

Supported formats then… Commercial DVD can be played on

the HDIUM DUO PVR by original DVD movies or backed up as
Video_TS or ISO format. When using folders, you can select to
browse or play the movie right away, just the way we like it.

If you wonder why 2 subtitle entries are shown on top, this is

because the unit can handle two subtitles at the same time.
(Untested). Embedded and external subs can be loaded
simultaneously and preference is given to SRT by default.

The audio button shifts between L/R and MONO if only one
audio track is included. Where it concerns multiple audio
tracks, the buttons will allow selecting those.
ZOOM functions are poor as with many players, limited to the
usual “2X pump it up too much” method. Something
progressive would be nice, preferred with an advanced zoom
option to handle width and height separately.
With BD movies, the movie starts without the choice for
browsing or playing since it’s obviously a BDLite function. We
get to use subtitles and audio, chapters and a playlist that
loads the additional M2TS files inside a directory, possibly
being the extra’s on a BD disk…
Obviously regular MKV’s are supported and the long list of
additional formats we usually get alongside of the standard
commercial formats. We mention mainly we had no issues
playing back content, performance testing passed with no
issues over cabled network and internal drive and we like most
features. Some little updates in convenience could be handy.
Did we have no issues? Not exactly… Whilst browsing, the unit
rebooted spontaneously once and just a bit later browsing the
SAMBA sources on my network, it seemed as if the SMB
crashed. We could still use NFS but the SMB sources
disappeared until we rebooted the player. Minor glitches on a
new player…
The second somewhat bigger issue is when in setup the
preview window is enabled, it is nowhere to be seen… Usually
in off mode the space is used for showing titles completely
which is ok, if enabled however half the window should be
used for a preview of the movie selected… Both settings reveal
the same title listing…
One thing I should still mention is from the top of the
navigating window, at all times, pressing left and right arrow
key selects the type of files that should be shown filtered by
Video / Music / Photos or a combination of all three. That
works fine for me.
What we often mentioned on models we review is that it’s
useless to have BCS controls to adjust the image darkness and
what not. IN case of the HDIUM DUO PVR we initially thought
we would experience the same (what we call) stupidity but
no… the setup can be called as an overlay on the video and as
soon as you adjust brightness, contrast, hue, saturation… the
image is visible…
That means, these features are not just there for being
available, they actually work to your benefit and convenience
to tweak the best possible video quality out of the unit as you
can. Just like the other OSD’s though, also here a lot of clicking
back and forth as the OSD remains fixed in place until we press
“return” to go back. With 4 options to tweak in BCS going back
and forth… oh well… What’s a person to do with all the time in
the world!
As for support of HD Audio, no issues were found although we
feel the audio kicks in always a second late. We get downmix
features and regular bit streaming of audio over HDMI and
Optical.
We already know the unit can handle music in the background
when running a slideshow and we get tons of transition effects
to make a slideshow more presentable. We found no issues
placing MP3 music inside a picture folder, when starting a
slideshow to hear music. We haven’t tested the playlist
function. (We got to leave some things for you to explore).

The Ken Burns effect does somewhat disappoint zooming in

and out of images at random but it can be shut off. When
calling the Setup menu, the menu jumps over the video /
slideshow currently playing allowing you to change settings.
Obviously the content is paused for the duration of the setup
session.
For music, I must say, it’s little exciting. The list is shown and
playing files is easy whilst browsing the list continuously. We
even get page up / down as a convenience feature for long lists
of files but… playing a file does not show a play window at all…
Heres a screenshot when not playing a file…

Rotating is featured using the arrow keys (it’s not my cat

pulling stunts). With the ZOOM< despite it’s similar to the
video section, not progressive as we like it, we have less issues Here’s one where we are playing a file…
as with video as with zooming into the image we can pan left,
right, up and down.

Now find the 7 differences… 

We tried Play and Enter button hoping they would act

differently. I assume the “preview window” is the culprit here
that should function as the playback window but since we have
issues in both video and music section to get to see this
window, we are having no control. By the way, if the preview
window is used as playback window and you don’t want it for
playing video file previews, there should be a way to disable it
for video separately where now preview is a “global” option.
You either enable it for everything or disable it… Not flexible!
Recording is done via the recording menu where we schedule
the record details. We only get the selection of “Video1” which
means as much as “video input”. If any channels are found
during scanning, obviously these will be listed as well.

So the least that should happen is see why the preview

window is not popping up (or explain what I am doing wrong)
followed by making the music section a bit more interesting.
Add some “on the fly” play list creation feature, gapless audio
and stuff that lift the standard music support up a notch.

Before we can start watching TV and record, a scanning must

take place of channels. Where I am there is hardly 2 – 3
channels to find, barely sufficient to check out the TV section
here. Scanning is available in both manual and automatic
mode.

We set a recording at 7.40AM which is within 5 minutes (up

early today) so we’ll start a movie now and see how it all works
together. Bastards we are, we chose a BD rip to stress the
system. Unfortunately, the player wants to stop the movie
playing in favor of recording. What’s more, even though we
choose not to stop playing the movie, the schedule is
disappeared now instead of indicating the recording failed. So
we know at least recording from external source is not to be
combined with watching something else.

Considering we have no DVB-T channels worthy, I lack the

material to test the DVB-T section properly. It has never been a
part of our reviews but we want to work around this limitation
to get to the recording / playback at the same time… So we
hooked up a second device to the unit for recording.
There are more things to say about the HDIUM DUO PVR and
its recording abilities. Manually starting the recording at the
press of a button offers instant recording (until you press stop)
or you can keep pressing the record button to switch between
During our tests of DVB-T, we really wanted to check recording
and playback simultaneously as it makes up for a string part of
the HDIUM DUO PVR but unfortunately the player decided
otherwise by failing to find any channels. We are sure this is a
local thing only but never the less can only depict what we see.
Keep that in mind with making any decisions. HDIUM confirms
it works fine and supports background recording so you decide
on your own to place your trust in the unit. We can’t confirm
this at the time.

We reported all the issues we experienced to HDIUM and they

are already looking into it to make sure the frequencies of BE
are covered or possibly investigate what the error means we
receive at manual scanning.

The trouble is, the unit does not indicate anything when it is
recording. You get a brief red recoding icon on screen but the
player itself leaves no visual reference when a recording is
ongoing which is handy if you scheduled anything in the
background.

Recordings are named by date and record type. We don’t know

if the unit will use the name of the broadcast you are recording
as we fail to achieve a channel scan even though we went out
specially to get an antenna to reach the background recording..
As with all RTL loaded media players, there’s a copy feature
included where some file management can take place. You can
move files from any source available to any source available. A
little complex to handle with the remote control but it gets the
job done.

EPG data is taken from DVB-T channels and is featured. Again,

without channels being detected, there’s nothing we can show
so we need to move on now to some other parts of the unit
and finish up our conclusion.
The player supports SMB, NFS and UPnP. At least with the SMB
auto detection we managed to have a 50/50 change of
detecting our NAS server whereas NFS detects it every time,
hence the requirement to manually set mappings to avoid
issues with the auto scan, as mentioned, also for hidden
shares…
The player integrates torrent and online content using internet
channels, video search (YouTube and YouKu), Picasa and RSS
news reader or weather module.
There’s a browser integrated allowing to surf the internet. The
navigation buttons function as the driver behind the mouse
cursor and the player integrates quite a few options like
favorites, history and more… Also here we feel the HDIUM
DUO PVR has left some opportunities to be wished for. If
featuring a “favorites” inside the menus, why not use the
“bookmarks” button to make any page a favorite? The remote
has no switch button to switch between numbers and text and
we can’t find a button that deletes the text already in the
search bar… The manual may help but we refuse to use the
manual (convenience check)
As far as video and photo performance are concerned, we are
satisfied completely. It does perform and deliver upon the stuff
we need most and except for the quirky preview window not
working, we have no comments. It’s lovely to see dual subtitles
supported, nice outlined subtitles, easy operations and so on.
There are issues though where HDIUM must concentrate upon.
Some naming of features make our eyebrows frown, Samba
scanning of sources is inadequate and unstable (unlike NFS
working perfectly), must have a method to add firm mappings
and as far as recording goes, we could not record and playback
at the same time from an external source. Likely it is featured
for regular channels where the tuner is involved. Since we
could not find any channels, we could not test this. Recording
scheduling and information could have been done a bit better.
Hardware wise we are not really impressed. The big led is
disturbing the view, the player is not fanless (although hardly
audible- SATA is not real eSATA, no indication of recording on
the unit
Also in general, the player lacks visual appeal, menus are dull
including the setup, and background mechanism is ugly and
disturbing more than doing any good. Combining all these
remarks together, we have quite a few cons listed already for
HDIUM to work on and lift the convenience and features.
Regardless of all these remarks, we still think of the HDIUM
DUO PVR as a good value for money hoping the recording /
playback pays off. For the price of €179, getting a full HD media
player including HD Audio bit stream support and downmix,
recording from DVB-T and external sources and including a
DUAL DVB-T Tuner is just impressive. Sadly some of the issues
the player brings along bring down that extreme value but
never below the point we get disappointed. It’s mostly
software tweaking but that can take a long time. The few
hardware items we don’t like, we’ll have to live with it knowing
that a similar device like this would normally cost twice as
much. It goes without saying; the HDIUM DUO PVR could have
reached the NR1 spot in RTL media players if not for a little too
many quirks.
HDIUM DUO PVR fits the regular users that occasionally want
to record. It offers full support from MKV to BDLite so it is a full
media player. Good value, if it works 