Interesting things to do with a Topfield - watch AFC Wimbledon

So what is interesting about the Topfield (TP) apart from the basic PVR functionality, which cannot be under estimated if you haven’t tried using one for a week.

Connectivity: Using the USB 2 interface you can download recorded content from the TF onto a computer. Likewise you can upload files from a computer to the TF. There are a couple of Mac pieces of software that provide the ‘altair’ like file transfer functionality.

I tried out MPEG Streamclip and MacTF and both could not see the file names of recorded material. Uploaded content appeared fine. It was only after I renamed recorded material to very short filenames that I could see them and download them.

Experiments in downloading content worked fine. Radio content and TV was transfered and converted without a hitch.

Straight up and down MPEG-1 transcoded to MPEG-2 transport stream worked well and therefore let me view the latest win of mighty AFC Wimbledon, courtesy of Woking Jon and his ongoing amcam coverage of their matches in Ryman’s Division 1.

I also tried to upload content from a DVD, one I had created, but apart from the transcoding and uploading process taking an eon I could not succeed in getting audio, vision was fine. MPEG Streamclip has transcoding capabilitiies and I also used ffmpegX.

I was tempted to see if the Speccy emulator, written for the TF4000, would work on the 5000 but as it doesn’t support sound and I couldn’t see a kosher copy of Atik Atac to test it with my interest waned.

I hope to experiment more with the TAPs available for the TF5000 when we acquire a permanent one.