Aldi Reviews Australia

So, from time to time Aldi will throw a PVR or DVD recorder (they just had those actually), or Set Top Box into their specials.

This is a roundup of one that was sold in June 2007, the TPVR2511 model:

This thread at dtvforum.info has pages of information posted by people who bought one.

The main points?
Seems to be the same base unit as an Conia CPVR1602 with a larger HDD
Supplied to Aldi by Pebble Ltd
Does not have the ability to play and record at the same time.
Has a number of undocumented features and tricks because it's one of those 'rebadged generic' machines which are modified slightly for different clients, so tends to have hang overs from different badged machines.
Some like it, some think it's terrible... a bit of pot luck

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AldiReviews creator. Site Admin. Aldi Catalogue lover!

I have had one from the first day and it has gone well up until yesterday when it froze with only a few buttons such as Rec List, EPG, Standby operating. It was stuck on one channel that could not be changed even from the unit itself.

I got a message to wait while the hard disk had completed being formatted.

I turned it off, left it for 30 minutes, turned it on, left it without pushing anything for about and hour. This paralleled advice that I found on the Internet.

Nothing - still frozen.

So I undid the 6 screws on the base, disconnected the hard drive, plugged in into my computer and formatted it. I had to use Partition Magic as my XP could not find it on my PC although the BIOS set up found it.

Put it back and the unit unfroze. I then went into Menu and set up the default settings and reformatted it. I then set it up again without any problems.

Changing to a larger disk drive would be easy after this exercise I think, but there may be an upper limit on disk size.

ALDI tevion 160g HDD PVR
I am never touching ALDI "specials" again. After fiddling with this item for 12months , I give up. It is a pile of rubbish.
And ALDI have gone down so far in my estimation. The store manager assured me that they NEVER have any trouble with any of their electronic items.
Which assured me enough to fork out the $229 for this worthless pile of junk.
Will be on eBay soon , as it is too late to take it back, assuming ALDI would even take it back.
Will start at $5 to cover ebay costs. Might make a good spare or doorstop for someone.

Got home from holidays last night. Turned the Tevion ON. Pressed Rec List. Checked if my programs were recorded while I was away. They were all listed. Great. Switched it off. Also switched it off at the power point as usual. Went to bed.

Got up this morning. Turned the Tevion ON. Pressed Rec List. NO PROGRAMS LISTED!!!

Switched it OFF then ON again. Still no programs. I've lost the lot! Even the old ones recorded months ago.

How do I get them back? HELP, PLEASE.

From looking around the forums etc. it would seem your only real option to recover those missing recordings is to take the hard drive out of the machine and put it in a pc and access the recordings directly. (You'll need to get some software that can read digital tv files, there are a number of free ones around).

It'll be a real hassle and require a bit of fiddling, and will then require you to either watch the shows on your pc, or use more software to burn the shows to dvd and watch them that way.

A real bummer really.

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AldiReviews creator. Site Admin. Aldi Catalogue lover!