– August DVB400 Freeview HD Recorder – HDMI 1080p Set-Top Box Receiver with EPG, Pause, Rewind, Timeshift, USB Recording, Multimedia Player, SCART Output, Require TV Aerial, Not Compatible Freesat

I bought this little box to watch the world cup matches in HD on my older 40 inch TV in the kitchen. I have to say installation was quick and easy and the quality of the HD pictures were excellent. The box is very small, only a little larger and fatter than an apple TV so I have it sat on top of my set (which is wall mounted). It shipped with the latest firmware (3.7) so no issues with lip sync. Also changing channels is snappy.I briefly tried out the time shift feature after plugging in a usb dongle, so I could pause and rewind live TV which works fine but there is a progress bar along the bottom of the screen while in this mode. I have not fully tested the record mode as yet This item was ordered Friday and I requested Sunday delivery and it arrived on Sunday, so great service. I recommend this item if you want to get HD free view pictures. Some previous reviewers have mentioned the remote, which although is small it is perfectly functional. I have ordered a One For All Essence 3 remote so I only have one remote for my three devices (TV,August and Roku LT) At £34 this is great value and I highly recommend ++update Ok so I have now tested the record feature. I set up to record the football on BBC1 HD for two hours and then record the news on BBC1 HD directly following. This worked perfectly, but my observation was that between recordings there is about a 10 sec gap while it ends the first recording and then counts down to start up the next. I have to say the recording quality is excellent and when played back on my TV and then on my iMac the image is superb. I should point out I used a usb hard drive for this test. I then put in a usb dongle and did test recordings with similar results, although over a shorter period of time due to the capacity on the usb dongle. To give you an idea of how much storage is used in HD recordings, the 2 hour 5 min recording came to 7.59 gigs. It was recorded as a single file with the file name BBC_ONE_HD-06182014-1959.mts. I should also point out that when recording has started you cannot adjust or add further recordings without stopping the current one. Considering this device is around £30 I think it is an outstanding piece of kit, all you need is a usb dongle or usb drive and you have a fully featured PVR, but for me I am happy to just use it for the excellent HD channels

I REALLY wish I could give this a 0 star rating! This is an awful little product, it is sluggish, needs to be retuned every week and the record function is embarrassing! I bought this for my grandma who still hasn’t got the internet or satellite TV! She already had a free view box that she could record programmes and set reminders from but this still worked off the SCART connection on her TV, I thought I’d get her one that she could could utilise her HDMI connection with, but I want to emphasise the fact that THIS BOX IS THE WORST THING IVE EVER BOUGHT FROM ANYWHERE! Just to summarise why... 1) It took 2 attempts to programme the box initially, the first time it found 8 channels! 2) When I finally got the channels to install, it takes the EPG (programme guide) around 5 minutes to load the channels 3) The EPG itself is less advanced than a free view box I had 10 years ago, you have to change the channel to see what is on that particular channel 4) The lag is ridiculous, this alone makes the box a waste of time, you press a button and nothing happens, press it again, still nothing, so you press again, this time after a few seconds it receives all 3 commands at the same time and you’ve skipped 3 channels; and so the process starts again... 5) The ‘record’ function! This is not a function that this box should have! It hardly has the CPU power to run the EPG, try running the box while it records another programme! WASTE OF TIME! 6) Just to top it off and to to put the final nail in the coffin for the box, it randomly decides to factory restore itself every week (the only thing that it does consistently!) meaning that you need to go through the whole process of retuning! These are only the 6 most frustrating things about this box! I will be returning! Don’t waste your money and I would strongly recommend that you disregard all reviews of this product that praise its performance. DO NOT BUY!!!!!

I was looking for a cheap way to get HD Freeview channels on my HDTV which only has a SD Freeview receiver built in, this unit is cheap and compact, connects via HDMI or Scart (you won't receive HD resolution through the Scart socket) and is a piece of cake to set-up, there is no HDMI lead supplied in the box so you will need to buy one, the remote control is small but works quite well sometimes requiring a second press before it responds, the unit also has a USB port on the front to connect a USB stick or external hard drive for recording. In use the menu system works fine, it isn't as polished as a high end unit but you wouldn't expect it to be, the electronic program guide has its limitations, you can only see one channels listing at a time and the HD channels only show times and not the programs, maybe this will change with a future firmware upgrade but more of that later, picture quality is very good as are the recordings, HD recording which uses approx 3gb of memory per hour of recording is excellent especially given how cheap this unit is with the bonus recordings can be transferred to a PC to be archived or easily edited with freely available software. The one problem that has occurred is that it occasionally drops a channel or two for no apparent reason, it might be fine for days and the next time it is turned on one or two channels are missing, the only way round it is to rescan. I looked on the August website to see if there was a firmware upgrade available, there was and the serial and SW numbers confirmed it was compatible with my unit, what was included in the upgrade I don't know as they didn't make that information available and it became irrelevant anyway as despite successfully downloading and unzipping the file, transferring it to a USB stick and the unit recognising the update file each attempt to update would fail despite it initially looking as if it was taking place, checking in the menu confirmed it was still the original firmware version, whether the problem lies with the file or the unit is uncertain at this point, I will keep a check on the manufacturers website, but apart from this one problem it is a good little unit that provides very good quality HD channels at a very low price.

I decided to risk getting this STB despite some poor reviews and I am glad I did! After plugging it in (you need an HDMI lead) and connecting it to an external aerial and my Kogan TV it picked up all the Freeview channels in my area (50 or 60) plus the four HD channels and BBC Red Button HD on Ch 303. The lipsync issue has been sorted out so I didn't need to download the fix. Picture and sound are good on SD and excellent on HD. As Techie pointed out the EPG does not work for HD channels (SD only) and there is no Teletext/Red button service. These are relatively minor issues and you can still tune in direct to the Red Button channels usually on Ch 301-303. Pause/resume works fine. Record also works fine but if you want to rename recordings (from Channel/Date/Time) you should use the newer NTFS format in preference to the older FAT 32 format for your recording media. You can use either but if you rename a recording more than 500mb (about 10 minutes of HD) the size will be reduced to this amount. To format e.g. your USB stick see p 16 of the useful instruction manual: in the PVR menu press EPG, then Format. Use the side arrow key to switch from FAT 32 to NTFS and click Format. After a few minutes you should get a message that your storage media has been successfully reformatted. NB you will lose any data already on the stick/drive so be careful and if possible reformat to NTFS from the start. Conclusion: This unit is small and light (as is the remote which some may find fiddly). It is not perfect but at £32.50 it is as cheap as chips and at the time of writing you are unlikely to find a better Freeview HD receiver/recorder without spending a lot more. Ideal for a second set though you may want to spend more for your main set.

I am not quite sure what to make of this device and I have owned it for about 4 months. The basic function (watching telly) is good. The device is not used in the main room and the signal is a bit weak but mostly the device copes. I get the occasional blocky picture mostly when viewing HD channels but I expect this and possibly worse. The remote control is basic but OK (though the "0" button is oddly placed). The device was simple to set up even though I had to upgrade the firmware. Using a memory stick to view recorded programs works well. The problems I have are: 1. The EPG is tedious. You when you look at the schedule for another channel, the unit changes to that channel. Irritating 2. On occasion the DVB400 loses the channel numbering and get confused. For example BBC1HD will suddenly change from channel 101 to something like 823! The only way I have found to solve this is to retune. Irritating more than a deal breaker. Would I recommend it? Not sure. Would I buy another one? Probably but I'd look around at other devices first.

If I had to guess I'd say that this was developed by a Chinese technical team with no input from anyone Western or anyone who has used a competing product, let alone a dedicated User Experience specialist. The end result is something that feels like a cheap and nasty Chinese device, it meets all technical requirements but is wrong in as many ways to cause constant frustration. The device itself is reasonably good looking, it's small, sleek and very light. A little too light perhaps. The foam feet don't offer much grip and the weight of an HDMI cable is enough to lift the front of the box into the air. On the back you'll find SCART and HDMI outputs, plus an input and an output for your TV aerial, a useful addition. Unfortunately for me the USB port is on the front. This would be ideal for a thumb drive but if like me you're using an external hard drive then you'll have nowhere to put the cables. On the plus side, unlike my most recent two laptops the USB port has enough juice to power a 2.5mm hard drive in an enclosure. The power lead is under a meter long so you'll probably need an extension. The remote control makes a few UX sins and was either made for a different device or was designed by someone who is not skilled in the art of interface design. The number buttons are in an irregular order with the 0 key being to the left of the 9, they form part of a grid with other circular buttons which helps hide them from a casual glance. The channel buttons are plus and minus rather than directional, meaning they change channel the opposite way to the on screen display. The media playback function is activated by the "list" button, which doesn't make much sense. The power button is in the right place and the right colour, it's rectangular rather than circular. The electronic program guide is done differently to every digital TV I've had. A standard EPG is a vertical list of channels on the left with a horizontal timeline to the right, the user moves up and down to view different channels and left and right to compare what's on. This EPG doesn't have that, instead, if you're lucky, you get the schedule for the current station without a channel list. To see others you have to actually change the channel and wait for the list to populate, which isn't possible while recording. The list occasionally gets stuck displaying only the current and next programs, sometimes it skips a day in the middle and if that day happens to be today you'll be thrust far into the future and stuck there until you manually scroll back. There is no EPG for HD channels. It is however possible to get a list of channels by pressing the OK button, which mitigates some of the mess that is the EPG. There's a nice clear separation between radio and TV, but unfortunately it looks like whatever fancy text broadcast with the BBC's radio signal (DVB-HTML? DVB-J?) isn't supported, instead we get the brand image; the brand name "August" (which annoys me more than it should) in a font that makes my inner-typographer cringe, sat atop a bright photo of a green field in the style of the default Windows XP desktop. The user interface lacks progress bars, instead opting for a series of dots. The volume "bar" goes red at about 80%, suggesting that sound quality is compromised by being amplified over 100% (it isn't). The media playback functionality appears to be completely separate software from the TV tuner and programme guides. Some menus have a save option but there's no visual feedback acknowledging a button press. The PVR playback section is separate from the rest of the media player even though the files are in the same place, the PVR section shows only "m2ts" files while the media player shows everything, so if you want to play a downloaded film you have to exit PVR playback mode and enter media player mode, then navigate to your file, press the play button which starts it playing in the top right corner, then finally press the red button to expand it to full-screen. The PVR itself records file names in the format "Channel - show - title - MMDDYYYY-hhmm" then lists them in alphabetical order, meaning the display order is completely wrong. To make this worse, the show name is set when the recording started rather thanwhen it was scheduled. This means that if a program doesn't start in time the recording is given the name of the show before the one you've actually recorded. To work around this flaw you can rename files using an on-screen keyboard, which is in alphabetical order than QWERTY and lacks a space button. In summary, while the device works as advertised and can be used to record digital TV or add HD broadcast capability to a TV that is was "HD-ready" but doesn't support HD broadcasts, it's not a great PVR and I wouldn't recommend it as your primary digi-box or media player. The external USB is great in that you can pull recordings off to your computer with ease, and the price is fantastic, but you certainly get what you pay for.

This product has a lot of irritating things about it but I so far have found very little that doesn't work or can't be sorted out. For the price, I think it is extremely good value for money. I will start on the outside of the box. It is tiny and incredibly lightweight. One thing that I wish the manufacturer had done was make the power supply longer or detachable. I ended up taking the plug off and wiring it up again to get it where I wanted. it is just around 1m long which is a bit tight in my opinion. On the front, it has got a USB port. August say it can have a hard drive up to 1TB. That is pretty good. But then the format it records TV in is mts. Those files seem to take of over double the room of MP4 MKV and similar. I just have a 64gb Lexar stick and that is enough for me. On the back, it has HDMI, SCART, COAXIAL, RF in and the RF loop through. I have used all of them at times. Some people will probably think that scart isn't really relevant but I find it very useful. I use a scart to phono adaptor. I was looking for a cheap way of getting an analogue audio signal to my amplifier. That has done the job well. I use HDMI to go to my PC monitor. Like others have said, it is very simple to install. I think that the only channels that don't work smoothly are the ones that my aerial didn't work with very well anyway. I do have one of the problems that some people find very irritating. Every now and then, channels such as 4 +1HD and several others move up right up to the channel number 800 or so. Very strange. This doesn't happen often but all you need to do it retune the box and it fetches them back to where they should be. I agree with others here, the user interface is poor. Even so, I waited until I got used to it and I'm still learning now about how many things that is actually capable of. It is nice that you can record anything on any channel. It seems unlimited to how many programs you can set to record. I once had 20 set to record and it did the job just fine. When you set programs to record, you have the option to set the time they start. This means that you will be able avoid cutting off the start or end of programs if they don't run on time. I tend to set them to start recording 5 minuted before and add 5 minutes after too just to make sure I won't miss anything. You can even set a program to record daily and weekly. One thing people might not like is that if you are wanting to put what you have recorded onto your PC afterwards, it actually splits the video up into several files. They are called the channel number, then the date, then the time so it can get confusing. If you want your computer to play them, you will need to rename them and add on part 1 part 2 etc. On the media play on the DVB400 though at leased, it will play them fine as one whole program like it was originally! A smart but slightly hidden feature is when you play back TV you have recorded. If you press the stop button on the remote, and select that video again sometime later or even another day, it pops up with a message saying start/resume. If you select resume, it will remember where you were last time in the video. However, the pop up message is very hard to see or even notice. If you press exit when you are in a video that you have recorded, it then won't remember where you last were. You need to think to press stop and look very carefully for the start resume text. This is one place where the UI is really poor. Even the guide of the HD channels only has the times. Only the SD channels have information of what the programs are on the guide. Another thing that would maybe bother others is the style of the guide. Each channel you view, you can only see one at once and you as you view each channel, you can't stay on the one you were on. So if you were watching the news on BBC 1 and you wanted to see what was on BBC 2, you won't even here BBC 1 any more. As I said earlier, there is no information other than the times for the HD channels. If say I wanted to know what was on Channel 4 next, and I was on Channel 4 HD I would have to press 4 and then EPG then go back to 104. The RECALL button is also the previous channel so that would get you back too. Timeshift works well. How it works is it pauses the TV and records what is currently playing. The time shift space is 1gb when you first get the DVB400 but you can put it up to 4gb. Something that most TVs don't seem to have is a button that switches it over from TV to radio. You can press the tv/radio button. This will then take you to the list of radio channels. If you mainly listen to 1 channel then you can press the that button again and it will take you back to the TV channels. It only takes one press of that button and it will take you back the the exact same radio channel you left it on. On a Samsung TV in my home you need to dial in the radio channel number each time you want it which to me isn't as simple as this. The remote is quite poor too. It is very small and takes a while to get used to. Some of the buttons don't do what you would expect and are labelled in an unusual way. Such as the goto button. This to me makes it sound like it will bring up a menu of different places you can go or something like that but no. It is only for when you play stuff on media play. You play a video, press GOTO and 00:00:00 pops up. you dial in the time of the video you want to get to. It is pretty hard to skip to it the other way as there is just a fast forward. Although this feature is a little tricky to get used to, it is very useful at times. Although it has many niggles, I really can't complain for the price. Now at only £24. That is really good value. I got it at around £26 - £29 and I still think that is great value. The value for money is the main reason why I have given it 5 stars. Update - 26/04/16 I have recently worked out the reason why this Freeview HD box didn't record a program all as one file. It was because my record device was formatted to FAT32 and it only had a limited amount of space single a file could take up before having to create another. Now I have a bigger portable hard drive connected to it that I formatted to NTFS. It now will record everything as one video file.

This seemed like a bargain, but it is so full of bugs that it is not worth the money. The good: - Picture quality is excellent - User interface is ok looking. - Able to record in HD to a usb stick. The bad: - No programme information or schedule for all the HD channels, and some others. This means you can't even see what the programme is that you're watching. Seeing as most of the main channels are in HD now, it basically means that you get no programme information at all. - Programme info and schedule for all other channels is incorrect most of the time, and thus useless. - Due to the issue above, you cannot schedule recording on a HD channel without searching on the internet for the programme and its times, and then manually entering them into the recorder. - Channels are all mixed up. There is no logical order to the channels and so they are all over the place. This makes watching normal tv a pain in the proverbial, as flicking between say BBC 1 and ITV involves searching through about 50 channels. There is an option to rearrange the channels, but to my annoyance I have found that they get reset to a random order when you turn off the digibox. - The box seems to randomly delete and add channels on a daily basis. This means that you often end up with multiple versions of the same channel: I ended up with 60,000+ channels added randomly, which then get mixed up! Try finding the channel you want in all that. - No red button interactivity. Don't even bother with this piece of junk. I can put up with pretty rubbish things, and have done for the last 6 months, but I've finally got fed up and got a better replacement.