This is the king of current generation freeview box’s and a pretty good PVR. It has a 160 GB hard-disk with enough clout to record 2 channels simultaneously while playing back a previous recording. It finds and sets it’s clock automatically when it is powered up. It has a nice 7 day EPG that you can browse through and if you see something you want to watch, you simply press a button and it gets scheduled for recording (no more fiddling around with the date and time on the VCR).
In terms of general operation it seems well thought out but the software doesn’t seem very robust – It’s had a few problems that have needed a reset and it goes completely wrong when the clocks change. The remote control is well designed but the user-interface could be better when editing recordings to cut out the advert breaks (possible but fiddly). The programme guide has to re-load every time you switch on the unit, and it can take about a minute to warm up and for all the channels to load. It doesn’t allow for rule based scheduling, for example: you can’t tell it to record all Simpsons.
[…] have quite a good Freeview box which does scheduled recordings including series-record but it could be better because it is […]