Freeview HD TV Set Top Box Recorder – August DVB400 – Watch

Once I mastered how to use it it’s soooo easy to operate. Brilliant recorder for the price. Anyone looking for a good recorder for the price this is the one. Definitely recommend

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 box is great, and I am really happy with it. The picture and sound quality is good, and the menus are reasonably user friendly. I was able to set it up in minutes, and has been working well since. Also it works well in Ireland with Saorview, except that it dos not display the teletext. There are some minor issues that if addressed, in my opinion, would further improve the product and these are:

– The pause and rewind feature is not started when you turn on the box, but you need to activate it by pressing the timeshift button on the remote. While this is not a big problem, it would have been better if the function was automatically activated the moment you turn on the box. (a bit like a Sky box really)

– No automatic series link option. Although you can set the box to record the same time slot an a daily/weekly basis, this is not the same as program times sometimes change.

– The recorded programs are saved by channel name and not by program name which makes it difficult to identify for playback.

– you cannot watch a recorded program while it’s still recording. So for example, if you set the box to record a two hours long show because you won’t be home in time to catch the start, and one hour after the start of the show you arrive home and want to start watching the recorded show from the beginning, the box will interrupt the recording. This is strange because if you use the time-shift feature for example, you are watching a show while it is being recorded.

Except for these very little gripes, the box is excellent. Given its price this is probably the best option around for digital terrestrial TV.

Review Update – I’ve just noticed that there has been a substantial price hike on this product which jumped from 27.95 when I purchased it to 44.50 now. This is a big price difference and while at 28 it was a great bargain, the current price is probably just acceptable for what you get, hence I removed one star.

I bought this unit in December 2013, and it is still working today (Jan 2106) which is far longer than any of my STBs have ever worked (bar the Bush DH2636 which is even older). I only use it as a recorder (with a USB stick).

The channel numbers are completely scrambled now, all in the 800 range. I’ve given up trying to reset them and I just use the alphabetical search when setting the timer.

I am getting quite fond of it now, so I’ve increased my rating from 3 to 4 stars.

Original Dec 2013 review:-

I checked the software revision (see other reviewer(s)) and mine was the latest version. The lip sync seems to be OK.

I am having a problem with auto tuning, which may be due to a weak signal. It often reports a “weak signal” and there is some break up as a result (my signal is a bit weak, but the Bush and my TV are happy). SD is better than HD for break up. Anyway, if I tune it in the morning, it will not pick up BBC4, ITV3, CITV and about 12 other stations (all on UHF ch 29), nor BBC3HD; if I tune it in the evening all these are picked up, but it ignores CBBC, CBeebies and a couple of others (all on UHF ch 49) instead. It has done this consisently for 3 days now. I do not know how to get it to register all channels.

I have plugged in a USB stick to use it as a PVR and that seems to work OK.

The really irritating thing is that the HD channels 101, 102, 103 etc renumbered themselves as 802, 803, 800, etc – may be this is a consequence of using the PVR function? The programs-to-record list tracked this number change and so would have recorded them OK. I rescanned the channels to reset 101, 102 etc. which it did, but it cleared my list of programs to record (Bush and TV don’t do this), so I had to re-enter them. The recordings already made on the USB were still there.

The PVR reorded program list is in channel name order. I would much prefer chronological order. (On my Bush STB, pressing “list” toggles between channel name and chronological). You can rename the programs (it’s a bit tedious), but it still appears to display them in the original channel name order.

One tip here – when setting the timer, it defaults to channel 1, so rather than scroll up to 101 (which takes a while), scroll backwards via 301, 105, 104 – it’s quicker. Why can’t you just type the number in like you can do with the times?

It gets one star for still working, another for having a PVR function, and a third for being cheap.

Before you dash out and buy the Bush STB instead, be aware that it has its quirks too, like you mustn’t edit a program-to-record because it then won’t – just set up the recording timer carefully and leave it alone.

Beware when using PVR function and DO NOT rename recordings made in the default FAT32 file system – it truncates the recording to 512MB (some 20-30mins) and makes the remainder of the recording inaccessible. Deleting the recording still leaves the inaccessible part occupying memory space – the only way to recover the space is to re-format the drive (which wipes all the recordings). Instead, format as NTFS, and re-naming then works sensibly.