NetBox HD: Freeview Play smart TV box + HD Streaming + recording = all in one place.

This is a good value device in terms of features in a very very compact box ... but a nightmare of a user interface, and crashes regularly. Whoever designed it should be fired.The main missing feature is the ability to rewind the current programme that you are watching. I had this on the humax freeview box and it was one of them features I used the most.You can get around this by pressing pause and then immediately pressing play whenever you switch channel so that it starts recording the currrent channel to allow rewind, but I do t understand why they didn’t do this automatically. Just very poor design.You can watch a channel and record a different channel, but bizarrely you can’t record the same channel that you are watching. Not a major issue but I would definitely like to be able to dip into a channel that I had previously set to record.The user interface is a confusing nightmare. It looks great and at first sight seems very slick, but after using it for a while I still find it unintuitive. It is like a maze. I think it is because they are trying to package freeview, online services such as amazon prime and iPlayer, and their own streaming service as an integrated system. This probably seemed a great idea on paper, but it just doesn’t work well in practice. It would have been far more intuitive if they had kept these services completely distinct.Related to this is a small annoyance that when you select a channel to watch you are presented with another menu asking you if you want to watch the programme live, restart (which seems to want to take you to a catch-up tv service if it exists for the channel), or record. This doesn’t sound like much, but 99% of the time I just want to watch the channel live so it gets very irritating. To make matters worse the watch live option isn’t always the default option which requires another button click to select.It is not obvious which online services are available for free and which require a monthly fee. This is even true for the channel selection where many channels are displayed that are not freeview and you only find out when trying to select the channel that it is not available.The interface also seems to deliberately make it difficult to get to some services. For example to get to Rakuten tv I have to press the TV button on the remote, press the exit button to quit the amazon prime app that starts up automatically, scroll to and select the netgem tv menu option, scroll down past a whole heap of film and programme suggestions taken from assorted services and channels until I find a “top apps” row. Then finally scroll along and select rakuten tv! How are you even supposed to know it’s there!The box also has irritating adverts for programs each time you switch it on. Just one more annoyance.The box is slightly underpowered with a small delay when you do simple things such as display the channel selection and pause.The latest problem that I have had is the box hanging. This first manifested whenever I used amazon prime, requiring a reboot, and later progressed to hanging as soon as it started up. Their help desk solution was to factory reset which meant I had to spend 20minutes setting it all up again. If it happens again, this box is going in the bin.At first I was not unhappy with the purchase because it is a low priced box and I didn’t want to spend more, but over time I have come to dislike it more and more.It could have been so much better for just a little extra cost and a competent user interface designer. My previous Humax box was only a little more expensive and did not have these failings.When I set up the box, I initially couldn’t connect to my WiFi, but after pulling out the power supply and putting it back in again it worked fine.The box requires you to buy a separate USB stick to support recording. That’s fine, but when I plugged it in it failed to “initialise” it ... whatever that means. To get it to work I had to plug the usb stick into a windows pc and format it in NTFS format. If you don’t have a windows pc there are Third party macOS utilities available that you can use to achieve this. I think you also have to power down / power up the box if the usb initialisation fails in order to get it to work after you format the usb memory stick.

So where do I begin? It is all lovely now it is working but be warned you need lots of patience! Took a night and a phone call to thier help line before I got my box working! I was getting so stressed out with all the issues I almost gave up! I was looking for a tv solution in my conservatory which has limited wifi as its 2 rooms away from the router and my Fire stick was constantly dropping out so short of adding a virgin box in there which was alot more expense I just wanted a cheap n easy solution!This is my 2nd box, tried anAbox 1st which went back to Amazon the following day after delivery as I found none of it worked and I had spent 45 quid for just YouTube! I eventually settled on this one as it said it had the ability to access Prime Video and I wanted to be able to watch my content. I plugged it all in, and my 1st stumbling block was trying to type in my WiFi password! Jesus no onscreen menu so after 100 tries I eventually worked out we were back to 90's texting where you tap the letters many times to get the corisponding letter you require! Ok in therory untill it blanks out what letter has just been typed! Took 20mins! alot of swaring and my son to eventually complete the task, then it wouldn't conect to the internet! By now its 10pm so I switched off and the following morning searched up a helpline number and spoke to a guy who did something his end and told me to reboot and I would be online! Being the skeptic I am I was pleasantly surprised when it worked! It did a system update and scanned for freeview channels of which there were none! Aparently I needed an ariel for that! So back to Amazon for that! (Grrr!) Once all the updates were complete I eventually found Prime Video and sat back to enjoy!I now have an ariel and 130 channels! about a hundred of which I need to keep moving the ariel for! But at least all the catch up channels are there! and Prime video so I have no excuse not to watch anything now! Overall I am just glad im set up! So much for all this "works right out of the box" promises! No wonder people of my generation get frustrated with technology! (Im 44 not 84!) I guess this is one of the better boxes as it is small and very receptive to the remote control. Just don't forget the ariel and you will be ok!