Long-time reader first-time poster! As the heading says I’ve had the HB1000s for just over a week and wanted to share my initial thoughts and maybe get a couple of questions answered!
Current setup was a Youview box (TalkTalk), a single Freesat tuner in my tv and a Roku box with Netflix and NowTV subs.
Reason for buying was the epg and signal reliability with my TV’s Freesat was poor and Youview box’s performance was iffy at best and the TV’s usb-recording feature was just too much effort to use so after lots of deliberation I got a HB1000s from a certain internet auction site at a good price as I didn’t really want to pay £90 for essentially convenience.
Anyway first thoughts were it was reassuringly heavy compared to the Youview box and was VERY compact; connected it all up inc an Edimax wifi dongle and off we go!
Problems from the beginning sadly around the Showcase and On-Demand features which I read about on here so after two factory resets and assigning a static IP it was working fine with all the channels found in seconds. I’ll leave that one down to bad-luck on my part though.
Initial setup wizard very easy to use, found all channels in seconds.
First thing I noticed was picture quality; a LOT better than the integrated tuner. HD was eye-popping esp on the NHK channel and SD was absolutely fine even on poor quality channels like CNN which imo Youview and the integrated tuner lacked in.
EPG made good use of the screen-size; channel logos were clear, clear font, fast loading etc and was a lot more intuitive than previous setup. TV’s integrated tuner wouldn’t let me use EPG and watch a channel at the same time so having that feature back was a god-send!
Remote layout was fine, only negative for me was it was very “clicky”; I prefer soft remotes but that’s just personal preference!
Searching, channel changing from input, epg and mini-epg was instant; the Search feature doesn’t include on-demand content but according to the Freesat facebook this will be added soon.
On-demand features v good especially Showcase, it has the latest iPlayer layout which looks very nice especially now there’s a 30day archive making it more “Netflixey”. I don’t think Youtube adds anything and shouldn’t have been on as the other players have proper licensed content whereas Youtube is essentially clips so could interfere with the searching in future but will see; same with Humax online portal.
Mobile app is okayish, tv-guide is a bit cumbersome not allowing you to scroll across and see a screenfull of channels and times; not sure why anyone thought viewing one channel at a time in the EPG was a good idea….
Only negative for me was the non-freesat mode as I’m an avid Scuzz TV viewer and on my TV setup I can flick between that and Kerrang in two-presses whereas on this non-freesat mode is VERY barebones with no epg data whatsoever (even though my 5yr old TV had that), and it disabled the mobile app as a remote; but I cant see Humax changing this anytime soon nor will Scuzz re-join Freesat sadly.
So yeah very happy with it and I’ll add a usb hard-drive to it so I can use it as a PVR!
