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I have just "cut the cord" and got rid of cable TV. Substituting my cable TV box with the Amazon Fire TV Box. When you couple that with apps and subscriptions to SLING, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, I am more than happy to be paying less than $50 per month in place of my cable TV bill. But I still needed local TV channels to watch local NFL football games. I bought an antenna and installed it in my attic. With all that, my sore spots without cable TV were not having a DVR to pause live TV and rewind. And of course the need to record my favorite local channel shows. This box had great reviews, and at this price, and the hundreds per month I am saving without cable TV, this is almost "disposable" if it doesn't cut it. Now that I've installed it, played with it, and read the instructions. Here's my feedback from experience: GOOD: Very straight forward to install and begin using. Yes you do need to provide your own external USB hard drive in order to pause live TV, and store recordings, but I had an extra 1 Terabyte USB-powered mini drive to use. All I did was plug in my USB drive. Directions state you need to set up a folder to store your recordings, but I never did - it created a folder by itself, so there was NOTHING to set or configure - I just plugged in my external USB drive, and (please note it does take a good 5 mins to "look over" the drive, create the folder, and prepare - but you can then press the pause button and begin recording shows, etc. Overall setup and menu structure was very good. Pretty intuitive to use.NOT SO GOOD: I can't stress enough that for the price, you can't go WRONG. But there are just a couple things that I don't like about it, and, seeing how I need another one of these for my HD Projector for my Home Theater room, I will look for another model that does not have these not-so-good features:To help you understand these CONs, you need to understand how this box works, and what “time shift mode” means. Normally, the box is in “pass through” mode. Signal in from your antenna, it tunes your channels, output via HDMI and watching on your TV. It does DVR functions like pausing live TV from your antenna, and even reverse or forward (x2/x4/x8/x16). But to do that, you need to attach your own USB storage device/drive. But, even with your attached drive, at first, you are still in “pass-through” mode. If you press the pause button, it says on the TV screen “entering time shift mode” and takes about 10 seconds to buffer the video and freeze your TV image. During those 10 seconds, you are just seeing the words “entering time shift mode” on your screen (no TV image or sound). At that point, you are in Time Shift mode, and about 10 seconds behind real time. You can then press PLAY and PAUSE with instant response on the screen – which is nice, except that it takes 10 seconds to “enter” time shift mode, which is one of the CONs.OK on to the rest of the CONs:1 – Sound and Video get out of sync. What’s odd: even when NOT in time shift mode, after so many hours, sound and video are offset really bad – like 1+ seconds… unwatchable for me. How to fix? Press pause, let it enter time shift mode (which takes 10 secs). Then it’s fine. You can then either stay in time shift mode or go back to real time by pressing the STOP button (small square icon). I forget whether it can “turn itself on” and record shows as per your recording schedule if you turn the device OFF, but maybe if I turned it OFF when not watching, I would never see the out of sync, since it only occurs like the next day (well every day if you leave it on, but perhaps not an issue if you only turn it ON when watching TV for a couple hours, then turn it OFF again)2 – It’s irksome that every time you want to pause, you must wait 10 secs before it pauses on your image. But you might say – why not LEAVE it in time shift mode always, since after that initial 10 second wait, you can pause or start again instantly? Well, read on to CON #3…3 – Many (nearly all) of the important remote control buttons (TV guide of upcoming shows, Main Menu of all functions, see channel list, INFO button) DO NOT WORK when you are in “time shift mode”. So pretty much any time you want to do anything OTHER than watch live TV, you will need to EXIT time shift mode, by pressing the STOP button, and answer the question “exit time shift mode – click OK”. I mean you can’t even change the channel you are watching if you are in time shift mode. Nearly every button you click will fill your screen with “time shift mode”. At first I didn’t know what that meant, until later figuring out that you must first exit time shift before you can do ANYTHING else. At least they could have made it so that if you change the channel, of course you lose your time shift and go to real time on the channel you are switching to – as per all cable DVR boxes do. Perhaps that could have been a configuration setting – Auto exit time shift when performing other functions or changing the channel” instead of having to see a big message, then click STOP, then click OK every time you are in time shift and want to do something else.4 - NEXT (and only other, so far) thing that I really don't like: I scheduled my first program to record, which worked fine. But when I accessed my recordings, the recording NAME was NOT the name of the TV show which one would expect from a Cable Box DVR. The recorded show was named "WJAR-10.1_21:00" - which is the TV station call letters, then the channel (10.1), then the MILITARY TIME (21:00, 9pm) of the recorded program. This means if you have it record a bunch of your favorite TV shows during the week, when you sit down to watch them, you'll have to sift through the recordings with these cryptic names, and try to remember what shows were on at what times on what channels in order to know what show each recording is because the name of the TV show isn’t in the recorded file name. Now there IS a feature to RENAME the recorded show, but only AFTER it finishes recording. To truth, now that I use SLING and Amazon Fire TV, I no longer record any TV shows, since all of them are playable from the various streaming devices either the next day, or at worst, are playable about a week after airing. So the only recordings I will do on this box are sports and specialty TV events, so this is a nuisance, but not a real problem.I’ve had it for a few weeks, zero problems with it so far, so again for the price – a GEM! It’s got ALL the features I could want in a box of this price and THEN SOME, but falls short where they COULD have put more R&D time in with the Usability.

Es un convertidor que si funciona. por el momento no he usado la funcion para grabar de la USB, pero respecto a lo demas todo muy bien. Yo aproveche una promocon con la antena Mediasonic Homeworx HW110AN Super Thin Indoor, aunque la antena es pequeña y el material parece de baja calidad, funciona de forma excelente, ademas de que es muy delgada, discreta y utiliza muy poco espacio.

I ordered this unit to replace a $600 Viewsonic tuner purchased about 10 years ago and which failed. This is much better. Setup and programming are a snap. The picture is fantastic which is no surprise as it's a pure digital path from signal to HDMI output. Excellent, easy to navigate menus are easy to navigate. Versatile formatting options. Runs cool so liable to last. Proved surprisingly sensitive, picking up most stations from my basement using a cheap amplified indoor antenna. There's not much to criticize but might as well quibble a bit. The remote likes to be pointed straight at the unit or it might not respond. Plastic case and very light construction but so what. Years ago a unit like this would have weighed 15 pounds because of those huge (and inefficient) hot-running linear power supplies and the heavy framing needed to support them. These days we have light, compact switching supplies but people now complain the products lack heft. Really, this way is much better and has no bearing on durability apart from the low heat helping things last longer. On top of it all, excellent value. Highly recommended.

OK, I've had this gadget for about 3 months now & time for feedback. First, I bought this as a replacement for a Zinwell ZAT-970A which burnt after about 3 years of reasonbly good service. I didn't want to spend a lot of money, this unit seemed to fit my price range and had a media player/PVR feature in the bargain. Altogether, the product is OK but is a bit unstable. I've learned that it needs to be treated gently in order to get decent use out of it. Here's the list of pro's & con's I've run into since owning it.ProsIt doesn't need a wall wart for power. The unit plugs directly into the AC wall socket.The PVR works fairly well despite some quirks, which are listed in the "cons".The PVR works well with USB 2 flash drives and a USB2-to-IDE that I use with older HDDs.The PVR recording works well although it's limited to storing as .mts files. The mts files can be edited with popular video editing software.OTA channel searches are fast and reliable.OTA reception is better quality than I had with the ZAT970AConsMajor-Major defect is the media player WILL NOT play back videos that are longer than about 2 hours. I've had no response back from Mediasonic on how to fix this or if there even is a fix. There are no firmware updates whatsoever on their web site.The unit draws about 18 watts, so it runs a bit warm. It remains to be seen whether the heat will shorten the unit's life.The unit does not respond well to aggressive button pushing on the remote. It will hang and reboot if you push the remote buttons too quickly.The remote will hang occasionally. The only way to reset the remote is to remove the battery for a few seconds and re-install.Media player playback has an annoying 100 mSec delay between audio and video. This can be fixed by pressing "fast reverse" and "play" in succession.The unit will attempt to auto-search OTA channels immediately after applying power the first time out of the box. I suppose that's ok, but if your antenna isn't pointed in the right direction, the auto-search won't be optimal. Of course, you can force a re-search or search manually later, but the autonomous auto-search came as something of a surprise.Mediasonic does have a web site with a customer feedback section that you can check out. The customer feedback is a good idea but none of the feedback on the HW180STB operational bugs seems to attract the attention of Mediasonic tech support.That's about it. A reasonably good unit for the price. I'd recommend it.

(Updated Sept. 16 2017)It's going back. I tried this device, which is still available in 2017, and found it way too basicIt works ok as a tuner and signal booster, allowing me to watch at least one channel that my TV can't tune into. Fine.But it only has one tuner, so you can't record a show and watch another. You also can't wach from the beginning while it is recording. You have to wait for recording to stop. And it is very sensitive to antenna interference while recording. If the signal cuts out, even for an instant, recording stops, so the whole show is lost.I tried a usb thumb drive, bought especially for this use, and supposedly fast enough and an external hard drive. The recordings were unwatchable on the thumb drive. It skipped and jammed, etc. They were ok on the hard drive...I am returning it to Amazon. I bought the Tablo DVR instead and it is absolutely fantastic, compared to this Mediasonic thing. But it is obviously much more expensive. Again, as in all things, you get you money's worth.

Performed correctly. The set-top box features are good, the image is good too. Until I connected a device on the USB port. The unit shut off and never turned on again. Did something physically broke when I inserted the connector, or some electronic overload, fuse blow? The user's manual has no specifications about this connector, like the maximum power draw for the device, but it says you can connect hard drives for the pvr function. Aside from its cost, the pvr is the outstanding feature and the reason for my purchase. But it is so badly documented. I returned the unit, and I'll buy another one to try again, but first with a USB flash stick. We'll see what happens.