Mediasonic ATSC Digital Converter Box with Recording / Media Player / TV Tuner Function (HW130STB)

My new Mediasonic Homeworx replaced an older version of ATSC box that I bought directly from Shenzen on eBay several years ago. I really liked the old box until the flash memory stopped working. When new, the old box would let me create up to about nine DVR schedules. Then after about three years it went to zero. All the functions of the old box are still good, except for the DVR schedule. I am still using a second old version ATSC box where the DVR schedule capacity has gone from about 14 entries to four. I replaced the ATSC box with zero DVR schedule with a new Shenzen model. I expected it to be like the one it replaced. Instead the DVR schedule has an eleven day week and zero working flash memory to hold schedules. I am really hoping that the new Mediasonic will have better quality flash memory. Ask me in three years how the flash memory is holding up. Right now it looks very good. I have been using old model USB 1 Western Digital disk drives for DVR storage. They worked great on the old model ATSC box and work just as well on the new Mediasonic box. I assume that the new box will support USB 2, but have not tried it. The old boxes do not support USB 2. The old model Western Digital units arrived formatted as fat32. To use them for DVR storage I had to reformat them to NTFS. I suspect the reason thumb drives do not work is that they are formatted as fat32. I bet that after reformatting to NTFS, they would work. I noticed that the Mediasonic has a disk format feature in the menu. I did not need to use this, the USB 1 Western Digital drives transferred to the new box without a hitch. I had two boxes because I had two outdoor antenna. I’ve been experimenting. The first antenna has stopped working. I suspect it is because it is now pointing to the sky rather toward the horizon. I have it clamped to a plumbing vent that is now bent over after the last wind storm. I wanted two working ATSC boxes, one to watch while the other records or record different channels at the same time. I tried using the RF output on one box to the second box. That works, but there is significant signal attenuation especially when the first box in the series is working. I installed a Channel Master signal-splitter amplifier. Now both boxes get the same signal strength. I have two antenna on the roof on the same mount with a Wineguard signal combiner feeding a Channel Master antenna preamp. That feeds into the signal-splitter amplifier inside the house. All this gets me about 40-60 over the air channels depending on atmospheric conditions. The antenna mount once held a Direct TV satellite antenna. I’m thinking of another type of antenna to try. I might replace the antenna on the bent plumbing vent with something on a tower next to the house. We will see how much ambition I have. Some things to note. The Mediasonic menus are identical to the old ATSC box. The remote controllers have the same functions, but they are arranged very differently. With the two old model ATSC boxes, when I clicked the controller on/off button, one box would turn on and the other would turn off. That, I found, was a useful feature. I now have two separate controllers. I suspect, if I get another Mediasonic that this feature would return. I set my Mediasonic to the 24 hour clock. Please remember that it does not automatically switch between standard and day light time. I seem to get caught twice each year. The DVR scheduler assumes that a digit placed in one of the two hour slots means that a zero should be in the other. Why? The old model didn’t do this. I like that the Mediasonic DVR scheduler starts with the working channel. The old model did not do this. The old ATSC box DVR scheduler has an annoying bug. When more than two shows are scheduled to record where each starts on the same hour that the previous show ended, there is about a 20-30 second additional delay that adds up. This delay pushes the start time and end time forward by that amount. This means that after several iterations the start and stop times are out of sync with the shows being recorded. This is a real issue when recording one of those marathons where 10+ episodes are broadcast back to back. Making the stop time a minute earlier than the next start time seems to help. Except when the scheduler is turning on the unit before starting to record, then it turns off on the ending minute and back on at the starting minute. Fortunately there tends to be a lot of advertising between each iteration to absorb the slop in the time. I haven’t used the Mediasonic enough yet to check this on the new model. I noticed that the Mediasonic initial boot goes a lot faster than the old ATSC boxes. Otherwise there is no difference. -- It is now official: The bug described above is present in the Mediasonic. Here is instructions to reformat a thumb or disk drive to NTFS: Put the following in a Windows Shortcut Target: %windir%\system32\cmd.exe Start in: %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% Use the following commands in the Microsoft Command Prompt Type "DiskPart" in the command prompt. Type "List Disk” (make note of the disk number of the target USB drive). Type "Select Disk X”, where X is the target USB drive noted above. Type "Clean”. Type "Create Partition Primary”. Type "format FS=NTFS”. Type "Active”. Type "Assign". Type "list volume". Type "Exit" Be real careful with this. As soon as you type “clean” the target disk is wiped clean. If you want to get rid of a disk drive and hide your data, use the above procedure. I suspect a well-equipped forensic lab can still get at your data, but not easily. The format can take a long time. A 1TB disk drive can take 8+ hours to format. Like those Western Digital disks noted above.

These things function ok, basically works like an old VCR but digital, if you view it that way you'll probably like it. I have bought several of these over the years. I bought one about 15 years ago that lasted a really long time, I don't think they're being made as well now though. There seems to be a fairly high fail rate on them, they seem buggy too. The programming doesn't always work as I think it should. The on screen menus and the remote are not super user-friendly. But hey, it's really inexpensive, you can buy several of these for the cost of one expensive name brand that might not work any better. Good choice for cord cutters, I record lots of ota shows with it. I have had best results using an external mini usb hard drive with it rather than a thumb drive, just my experience.

This works great as an OTA DVR. There are some drawbacks, but for the price it is well worth the minor inconveniences. As a long-time cable cutter, the thing I missed most was the ability to time shift. The Mediasonic HW130STB takes care of that. If you expect this to do the same things your $200/ month cable box did, you'll be disappointed. If you think of it as a 2020's version of your old VCR, you'll be quite pleased The UI is pretty clunky and takes some getting used to. The remote has way too many buttons and would be much better if it was simplified. That being said, it gets 5 stars because it's about 1/3 of the price of one month's worth of cable and less than 1/2 of what the streaming services charge per month and yet provides robust recording options. You can record real time by pressing the record button. You can choose to schedule a recording from the channel guide, or you can record by time and channel like an old fashioned VCR. You can set it up to record a program or time slot one time or every day, week, month, etc. The HW130STB is a single tuner device, so your recording has to end before you can watch what you recorded. You also can't watch one channel while recording another. The picture and sound quality are both spot-on 1080 if you use an HDMI cable. It records in a standard format on a USB stick or USB drive that can be read by other devices. For the price, I am quite pleased. And if it stops working in a year, so what? It's cheap enough to just buy another.

First off I would say about this is that it does not exactly last very long. It burned out from just being on stand by alone. I am not sure why this is. The next thing is that it does not come with an HDMI cable only RCA cable. That being said, this does what it is suppose to which is to get some channels. Other than recording though, most TV with coaxial can do what this box does. It does not give you any additional channels. Sometimes the TV gives you more but honestly everything depends on your antenna. The device is not perfect. The quality can be choppy as times but you can get the news and some random channels. It is definitely not a sport channel getting device. It does have a USB port that had limited movie playing experience. You can watch avi or mpeg formats. The device can be a bit buggy and actually crash during play or have sound lag. It does get a bit hot which makes me wonder if that was the issue for the device breaking down. The remote had to be in direct line of sight to register. It does takes two AAA batteries that are not provided. The connection is stable for the most part. I would recommend doing a few video scans. The video quality you can pretty decent video but there can be a bit of static here and there. The device does come with component cables. It CAN be hooked up via HDMI but the cable will need to be purchase separately. There are also a place for antenna in and out (antenna is recommended and needs to be purchased separately.) It runs on a traditional power brick. Overall I think this box is not really needed and it burns out super fast. You can get the same amount of channels on most televisions with a coaxial port built in. The only thing you get from this is recording. The user interface is pretty simple I am just concerned that this thing burns out way too soon on just stand by.

3 stars. For what it does it works great. For what I needed, it doesn't. I was going to use it strictly as a pvr ro record ota tv. It does. Setup is easy, picture is ok, recorded just fine to an external ssd drive, and played back just fine. There is no way to skip through commercials though. The skip next buttons do nothing while viewing a recording. FF works fine but is impossible to stop at the end of the commercial break. If this is not important to you, it's a good product. It is important to me though, so it's going back.

This unit, while has a cheap feel to it due to the light weight plastic used for the case, along with a cheap feeling power adapter & remote, is solid in terms of functionality! After the basic setup; it was able to tune in more channels than my LCD TV's built-in tuner. The output allows you to display it to RCA out (analog like quality); back out through the Coaxial out (analog like quality on Ch3 or Ch4); or HDMI (HD quality).. So if you have HDMI input on the TV use it! The quality can be adjusted too... from 480, 720, to 1080 (via HDMI). Now for recording, plug in a USB pen drive (128GB for me)... and it records in HD the channels that come in HD. The remote is a bit tricky to figure out only because the buttons are small and it isn't one of those huge remotes that is 8-10" long. So they had to cram a lot of buttons in but it has all the features needed. There's a "goto" button that you can type in how many hours you want to skip forward (or backwards to)... this is a nice feature when you record 3-4 hours in one file and want to jump to certain parts of the show... One thing that wasn't possible was recording in lower quality. It seems to only record in the native quality of the broadcast so if it's 720HD then it records in that format... you cannot pick a lower quality. So for regular HD it appears to use about 1GB per hour.. with a 64GB USB stick you can get up to 60 hours and if you have say a 500GB drive... much more. I have not tried a spinning 2.5" USB drive yet... so I can't say if the USB port can power that. But for $30... I can now retire my VCR from recording duties (running through a Digital to Analog Tuner...) Wife can't make fun of my Luddite ways anymore... :)

So far, I love it. It is a lot smaller then I thought and the build quality is a little on the cheap side as far as the plastic case and buttons....BUT it does exactly what I need it to do and it is simple to hook up and use. I have an antenna in my house because I don't care to pay $100 for cable, so the ONLY thing I could not do was record the Browns games. I couldn't hook up an old VCR because of the digital signal so I thought I would try and find a cheap digital recorded. I know that there are expensive ones out there, but honestly, I don't have much interest in anything on TV except the Browns. So I thought I'd give this a try. Honestly...this thing was simple to hook up, ran the antenna into the co-axe in, ran a HDMI out to my 55" LG, did the channel scan and plugged in a thumb drive to record onto. It all worked flawless! The picture is better than Cable and I didn't spend much money on this. It picks up the broadcast schedule so you choose the channel. it shows the upcoming shows, you highlight and click. The only issue I had was that I only had a 16GB thumb drive and it ran out of memory about 2 hours into the game which was ok since the Browns Played Horrible :) So I would HIGHLY recommend this thing if you want a cheap solution to record over the air stuff with out paying for a subscription. As stated, it is very delicately made with cheap plastic, but does do what it says with flying colors. I even took the thumb drive out and played plugged it directly into my TV and it played back perfect, so you can set it up in another room and watch it back on another TV with a USB input.

Shortly after I posted my original review below, the DVR suddenly stopped recognizing any of my hard drives. When I say suddenly, I mean I watched half of a recording, then went back a couple hours later to watch the rest and was greeted by "no external drive found". I then tried every hard drive I owned - several of which I had previously successfully used - and none of them can now be recognized. Well, except for one 2 GB flash drive (which is not very useful). I contacted support and we went back and forth, and I was ultimately told, "If it is a portable drive, the problem is expected." Long story short, the only hard drives that are officially supported to be used with this DVR are internal SATA hard drives in an enclosure with a separate power supply. Specifically, support recommended a 3.5" Western Digital 1 or 2 TB red label drive with a HDL-SU3 enclosure. So technically, the product description does say 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives, which basically means internal SATA drives. However...I think most people reading that will not catch that this means "a SATA drive in an enclosure". I certainly didn't catch that. And I used the unit for months with every drive I had, including flash drives, with no problem. Until they no longer worked. I checked the price on the drive they recommend and it's about $70 through Amazon, which means that in order to guarantee the unit will work as intended, the initial buy-in price is about $100. At point, you are in the price range of much more robust units that WILL use any cheap USB hard drive. Which is what I ended up switching to. MY ORIGINAL REVIEW: Overall, this is a great cheap basic DVR for over-the-air recording. It did exactly what I needed it to do. After using it for several months, here is my feedback. PROS: Price (dirt cheap). It works. Essentially it’s a modern VCR. You set the channel and time and it records. Picture quality is quite good, both for live viewing and recording. I received the DVR before the external hard drive I ordered with it arrived, and to test the DVR I plugged in an old slow USB flash drive. Even though other reviews warned to not use flash drives as the performance would be terrible, I was actually pleasantly surprised that it worked fine. CONS: The interface is more than a bit clunky and not very intuitive; takes some time to learn. The remote doesn’t always work unless you point literally directly at the box. A tight beam. Sometimes the voice gets out of sync with the picture (another review says this can happen if the TV signal drops out at any point). When this happens, you have to reset the box to sync it back up. I do want to point out that so far the sync has never been off on any of my recordings, I’ve only experienced this while watching live TV through the box. For me, the biggest drawback of this DVR is that the built-in antenna tuner is not particularly sensitive and does not pick up a bunch of channels that even the tuner built into my TV picks up (and that’s not a particularly sensitive tuner). This hasn’t really affected me so far as everything I regularly record is on channels that the DVR tuner picks up, but it will become a problem if I start watching something on a channel that it can’t get. Also, just an FYI, the external hard drive I ended up using with the DVR is a Maxone 320GB Ultra Slim Portable External Hard Drive HDD USB 3.0 (Amazon link below). It works perfectly, plenty of space, rock solid performance. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BDQ7BV2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Delivery of converter box was reliable (On time and in good condition). Apparently, it did not work so I contacted seller. They responded quickly and carried and sorted out the issue without fuss (refund).

It works well, and as some have observed, hardens back to the first plain Jane VCRs of the 80s. Can't give the user interface or remote 5 stars: interface has some major clunky points, and the remote is tiny, and apparently underpowered, since it only works reliably when pointed directly at the device. On the plus side, I dropped my satellite subscription, and therefore the integrated PVR capability in my receiver. Since most of my content comes from the 'net, I couldn't justify the monthly costs of satellite any longer, and my antenna provides great reception, but I have missed the ability to record live TV. I considered the new generation of networked PVRs, and while they're promising, and have features the Mediasonic unit does not, they were still pricier than I wanted for my pretty infrequent recording. As a backup when I feel I might not stay awake long enough to watch something, the Mediasonic is great, and for $40 plus tax, the price was perfect. The added bonus - which I had not known about before buying it - is that its recording format (MTS) is natively recognized by Kodi, which I use as my primary media player software. Rather than having to convert the MTS recording to another format, I simply unplugged the external hard drive, plugged it into the android box in the room where I wanted to watch TV, and Kodi played it flawlessly. Although the Mediasonic tuner isn't quite as sensitive as my aging Pioneer TV, it's been quite adequate so far. Above all, the price was right. (The only reason I didn't give full marks for picture quality is some intermittent video "noise" I'm monitoring: the first time, a restart solved the issue, but I'm hoping it won't be a regular occurrence.)

No cumplió su cometido

DOA. Box only turned on and off. Could only tell by the green and red light. Reread instructions several times to make sure I was setting it up right to no avail. When shipped to me it only had a plastic bag type wrap with no protection other than the manufacturers cardboard box. For the price expect to get low quality electronics and minimum shipping protection.

Bought 2 of them, they work great