Set-top boxes

A.C. Ryan’s new Veolo is an odd experiment: it’s a device that essentially repurposes the guts and operating system of an Android smartphone for media playback duties, to slightly mixed results. The obvious appeal of using Android is the ability to install apps and games, upgrading the device from just media playback to basic PC-like functionality.

DXtreme is a fairly new Australian brand that largely specialises in network media players and PVRs. The D1 Mini doesn’t fall into either of those categories, however — there’s no TV recording or networking to be found here. For just $80, what you do get is a basic media player: if you want a device to play back PC media files directly from a USB drive to your TV via HDMI, it will serve you just fine. In our testing, it played up to 1080p .mkv files without a hitch.

The Wintal PVR10HD twin-tuner PVR talks the big talk when it comes to offering up features. It’s a twin-tuner model with a 500GB hard drive, good for up to 115 hours of digital HD recording or 350 hours of SD recording internally, and then any number of hours via an externally connected USB drive, giving it strong portability. The physical unit isn’t that remarkable, with a standard-sized AV box and squishy-buttoned remote control.

The Soniq T1000 is a budget-priced HD PVR that offers a lot of promise. It’s a dual-tuner digital PVR, sans Freeview branding, which is a plus as far as we’re concerned, as it allows for file shifting and doesn’t add much beyond a red Freeview badge and lots of limitations. Storage is via an internal 1TB drive, which should provide plenty of hours of recording time. That’s all good in theory, but in actual usage, the T1000 can only be described as poor. Onscreen prompts rarely match up to the buttons they’re meant to work with and that’s when the T1000 will respond at all.

This Akai AD173X is a combination of DVD player and HD digital TV set-top box with USB recording, supporting .avi and .mkv video file playback. The PVR lets you record to NTFS- and FAT32-formatted drives, and capture TV as editable .ts files. Scheduled and manual recording worked fine in our tests, the TV picture quality was generally first-rate and the Australian classification-based parental controls work well. The time-shifting feature proved to be a little problematic, however, causing stutter if you continued to watch the ‘live’ show while active.