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.exeStart in: %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%Use the following commands in the Microsoft Command PromptType "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.

I have been using this for almost 2 years - it sees most use during the football season, which is when we use OTA TV. So, it's effective use has been about 50 times, each time for ~4 hours. It has been functioning as expected and for the price paid, I am happy with the purchase. I have connected it to a Receiver, which outputs to either the TV or Projector, using an HDMI switch. The Video and Audio quality is as expected. Docking one star for the clunky remote - the response is slow, and I wish it had favorite channels. Maybe it does, but I couldn't discover it, in which case, poor discoverability.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with this little digital converter box. My local cable company recently decided to start scrambling all their channels and charging customers $10 a month per TV to have a decoder box. So I said to heck with the cable TV and got a DTV antenna for local stations and this little DVR converter box.The coax out on this is just the RF modulator, not an antenna pass-through. But, my digital TV has both HDMI and basic antenna input, so I was able to put an antenna splitter between the antenna and this box and connect the antenna directly to the TV as well as the HDMI from this box, which allows me to record one show on this box while watching a different one via the TV at the same time. And, I can still connect my old school CRT TV to this convert via either the RF modulator or the composite video outputs, allowing me to run both TVs with only one box. I swear the richness of color is better on the old CRT than any setting combination I can achieve on the new digital TV... so it comes down to a question of 4:3 format and 480i resolution with good color or a 16:9 format and 1080p or even 4K resolution with less good color.I did have to dig around to find two AAA batteries for the remote, since they weren't included with this converter box, which I thought was a little odd (as most things needing batteries like that tend to come with them). Otherwise, it worked great right out of the box. And for the money, I can't complain much.I did a few quick recordings on this box to make sure the DVR function worked, but haven't fully put it through its paces yet. It seems quite functional, though doesn't have all of the bells and whistles my old TiVo had with scheduling options and whatnot. But for basic over the air DTV recording, this box is a good replacement for that for the money.The LEDs though, as others have reported in their reviews, are a bit weird, as there's a really bright red LED on when the box is turned off, but only a very faint green LED when it's actually on -- so faint you can barely see it. Not sure what's up with that. Maybe they did it so that if this thing loses power and turns off, when power is restored you'll notice the bright red LED and know that you need to turn it back on? Not sure. I'm probably just going to leave this box powered up all the time anyway.In any case, for the money, this box is definitely worth it and surpasses similar converters I've bought in the past.