Humax HDR-Fox T2 Freeview HD DVR

The telly addicts' new best friend?

In the meantime, the HDR Fox T2 can stream content from your home network. Unfortunately, it’s not quite comprehensive enough to make everyone ditch their media streamers; I had no problem with AVI, DivX, DivX HD, WMV, WMV HD, AVC HD (mts) and VOB files, but MKV support is decidedly patchy.

A good performer with a subdued front panel display that isn’t overly distracting

To be fair, MKV playback is not something that Humax has claimed to support, but if you have lots of MKV material, you may be disappointed. I also found that when rewinding through AVI files served from my Synology Nas, the Humax had a tendency to jump back to the beginning of the file.

On the audio side, streaming is limited to MP3 only; even with transcoding enabled on the Synology, I wasn’t able to play any other formats. So, again, if you have all your music in something like AAC or FLAC, you’ll be out of luck.

As for power consumption, it notched up 24W in use. However, standby seemed to waver between 1.4W and 0.5W. It does have an energy save mode though, so I guess it'll drop to the 0.5W left for long enough.

Verdict

On balance, while it’s not without some niggles, they are pretty minor and don’t stop the HDR Fox T2 from turning in a great performance as a Freeview HD recorder. It even holds the promise of offering even more when the Humax TV portal is launched. ®

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