Sign up to reveal. It's blissfully simple to use set-top box and won't impair the picture or sound from your TV. It's a great choice if you want extra channels through your satellite. It may cost more than most, but this set-top box is top of the heap. A comparatively affordable model, this PVR has a slightly smaller hard drive but shares many of its predecessor's other features.
It's one of the best we've tested. Table last reviewed: April Looking for something a little different? Find the perfect model for you with our PVR and set-top box reviews. More expensive set-top boxes are often smart, which means they have catch-up and streaming apps, such as BBC iPlayer and YouTube. We're also starting to see 4K models see features to look out for, below , which can up the price still further.
Both types of device can stay on sale for many years. Prices aren't that high to start with, and get even lower the longer a model is on the market. Unsurprisingly, the best time to buy is usually during a sale, such as Black Friday or the January sales.
Humax is the big name in PVRs, but Panasonic makes them, too. Freesat also made its first forays into both the PVR and set-top box markets in Humax certainly offers the most choice with a bigger spread of pricing, so if you're after a cheaper model then it's probably best to start with its PVRs.
The set-top box market is focused around two brands: Manhattan and Bush. Manhattan has a wider range of products to suit most price points, as well as a few PVRs, while Bush a brand owned by Sainsbury's makes some of the cheapest set-top boxes. You can read more about the different brands and which make the most reliable devices in our PVR and set-top box brand guide. Many PVRs and set-top boxes offer additional functionality for those with sight or hearing impairments.
We've highlighted some of the most common, below. Audio description AD is an additional narrative audio track for visually impaired people. A set-top box goes a long way toward obviating the need for an expensive cable account, but it's not quite there. Typically those channels include the broadcast networks Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC , along with a lot of public access and foreign-language channels, and a smattering of others depending on where you're located. It's a great feature, one that makes it possible to channel-surf even without cable — though you'll definitely still miss some of the advanced features like DVR.
There are a handful of standalone devices that do something similar, like the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid or EyeTV Home Run, both of which can also plug into a set-top box and capture streaming content onto your hard drive, but those don't usually include the streaming services.
Google TV supports a lot of cable boxes and DVRs, and is trying to basically be the new interface for your live TV in addition to everything else, though you'll need an existing cable connection. If you're looking to cut the cord but don't want to completely let go of live TV watching, these are your best options.
If you're just interested in streaming, you may not need any storage, but if you've built up a library of music and movies over the years you might want a device that can store and play those files too.
If you're in the latter camp, buying a set-top box with internal storage has a bunch of benefits: you can throw all your own stuff onto the device, and watch it all on its rightful screen — your TV. It also gets huge movie files off your computer, and onto the typically cheaper and less likely to be dropped and broken drives inside a set-top box. If you have an iOS device, it's hard to beat the AirPlay's ease of use.
It's popularity showed how great wireless playback could be when properly implemented. Of course, if you own an iPhone or iPad, an Apple TV becomes a perfect conduit for sending photos, videos, and songs straight to your TV, if you're not invested in Apple's ecosystem you should look into replicating some of those features with DLNA. DLNA is a nightmare of compatibility and manufacturer implementations, but when it works well it nicely replicates a lot of the best features of AirPlay.
DLNA lets you access files from one device on another — so you can grab files off your computer, for instance, and then send them to your TV — and makes it easy to connect all your devices.
AirPlay is certainly the easiest and most elegant solution, but you can get wireless capabilities out of a handful of Blu-ray players and set-top boxes as well. In a perfect world, all your devices — your phone, your TV, your tablet — would play nicely together. Samsung devices offer a similar, slightly messier system using DLNA, and if you buy one of the Galaxy Tabs with an IR blaster inside, you can use the Peel app to control your whole home theater stack.
Roku has remote-control apps for iOS and Android, and Western Digital lets you control your box with your smartphone as well. On your TV. Novel, right? Well, if you want to play games in addition to everything else on your set-top box, there are a couple of great options. First and foremost are obviously the Wii, Xbox , and PlayStation 3, which are industry-leading game consoles that are rapidly adding set-top box-like features.
If you're only going to add one box to your home theater stack, those three are great places to start. If you want streaming first, gaming second, you've still got some options, though the games you'll encounter are little more than fun gimmicks. The Roku 2 XS has an optional remote with an accelerometer inside, and you can use it to play games like Angry Birds and Pac-man. They're Wii-style games with barely Wii-level graphics, but they're surprisingly fun to play.
If you have a p TV and neglect your DVDs in favor of newer, better Blu-ray discs, you're going to want to stream the best-quality content possible.
A number of set-top boxes will now stream p content, though it typically depends on the source — not every device is able to stream Netflix at p, for example. Video quality actually becomes really important in these cases: if you want to stream Netflix at p, you're stuck with a Roku 2 box, a PlayStation 3, or the latest revision of the Apple TV.
If you're not as picky about your resolution, or if you only have a p TV anyway, you can often save a decent chunk of money just by giving up p video, which is typically reserved for only high-end models in a particular lineup. What good is having a box if you can't control it? Gone are the days when you could walk up to your TV and change the channel — now if you lose your remote, you're out of luck. If you do a lot of searching, browsing, and organizing, having a feature-filled keyboard is really useful.
On the other hand, you might just want to flip through a few movie options, pick one, and watch it. The Apple TV's remote is impossible to misunderstand, since all you can do is go in a direction, select, or go back. The remote that comes with a Roku box is much the same way. Of course, both of those ecosystems also have companion smartphone apps, so you can control your box with your iOS or Android device. That's a nice option, since you're probably not going to lose your phone in the couch cushions.
The "Babysitter Test" is often mentioned when talking about remotes, and it's every bit as important when it comes to user interfaces for a set-top box.
Could you turn on the TV, put the remote in someone's hand, and have them figure out how to use the box? Could you figure it out yourself? There's a balance to be struck between simplicity, features, and usability, and where you land in that tri-circled Venn diagram is awfully telling.
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