First of all, it’s nice to be a part of the forum. It’s an interesting ‘vibe’ when you see a pinned tweet denying hundreds of units have been returned (Smoke without fire, is what one might start thinking). Just to fill you in on my background.I have a background in Computing, and 3 degrees including a PhD.

I’ve had my FVP 5000T for around 2 months now. Some things have quite shocked me about this new box.

1. It’s slow. Wow, is it slow! I previously had an old, old Virgin Media TiVo which crawled along at a snail’s pace. My Humax box reminds me a lot of that TiVo. This is particularly frustrating when you end a recording, and come back to the “Play This Recording, Delete This Recording, Cancel Whole Series” screen. You hit the down key to highlight “Delete” but then around 2 seconds after that, the screen refreshes with a nice new thumbnail photo and “Play This Recording” is re-highlighted. So you go to hit OK (to delete the recording) but end up selecting play rather than delete.

2. After turning on the box on, hit Guide, hit +, select genre and tab across to movies, hit OK. More often than not absolutely nothing appears! And you have to end up hitting OK many times before anything appears. Then, having got past this hurdle, you realise that actually the box only lists movies for the current day, rather than the week ahead. What an awful ‘downgrade’ from previous Humax models which attempted to use all 7 days worth of data. I mean, if you have the data, why not use it?

3. So, I find a recording and get it playing and I may then want to see some info on it as it is playing. But I can’t. How strange that there’s no way to easily display the programme description while a recording is playing. Staggeringly poor design and a sign that nobody from Humax has run a good period of home testing prior to release.

4. The only fast and responsive thing is the Netflix button. It’s funny how hitting that instantly gets you a full screen of full colour, updated information about all that’s on Netflix. Could this be due to a deal with Netflix? If only the program code for the rest of the system was written in the same fast, responsive way. But it shows it is possible on this system! The fact it hasn’t could be down to poor programming, cheap outsourcing, rushed programming or a combination thereof.

5. Fast forwarding (from 5 minutes behind) in catchup mode on a live broadcast. Firstly hitting the fast forward button a few times doesn’t allow me to go faster than X2 speed. Why? I then go to hit “Play live broadcast”. Nothing happens! I try again. Nothing happens! It continues to fast forward. I eventually hit the stop button and the whole thing freezes. Shoddy programming. I have to turn the whole thing off and on.

6. The simple act of hitting next channel or previous channel. This is a basic operation, known to all of us for decades. And wow – how slow is this! Even my Aunt commented on this and she’s a pensioner and in no hurry to do anything. When pensioners start saying technology is slow then you know something is truly wrong.

So, I guess it’s worth mentioning a couple of features that I like.

1. The On Demand button is a good idea. I like the idea of gathering all the Freeview On Demand info from various apps/channels. It shows just how much there is on Freeview. I also like “On Now” and “Next” features which highlight programmes from a restricted selectiom of channels (which you can reconfigure yourself).

2. Recording 4 programmes at once, while not often used, is a nice feature.

3. The nice integration of Freeview Play has come in handy a few times.

4. The search function is a nice touch. It’s handy to be able to search for something on demand, broadcast and YouTube.

Not related to any of this, but worth a mention, but I did try out the H3 Media streamer and returned it. A truly awful product. Very unintuitive. The menus were like something out of 1990. You had to hammer the remote to get any sort of response, to the point where your fingers were sore. If you did manage to get a programme streaming from the 5000T then you couldn’t rewind or fast forward. Clearly the product was rushed out. When I returned the product, the person I spoke to wasn’t at all surprised, but did sound surprised when I said I’d keep the 5000T ! It’s amazing how the little signs add up (just like seeing how experienced users have reacted to the 5000T on the reviews/forums).

Conclusion: A major software update of the 5000T is much needed in my opinion. I’ve a feeling it will never happen on the level that is needed. What is shocking is the lack of speed/responsiveness compared to the Humax Fox HDR T2. I would guess (purely a guess) that this is down to the team of programmers being changed.