I know this review will not go down well with dedicated Humax fans but I’m looking at it purely as a recently released and currently in production consumer device within its field. I’m comparing the smart side of this with the best-selling alternative – the Amazon firestick – of equal 4k spec. I’m also judging this box in isolation – in simple terms of whether or not it works reliably and whether it’s given me a good experience of viewing live TV and streamed content plus access to and use of apps. It’s not spoiling the review for me to say that I regard this device as a total failure that is not worth buying and never will be if Humax don’t address serious issues immediately.

The Remote

I’m starting here as it’s the first thing you’ll use after plugging the box in. The remote looks okay but I soon realised it’s a real mess. It’s lightweight so the batteries radically affect the balance. The natural – and necessary because of the shifted balance – position to hold it has the user’s thumb placed over the “OK” button; not a bad position. Trouble is, from that position you can’t comfortably reach any of the PVR controls, mute or apps buttons nor can you reach the numerical keys and other viewing controls. You end-up shuffling this thing up and down to reach the most needed controls. Then there’s the dreadful navigation pad. There’s zero deliniation between the “OK” button and the one-piece direction pad so it’s annoyingly easy to press OK by mistake – a problem made vastly worse by the horrible hingeing of that pad which makes it damned-near impossible to press the direction you want anywhere other than the outside edge. The whole remote seems to have been designed by a committee, members of which have never actually used or even seen a remote control. The “destructive” buttons for the PVR – “stop” and “record” are tiny, not protected from accidental use and crammed up against the FWD and RWD keys – a recipe for frustration. In contrast, the “BUY MORE THINGS!” buttons are HUGE and are the only ones you can comfortably reach – including a patronising and annoying “Kids” button (seriously – why does this thing “need” that specific shortcut?). There’s more serious issues with the remote and they link to the way the Aura itself operates and how the whole thing abjectly fails as a “smart” device or even a general device in 2022. The biggest problems are that the remote only vaguely nods in the direction of controling TV functions – Power and Volume work on my Hisense set but the AV button is worthless because it only works with linear input switching. If you have a set where Input selection is in a grid, this won’t work as the remote doesn’t send standard direction control via IR. And the biggest issue of all – a remote that has a dedicated button for “Kids” (written on that button in a patronising “kiddie” font) – THERE IS NO BUTTON FOR SETTINGS! Given how much time you need to spend messing around in the menus and the appalling difficulty in getting to the settings menu (explained in more detail below), this is a massive mistake and tells me that the whole thing was cobbled together by people who simply don’t care about the user experience. After a week of using the remote, I can only say that it’s not “broken in” – pressing the ridiculously stiff directly buttons is extremely uncomfortable and the inability to reach the PVR and recording controls without shuffling the remote up and down in my hand is incredibly annoying. I can’t even use my All-For-One to replace this one because Humax bodged a bluetooth remote rather than deal with using IR to control the Android device they’ve nailed to this PVR.

Set-up

I’ll not go into too much detail other than to say that the process is relatively painless but it does ask the user to make decisions without ever explaining the pros and cons in simple terms – having to register a remote control with a Google account and being told that you “may not get the full experience” if you don’t is pushy when they fail to say precisely what you do and don’t get for selling your privacy (as far as I can tell, all it gives you is the voice search). When it launches, it installs unavoidable updates. Oddly, that leaves the Home Screen looking very basic and unpleasant. That screen later updates itself – I can’t say if that requires a reboot or just the passage of time as there’s no information, it just “happens” some time later (Note – this update is NOT documented on the Humax website and the only available documentation for this box is totally out of date – and the update includes some major changes to the menus and important options – totally unacceptable). The one MAJOR issue I have with it is the on-screen keyboards – and that plural is deliberate. There’s at least three different keyboard layouts – a QWERTY, an A-Z and the worse keyboard EVER – all 26 letters of the alphabet in a single row – the most hateful input device I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve used the dreaded Denon remote. (this is an IT-wide problem – just PICK ONE LAYOUT AND STICK TO IT!) And here’s a simple idea – one that Hisene and I’m sure others too use. When you have a text input screen – use the damned coloured buttons on the remote for shortcuts – so blue might be “enter”, red for “delete” and so on.

Home Page

The Home Page is far too busy and there’s a LOT of annoyances – only some of which can be resolved via the settings and re-ordering options. Firstly, the screen is plastered with icons providing shortcuts to things like Live TV, Recordings, Top Picks and the like. These are all items that have dedicated buttons on the over-crowded remote so it’s idiotic to also prioritise them on the GUI. Surely, the whole point of having physical shortcut buttons is to make it possible to remove or at least de-prioritise the icons for those function on the screen – to leave more space for the apps and shortcuts that AREN’T on the remote – especially when they couldn’t find room for a Settings button). Speaking of which, as you wander around the maze of screens and pop-ups, you assume that pressing the “Home” button on the remote will always get you to that Home Screen – IT DOESN’T! It actually acts as a glorified “Back” key – sort of “up one level”. To illustrate – go to “Apps” and scroll to the bottom of the page, then click to enter the “Play Store” (more on that later). Now press the “Home” key and all it does is take you back to that Apps page – and with you at the bottom of that page. If you’re in “Discover” and press the button to see your recordings, pressing Home takes you back to Discover. It takes at least two clicks of the Home button to actually get to the Home page – except that sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a totally unpredictable experience – users shouldn’t need to concentrate that hard to perform a basic function and check what the hell is happening. Oh, and if you want to scroll down through the various sections on the Home Screen, you have to get past an unavoidable ADVERT for “things we want you to watch” – which takes up 25% of your screen’s real-estate. And if you don’t remove it, you’ll also have MASSIVE icons for recorded films – so you have your 4K TV with a screen the size of a pool table and all you can see is half a dozen icons – so you have to scroll forever just to get through a relatively small list of entries. You can organise the layout to some degree and that does tame some of the excess – removing the pointless orange shortcuts is a good starting point.

And this brings me back to the Settings – or at least, to actually getting to them. Having click, click, clicked the Home button and then the up button to actually get to the top of the screen and having the cursor on the “Home” page entry, you then have to click “Right” – past the senseless but unavoidable “Discover” screen (which serves absolutely no real purpose beyond making it look like Google/Humax are to thank for the stuff you’ve paid Amazon, Disney etc to provide – then Right again past “Apps” and then maybe – or maybe not – to Settings. The “maybe not” happens becaise there’s a notifications entry that appears and disappears at will in between (and I’ll tell you why that’s also a mess later). So, you’ve reached the Settings menu – now you’re really in for some major frustration and real proof that this box was designed by a committee. Worth noting that this doesn’t only apply to the Home key – the Apps button also fails to simply take you directly to the landing stage of the Apps screen.

The basic problem is that we have to constantly climb over garbage to use the interface. You do the multiple Home button presses and it STILL leaves you underneath an annoying, pointless banner – you have to climb over that just to get to the menu bar so that you might be allowed to get near to the settings menu. When you get there, you have to climb over the insane “Explore Freeview Play” entry that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SETTINGS!. And then when you do get into settings, some idiot built the whole thing upside-down – so you have to climb over the EULAs that you already signed and will never read or sign again. And when you want to leave the menu, you can’t just move to the left – you have to climb back over every hurdle or risk the Wheel of Fortune that the Home button produces – landing in some unpredictable location or folder.

And then, you try to perform a simple, basic function by long-pressing an icon – only to have the pop-up menu it produces freeze and refuse to respond to the remote. This error – which happens constantly – appears to be down to the interface being bodged on top of a touch-screen design – since attaching a mouse or pad that gives you a cursor DOES let you click, unfreeze and use that menu. That’s a theme throughout this – it’s clearly NOT an interface that’s been designed to be used on a TV with a normal remote-control – that vile text input screen with all twenty-six letters of the alphabet in a single row proves that.

Settings

Firstly, Settings is a vertically scrolling text menu – so it crams everything into a tortuous maze of nested menus, crammed into around a third of the screen’s width. This is supposedly a system designed for TVs – and TV are LANDSCAPE in proportion. The disconnect between the grids of icons for every other function of this thing and the afterthought of this cramped menu, leaving most of the screen as wilderness tells me that no real thought went into any of the design. Then, the very first thing at the top of the menus is a HUGE entry marked “Explore Freeview Play” – it claims to show a “short video on how to make the most” of this box – it’s actually just a seriously naff, silent “presentation” in the form of a dreary and totally worthless animation, the content of which can be summed up as “Press some buttons on the remote – left right and OK”. This is not something that anyone is ever going to watch all the way through – and defintely something they’ll never, ever want to watch again – but it can’t be cancelled or removed so it sits there, wasting space on a menu that wastes space on your screen – and then you have to click to get past it every time you want to change or check the essential settings – having already been forced to click at least half a dozen times just to get to the damnable menu. Yes, you can press “Home” to avoid having to climb back up the tree of nested menus – but even that creates a problem as pressing “Home” from the settings menu DOES NOT TAKE YOU TO THE HOME PAGE. As with other times you use it, it goes to the last page you were on – and since you can’t navigate directly to the settings, that “last page” WILL ALWAYS BE THE APPS PAGE!. In other words, if you’re in the settings menu, “Home” isn’t “Home” – “Home” is “Apps”. Honestly – I get seasick just trying to use this deplorable heap of junk.

Then you go through the menus and realise that whoever programmed this interface should be fired. It seems simple enough – settings for Freeview, tuners, recording otpions and so on in one section, a section for apps, a section for device-specific settings and options and settings for networks and accounts. Only that’s NOT what they’ve done. In the “Freeview Play Preference” section, you find the options for for programming the remote control, power management of the Aura, screen saver, LED brightness, CEC and loading/saving settings. What the HELL does any of that have to do with Freeview Play – those are very definitely device-specific HARDWARE settings. It’s a total pain trying to find anything when they’ve thrown everything into random menus like this. If you want to restart the box, that option is… the “About” section of “Device preferences”?? And what about resetting the box? There’s one option in “Device preferences” – but then there’s two more options in “Freeview Play Services”. And NONE of those actually erases your recordings – for that you’ll have to go to Devices and then storage and then click on the name of the drive – there’s no clue that this is even a clickable entry.

You then get the unintelligible menu entries – far too many options with zero explanation beyond the “Pressing the red button activates the red button option” type of drivel in the user manual or onscreen. “Dynamic Refresh rate Switching” is simply not explained – not what it actually does or which settting is preferred. Okay, I sussed it out eventually (the three DRRS “settings” are actually just three combination presets of the two options below – but that’s not explained anywhere and I’m lucky to be reasonably tech-savvy – and that’s without the ever-present issue that those idiotic refresh rate settings shouldn’t even exist if Humax hadn’t screwed this up, for whatever reason). Audio options are equally messy and needlessly confusing. This is supposed to be a consumer product – they at least need to have a basic menu with the option to show a more geek-oriented list for those who like to fiddle about. Others have questioned why this box only outputs PCM stereo and have been brushed aside with “that’s what TV produces” and similar comments. The fact is that other, FAR more affordable consumer devices carry the option to output audio as PCM, RAW or Dolby Digital audio FROM ANY STREAM – my TV does it, all of my Amazon fire devices do it. In fact, this is the only device I own that DOESN’T give at least the option to send PCM or RAW. Why?

As it stands, there’s simply too many options for tripe and not enough options for the absolute basics that exist on any and all smart media device. I’ve seen this sort of thing before – it happens when a programmer gets carried away and keeps adding just one more option as they occur to him. The over-populated remote is a clue – the same lack of focus has clearly affected the GUI and these menus. Here’s a prime example… in the Channel and Broadcast settings are options for the EPG and such. In that same menu are a setting for long-pressing the APP key – again, NOTHING TO DO WITH FREEVIEW. But then there’s the most ridiculous entry possible – “Background Opacity”. WHAT THE HELL???? By definition, a BACKGROUND can’t be anything BUT 100% opaque – because if it’s is even 1% “transparent”, you can see through it to something behind it – and if there’s something behind it, it’s not the damned background. So exactly what does that setting do? Serious question because I still can’t work it out. (Nearest I can find – if you use the Google Home app to add back the functions that Humax inexplicably left out of this doorstop, you can actually do things like setting your own photo slideshow for the screensaver and control which photos from your Google account are used – this box doesn’t even let you look at your own photos).

It’s also worth noting that some disabled menu items – ones greyed out when another option is set – appear to actually still operate AND be required. For example – the “anonymous” setting for ftp has absolutely no function UNLESS ftp is activated, but is disabled once ftp is switched on. Likewise, the “Time Delay” in DRRS is disabled but dynamic refresh can still be enabled via the S/AD button – and that Time Delay appears to apply. (seriously – this whole mess of DRRS and resolution options shouldn’t even exist – Humax need to deal with this or just stop selling this box).

Live TV

So far, I’ve had no tuning issues – all channels found and tuning has been stable. There’s an over-use of screen overlays that can’t be deactivated – swapping channels will get you a distracting Now & Next bar. There’s a major annoyance – the channel appearing and then the screen going blank before reappearing. I’ve checked the www and seen this raised as a possible “fault” with all sorts of complicated explanations and arguments. In fact, the cause is simple, possibly removable and points to Humax doing something at least a tad naughty. It relates to the Dynamic Refresh Rate Settings. Let’s say that you have DRRS set so that vids are shown at upto 4K but Live TV always plays at 1080p. You watch a vid on Amazon Prime and when you exit, the screen resolution remains at 4k – you then go to Live TV and the screen is still in 4k – so you see a few seconds of TV at 4k and only then does the screen change to 1080 – and it blanks whilst doing so. The same happens in reverse – you leave Live TV and the screen remains in 1080 so you get the blank a second or so after starting a video in another app. So, changing the DRRS options can remove the resolution changes – leave the “Live TV at 1080” option off being the main thing (but that may affect the live TV picture quality – it certainly does for me). The reason I say Humax are being naughty – they could and arguably should have caused the resolution change to take place BEFORE the app/live TV starts but that would add a short delay and blank when switching between those functions. By leaving it until after we’ve opened the app or switched to live TV, they make the interface feel artificially “faster” than it actually is. (Anyone who’s used Kodi will be familiar with their refresh-rate switching options – which include the option to switch rates at the start, stop or start AND stop of a video – Humax are clearly only switching at the START of any stream – hence the glitch after the change of resolution). Other than that – picture quality is good – tweaking the settings on this box and the TV help. On my TV at least, picture actually looks more natural with “Always 1080” set to ON – it’s not bad in 4k but the colours are more saturated and there’s a tad more softness on some SD content.

PVR

Pretty good – easy to set timers and so far, no issues with recording quality but the damnable interruptions caused by the refresh rate changes are ever-present. There’s a bit of stuttering with pausing and restarting live TV and it clearly doesn’t like very short pauses. I set a few timers to record as a test and it handled a BBC movie which started “earlier than published” – no padding seems to be needed and additional time recorded is minimal. It is possible – and easy – to copy recordings from the PVR to another device. I recorded a movie in HD from BBC 1 HD and was able to drag it onto my laptop (more on accessing the drive in a mo).

One opportunity that Humax have missed. To get around copyright issues, users can’t download HD recordings so the box creates a lower definition copy which can be downloaded without encryption. Looking at the hard drive, it’s clear that the box keeps both the original and the downscaled versions on the drive. Ignoring that waste of space that involves, it surely ought to give us the option to delete the larger HD record but keep the low res version – so we can have a larger library of films. It concerns me that Humax offer no housekeeping for recorded TV other than delete and auto-delete. This box is already able to “shrink” videos – so why have Humax not even considered applying that ability to “archiving” in that way? A lack of care for their own products is apparent.

Apps

I’ll not get into the missing Netflix issue – it doesn’t affect me and I can’t add to that debate other than to say that it’s a massive clue that Humax have already stopped supporting the Aura – the lack of Netflix MUST be costing them sales and a lot of them. The Amazon Prime app is the generic one – it works and outputs 4k, HDR and Atmos without issue. It’s nowhere near as fluid as using a decent Firestick or Cube but it does the job and in some ways, is better than the Firestick’s latest interface when it comes to simply finding films and TV you like. The Disney+ app is fine but the lack of Atmos is a serious weakness. Youtube plays in 4k HDR but the colours are “wrong” – one well known demo video starts with bowls of cherries and on every other device I own, those cherries are lush and red, varying from deep blood red to bright scarlet – on this device, they are more like a nut-brown colour and there’s no settings or options for tweaking the output (no “deep colour” or “RBG/ycbcr” for example). In general, the issue with apps is the lack of them. Humax say there’s thousands of apps, they fail to mention that those include the system apps and the rest are pretty much awful. Once you’ve got the main catch-up apps – essential for Freeview Play – and the likes of Youtube and your streaming services, you’ve pretty much go everything worth having. Google Play only lets you install specific apps – I sideloaded some others but almost all of them were unusable. There’s some major gaps – aside from the well documented lack of Netflix. There’s no simple browser – the only ones available are all more or less identical versions of “TV Browsers” that exist purely and only to promote other services and which are impossible to configure – preset links to Amazon take you to the America site, for example. FWIW – sideloaded apps don’t appear in the apps list – you can access them in the “system apps” via settings for via another app called “sideload launcher). The Apps screen itself is not bad – easy enough to organise apps and to add them to “Favourites”. For those who don’t read manuals – long-pressing the apps key opens a window with recent apps – useful. I use Kodi on multiple devices – I have all my music, movies and photos on a simple USB drive which is attached to a router and is accessible via Samba – it’s a simple, cheap way to share everything on all devices – a couple of Firestick/cubes, phone, tablet, laptop and PC – in different rooms around the house. I installed Kodi on this Humax and was even able to do my usual trick of copying all databases and settings via FTP (I use filezilla – so easy). Kodi runs but not well – it struggles with all but the most basic, lightweight vids over the network and gives up completely with 4K or more “complex” audio such as Atmos or DTS-HD. So I tried a Kodi setup with a USB drive attached to the Aura – that’s certainly much better but still nowhere near as capable as a cheapo Amazon firestick – I’m still working on it though and have reached out to the Kodi developers to see if there’s any way to improve the performance.

Annoying issues with the Google Playstore as it appears on the Aura. It’s nothing like the Playstore as you’d see it in a browser, where it’s easy to search for a type of app or a named app. This is another screen full of oversized icons in rows and their “suggestions” of what they “think you’ll like”. First off – it is the dumbest version of Playstore ever – the top row of “suggestions” is punting apps that I already have. But here’s the real problem – and given the “Like the apps we tell you to like” set-up here, this is a BIG problem – a voice search may or may not work. It will certainly do something – but it won’t necessarily be what you expected. Let’s say you do a voice search in the Playstore for “Freeview Play” – it responds with “Results for Freeview Play on the Google Playstore” and shows you the “Explore Freeview Play” app – which is already installed by default. Now let’s say you already have the Disney+ app installed If you are in the playstore and you go to the playstore – you voice-search for “Disney” – not even “Disney Plus”, just “Disney” – and the Aura responds by opening your existing Disney+ app. You are in the damned playstore – you may have been looking for some other Disney-related app or you may have wanted to check the info that’s there – and if you TYPE the search it lets you do just that – but a voice search drags you out of the app-store without so much a by-your-leave – totally unacceptable.

Humax’s website appears to offer their own apps download service for this box – that’s fake and they should remove links to it immediately.

Incidentally, you get “8.4 GB of internal shared storage” – in 2022. That’s “shared” with every system app and any data produced. If you can’t move apps to the internal or external storage, you’re looking at a handful of dreary little apps – you’ve got no chance of installing anything worthwhile in the pittance that’s left from that 8GB when Humax has taken it’s share. new users need to be careful when adding their own video or music files via ftp as they will actually find themselves using that pathetic 8GB shared storage. And at the risk of banging the Firestick drum again, the Firecube lets you add USB storage and moves apps there – not every app but it does include ones like Kodi and various driving games that can easily consume anything from 500MB t 2GB each. This damned box has a huge hard drive built-in – why is that not being used to give additional storage for the OS (Answers on a postcard to “Aura is a pig’s ear”)

So – low-grade apps, very few worthwhile apps, no social media apps,no default apps for user’s own content, no browsers and barely enough storage for two games and a music player – I feel like I’m back in the 1990’s.

Discover

Worthless – completely and utterly pointless and and annoying waste of space, storage and processing power. It does nothing but show random content from subscribed streaming services – information that not only exists elsewhere on the interface but which can be found in far more useful detail simply by going to the service itself. It appears to be a data-harvesting exercise – in order to “use Discover”, you have to give permission to Google to access your accounts – giving them ever more information about you and your tastes & habits that they can use to shove more adverts in your face. Use it if you want another screenful of random “tips” like “You watched three seconds of a terrible movie about alien carrots – we are now totally convinced that you are addicted to films about extraterretrial vegetables so here’s some more).

USB drives

As I mentioned, I’ve attached a 1TB USB drive to see what I can do with it. I’m still experimenting with that but so far, a couple of oddities emerged. The drive was formatted to NTFS – simply because I forgot to change it to Fat32 – but it was recognised and I have been able to access and play files from Kodi and a couple of other apps. Results were mixed – MX Player actually caused the drive to be unmounted whilst other apps had spordaic problems. Kodi was happy enough – the only issues I had there relate to Kodi’s handling of files and folders on USB and are not down to the Aura. I also tried exFat but the Aura detected a “corrupted drive” (seriously Humax – what part of 4K video don’t you understand – those files can be BIG and Fat32 is a relic). Now letting the Aura format the drive itself – on the understanding that it should be most compatible. That looks to have been a bad move – it took AGES to format and then the Aura appeared to crash – another blank screen and it refused to respond to the remote – only for it to suddenly come back to life a couple of minutes later. So far, I haven’t found a way to access the USB harddrive as a share so I have to unplug it to add files – annoying that the drive is not integrated properly by the Aura – needing third-party apps and unavailalable over FTP, doubly so when the USB ports are both at the back of the device. Incidentally, attaching a USB drive brings up one of those notifications – telling you that you have attached a hard-drive (well, duuuuurrrrrrrr!).

FTP, DLNA

Both are potentially very useful. Unfortunately, in what seems to be the one predictable thing about this box – both DLNA and ftp are flaky and unreliable. Your network folders appear and vanish at random and ftp connection is constantly lost if you try to queue more than a handful of small files. They both work to some degree but both are massively out of date. It’s 2022 and this is supposedly a modern, custom-built media hub – IT’S GOT BLUETOOTH BUILT-IN (can you see where I’m going with this – and why I’m saying it’s further evidence that Humax have totally borked this thing).

When it works, the ability to access recordings from another device is good. The ability to watch live TV is interesting but actually not THAT interesting – why would you want to watch a live TV stream from the Aura on another TV, for example? What they NEED to sort out is giving users simple access to store and use their own files – music, video, photos et al. We need simple, STABLE access to a “personal folder” and we need that content properly integrated with record TV. Why should the user have to treat those differently – that disjointed approach is a major issue. That’s what makes me say that this is actually a £150 PVR with a £20 Android box attached – and why it is simply not worth the money.

Bluetooth

Connecting a game controller, keyboard and headphones was easy enough. The only grouse I have is that the only option after connecting is to unpair – so you can’t simply disconnect headphones, for example. Connecting a standard wireless keyboard and mouse via a USB dongle was not successful but will need to experiment as that may possibly be a conflict with the specific hardware. The bluetooth keyboard (which also has a touchpad) varied from app to app – occasionally stuttering or producing multiple key-presses but overall it a worthwhile addition, especially when first setting-up all those apps that require log-ins. Annoyingly, you are not allowed to add a keyboard or other bluetooth input device until AFTER you’ve been forced to use the vile 26 character wide on-screen keyboard (and seriously – the first four times you have to use onscreen keyboards, you are confronted with three totally different onscreen keyboard layouts – SORT IT OUT. And again, it’s wrong to blame Android/Google – Humax could and SHOULD have created or bought-in a remote-control friendly default keyboard layout for this box – as Amazon and others have done with their Android-based offerings).

External control and home control

The Aura App is basic but works. Oddly, the Google Home app is probably more useful – it quickly recognised that there was a “Google” device and gave me a good remote control – I’m still looking into precisely how much control I can get and whether or not a Google Nest might be useful for handsfree voice control – Humax provide no information and there’s so little discussion of this Aura online that I’m thinking it’s already dead in the water. I did try using the Google Assistant on my phone but the results were not great – saying “Watch bbc 2 on the Aura” had it show me bbc 2 but on Youtube rather than Freeview – I need to sort out all possible commands (not sure how – there doesn’t appear to be a list of commands available anywhere and Humax’ site is a joke). The Google assistant in the remote is actually pretty good at understanding request – the odd misunderstanding but that’s acceptable. It did very well at understand my searches and at controling various devices in my house such as all my lighting (Alexa normally does all that).

YouTube

The app works but has one seriously HUGE issue – HDR is totally borked. I have a number of 4k, HDR smart devices and screens – Amazon Fire stick 4k and 2nd Gen Cube, Sony UHD Smart Blu-ray, phones, tablets, PC and laptop across various screens. On every single one of them, in any combination of device and screen, produces almost identical colours when displaying 4K HDR videos on Youtube, I have some YouTube HDR vids bookmarked, one of which starts with a screen filled with various types of cherry and a few other berries and citrus fruits. On EVERY other device, the cherries are glorious shades of red, from deep blood red to vivid scarlet and the other fruits are bright and have well saturated colours. There’s also a porcelein bowl which has no sign of colour cast. On the Aura, however, the cherries are various shades of reddish brown, the lemon and limes are washed out and sickly and the whole image has absolutely no contrast or punch. This is not down to the TV and no amount of fiddling produces an image that works on Aura’s Youtube and any other device. There is clearly a problem with Youtube on the Aura. It’s not definitely an HDR issue as HDR seems reasonable in other apps and on playing local files. Humax should have checked this and should be talking to Youtube about the issue or else they should be looking at their own hardware – look at Amazon 4K display settings to see how it should be done, options for 8/10 or 12 bit output in RGB/YcBcR for example.

Flickering, stuttering, flashing, freezing

Multiple issues here – the main one is caused by Humax pulling a fast-one, the rest appear to be related to HDMI CEC and the failure to provide any switch for Standard/Enhanced modes – or any detail on which is being used.

With any app or live tv running and nothing happening to cause a change in refresh rate, the screen will suddenly go black for a second or two. It happens at random and may happen every couple of minutes or so. The only way to stop this is to completely disabled CEC on the Aura – meaning that I then can’t use the Aura’s remote to control TV/AVR volume – and I REALLY hate that I’m back to using several remotes since buying this thing.

The single biggest and most annoying issue with this box is the way it changes resolution and refresh rates AFTER a video or live TV stream starts. That’s absolutely the wrong way to do it. Anyone has ever used Kodi will have practical experience of what’s happening here and how easy it is to prevent it. In Kodi, you can tell the app to change the refresh rate whenever a video starts and again when it stops. This is how it works – the GUI has a fixed resolution – you press “play” and the GUI vanishes and you see a blank screen for very brief period as the resolution is changed in the background – anything from almost zero time to maybe a second or so with the most demanding of files streamed over a slow LAN – the video then plays and when the vid ends or is stopped, there’s another extremely brief blank and you return to the GUI at it’s own resultion. If you choose to go directly from one video to another, the resolution changes directly between those files, if necessary. What Humax are doing is idiotic – they only change the refresh rate when a video starts and even then, not until AFTER it’s started. So if your GUI is running at 1080p and you start a video at 4k/50, the video actually starts at 1080p and then the refresh rate changes after a period set in the Aura settings. When the video ends or is stopped and you return to the app or Home screen, that screen is now being rendered in 4k/50 – which is why the colours are constantly changing too. You get everything set up with natural colours for your TV stream and then you watch a video on an app – and when you get back to your Home Page, icons and images are now massively over-saturated/ It’s a total mess.

Why do Humax do it this way – why do they have a system which means that EVERY video is interrupted and ruined – that the home page has no single resolution or colour depth? It’s a scam. If they did the method I described above – change the refresh rate if necessary and THEN start playing the video, there’s a delay – and another delay when the video ends and the redraw the interface at it’s own native resultion. On a Firestick, for example, that delay is very brief – but the Aura is so hugely underpowered that the delay would be very noticable. They don’t want us knowing just how bad and bloated this thing is so they shifted the refresh rate change to make the box “feel” more responsive – you get to Live TV or your video stream very quickly and the time that should have been spent getting that app or feature properly reading to use is then stolen from the time we need to watch the video. In fact, one of my testcarding videos – a very short demo used to test DTS-HD – is totally unusable on this box because it starts and is then blanked out almost its entire duraton. Humax then have the temerity to inflict ridiculous, convoluted display settings on us – so we can blame ourselves for all the flickering and flashing caused by them. This is easily fixed – CHANGE THE RESOLUTION AND REFRESH RATE ****BEFORE**** STARTING THE CONTENT AND THEN CHANGE IT BACK WHEN THE STREAM ENDS! We will accept that – it’s NORMAL – it’s a transitional stage that we see all the time. We expect a brief blank page between pressing “play” and a video image appearing – we’d rather have half a second of that transition from “standing mode” to “playing mode” than start videos in the wrong resolution and then blank the screen WHILST THE VIDEO IS PLAYING. We are paying to WATCH THE CONTENT, not 98% of it every damned time. And yes, I am aware that I can force a fixed resolution on everything – but why would anyone pay nearly £300 to have a device that can’t play a few vids correctly – that forces the user to choose between downgrading their content or accepting totally avoidable screen blanking and flickering. This is NOT a hardware issue – it’s a MARKETTING decision – a move made to make it look like the box starts viewing streams “instantly” by shifting the house-keeping by a few seconds – totally ruining every video or live stream.

It’s this simple – you have a GUI with it’s own FIXED resolution. When you open a stream that requires a refresh rate or resolution change, you close the existing screen, open a new one at the correct rate for the video and then start the vid. When the video ends, you close the existing screen and open a new one at the GUI’s rates – or if you go directly to another video at a different refresh rate, you open a screen to suit. Change the rate, show the film, change the rate to show the interface. It’s not rocket salad. It’s fine to offer choices on WHICH refresh rates should be observed – the user may decide that 50/60 handles all 24/25/30/50 and 60 fps vids well enough – but the actual change MUST BE MADE BEFORE THE VIDEO STARTS! And for crying out loud – keep the damned GUI in one resolution by changing the rate back after the video ends – GUI colours shouldn’t be changing according to what we last watched.

Schizophrenic behaviour

As you use this box, you realise that that it’s not a single device – it’s neither a PVR with added smart functions nor is it a smart box with the ability to record OTA broadcasts. This is a PVR and an underpowered smart box sharing the same housing – only barely linked at an operational level. The disgusting way that Humax have bodged the refresh rate changes – setting-up the users for blame by making them responsible for choosing settings that shouldn’t even exist – is a major sign of this but even that appalling decision isn’t all there is. Prime example – you’re at the Home Page and you click the barely visible and almost inaccessible button to check your recordings and schedules and you are immediately blasted with audio from the last TV channel you watched – and when you exit the recordings “app”, you are dumped into live TV. You didn’t ASK to watch live TV, you didn’t want to watch live TV or live TV on that particular channel – you are forced to watch it when what SHOULD happen is that you return to the home page unless you specifically choose to go to Live TV. And this is the point – they’re trying to protray Live TV and associated functions as Apps – but if you go anywhere near Freeview, you are dragged out of Android and into a completely separate, isolated environment. This again links to the overriding issues of the deliberate mishandling of resolution changes. Humax have totally failed to implement a genuine Home Page – instead, having one screen with that name on none of the required functionality. Proof of that – the Home key on the remote does NOT take you to a specific position and you can’t even get directly to the Home page menu bar without climbing over a worthless promo for Amazon, Disney or whoever.

Overall performance

Dreadful – simply dreadful.

I have multiple devices that I use for streaming and this is by far the slowest – to the point of being totally unusable with set-ups which works flawlessly on older and vastly less expensive devices. Streaming video from a NAS to Kodi is almost impossible – it’s so SLOOOooooooow. Colours and screen resolutions are all over the place because of the way they’ve tried to hide the lack of performance with that refresh rate change “trick”. Whether it’s underpowered hardware or third-rate coding that fails to properly exploit that hardware is irrelevant – the fact is that this box is miles behind even a basic Firestick, phone or other any other “smart” device I’ve used. A £30 firestick 4K blows this out of the water in terms of performance. The ONLY advantage this set-up has is that there’s fewer adverts and promos – but that’s not to say that there’s NO such advertising, Google have been allowed to punt their own commercial video and music on-demand services and there’s the un-removable promos at the top of the fake home page, the moronic and unavoidable “Explore Freeview Play” obstacle in the menus and the blatent data harvesting exercise of the “Discover” page. By far the biggest problem is the refresh rate change issue – absolutely unforgiveable and it’s seriously annoying that none of the “independent” reviews warned that this existed. Put it like this – you’re at the cinema, waiting for the film to start, the lights are on, curtains are closed and people are chatting, reading their phones and messing around. The film suddenly starts with now warning – the lights are still on, the curtains are still closed – then, five minutes into the film, the film stops, the lights go on and off and the curtains open and close – only the film hasn’t actually stopped because you can still hear the soundtrack – and then the film reappears and you’ve no idea who just got shot, never mind who shot him. How many people in that cinema WOULDN’T be throwing their choc-ices at the screen – who many of them WOULDN’T be demanding a refund? But that’s what this sick, limping device does for EVERY film – EVERY time. And all because Humax are trying to con buyers into thinking that it opens and starts videos and TV faster by starting the stream BEFORE THE BOX IS ACTUALLY READY.

Who to blame?

I know that the interface here is more or less that of Android TV and it’s not been altered much – but that’s NOT a “good thing”. Humax are responsible for this box and they SHOULD have tweaked the basic, one-size fits all Android system to suit THEIR hardware and to better serve their customers. It’s not like we bought a box and installed an operating system of our chosing on it. They could and should have worked on this longer and properly ironed out all the problems. From the unforgivable lack of a shortcut button for settings to the deplorable decision to change refresh rates during video and live TV playback – it’s ALL DOWN TO HUMAX.

Bottom line…

I am sorely tempted to return this to Amazon and get my money back – but part of me wants to see if I can do something with it. Put simply, it’s a mess. If you want a smart device to access Disney, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, all the catch-up services and also get access to a few games and apps – get a Firestick for around £30 in Amazon’s never-ending sales – or a Fire Cube for about £60 and you can add external storage and store almost unlimited numbers of apps. PVRs are a dying breed – terrestrial TV is heading the way of betamax and cassette tapes and strapping a weak version of Android’s OS to a PVR is really little more than Humax trying to sell a few more boxes before the market completely dries up. What they could have done was produce a goodd smart box which has a PVR attached – rather than a PVR with a disjointed Android interface glued over the cracks. I bought the 2TB box and if I’d paid RRP for it, it would have cost almost exactly the same as four years worth of subscription to Disney+ or Amazon Prime – or both for two years (and for that money, you get a hell of a lot more than Strictly Come Baking On Ice). That really puts it into proportion – a Firestick and four years of Amazon Prime or Disney+ for the same price as this box – and you’d STILL be able to watch all the regular TV you can find plus all the catch-up. And that’s the rub – exactly what is Humax offering here for the money? The PVR ain’t worth £250-£300 – and there’s absolutely nothing on the smart side of this box that isn’t available for a tenth of that money on a firestick or cheap Android box. Even the claims of “5,000 apps from Google Pplay Store” is a joke – those “5,000” apps include the system apps and worst drivel imaginable – whilst spectacularly NOT including almost all of the most popular and “essential” apps – no Facebook, no genuine brower, no Netflix – I mean, really, once you’ve got the catch-up apps and youtube, you’re done – and all of those are standard on any modern TV even if you don’t have a STB or phone/PC that you can hook-up or cast.

As best as I can say it – it’s AWFUL. There was an opportunity here to produce something good and Humax did half a job and have clearly now walked away from the mess. There is potential – the box has a couple of useful features such as the ability to share recordings – but DLNA is notoriously unstable and so outdated that the experience is embarrassingly flaky. And for a box which is clearly trying to be an “entertainment hub”, why the absolute HELL does this not include native apps to play vdeo and music? And the final nail on the coffin – you can’t even install Google Photos on it. You can tell the “Google Assistant” to show your photos but all that is able to do is to shows all of your photos in a single stream, starting with the latest – it’s pointless. Yes, you can open the photo app on your phone and cast to this thing – which is also the “answer” to the lack of all the other basic apps and services such as Netflix – and access to emails, social media and the www – but the whole point of having an Adroid TV or similar smart device is that you don’t NEED to get a phone, a tablet and a laptop to do all those things whilst watching TV, The whole point is that you can be watching Eastenders and quickly check facebook – or show Granny your holiday snaps on a big screen – without everyone in the room being forced to watch “Babestation” because that was the last channel you watched the previous evening when all you wanted to do was show the Will Hay film you recording last week. Even the bluetooth remote is a joke – punted as being “great when the box is out of sight” but clearly actually needed because Humax couldn’t be bothered integrating IR input with the Android OS. Just wait till your remote stops working – or try to buy an affordable universal remote – and forget using the Humax remote to control anything about your TV other than power and volume.

Any issues caused by the hardware will remain. Humax can and should tweak the basic Android interface. Humax absolutely MUST change the refresh rate change systems so that all the housekeeping occurs BEFORE videos and other content are displayed. Until that is donw, my advice has to be – DO NOT BUY THIS BOX. Buy a PVR if you need one and buy a Firestick or any other streaming device. You’ll save money and get vastly better performance. I’m not a huge fan of Amazon – I detest the pushy way their interface constanly shoves “pay more to also buy this” in your face – but the plain simple truth is that a firestick is a THOUSAND times better at just about everything than this Aura when it comes to smartbox functions – and it gives you Atmos with Disney and access to Prime and NETFLIX is 4k with Atmos. ALL – absolutely ALL – of the catch-up apps are on the £30 Amazon stick and work perfectly (iplayer is in 4k too). And given that just about the only way to get anything onto this clunker is to sideload it, it’s worth mentioning that it’s just as easy if not easier to sideload onto a Firestick – there’s even apps that do all the “hard work” for you if you need them. A Firecube gives you access to external storage – dead easy to add a huge USB drive and it even lets you move apps to that external drive, and can do that move automatically for you. I’m not trying to promote Amazon here – I’m trying to say that Humax can’t justify selling this for ten times the price of a 4k Firestick when it so dramatically underperforms and offers sucj a disjointed nd frankly annoying user experience. I could accept a drop in some areas of performance in return for a well intergrate “TV experience” but the total lack of onboard access to my own music, videos and photos, the constant blanking, filckering, stuttering, failure to stream from a NAS, never-ending ftp and DLNA drop-outs and confused menus are killers – I have yet to be allowed to watch a single video or show without interruption by this monster.

IF – a massive IF – Humax deal with the refresh rate changing mess and IF they sort the GUI and menus and IF they fix the ftp/DLNA and/or add Samba and IF they give us simple access to the internal harddrive for our own files and IF they give us dedicate apps to access our music or video and/or give us access to the internal HDD for apps like Kodi – then maybe I’d say it’s possibly worth buying. But let’s be honest – all the signs are that Humax have already walked away from this thing. My suspcion is that the PVR market is dying, if not already dead and this was Humax’s last ditch attempt – tacking a half-backed Android device to the back of a PVR to make it seem “on trend”. No updates at all – no word from them – not even a security patch update in TWELVE MONTHS. If, like me, you’re a bit of a geek and have plenty of spare time (who knew that cancer had an upside), you might enjoy fighting this thing and trying to see if there’s any way to improve it yourself – but for the money you’ll spend, you’d be better-off buying a Android box. If you really only need the PVR and are thinking that issues affecting the smart side of things won’t affect you, be aware that the dreadful refresh rate problem will totally spoil your enjoyment of live TV – and that’s the real bottom line. One decision has made this box a complete disaster.