Mediasonic ATSC Digital Converter Box with TV Tuner Function (HW130RN)

I recently stopped watching cable TV and switched all of my television sets to Antenna TV. The Mediasonic Homeworx HW130STB Digital Converter Box made the transition very easy. If you follow the instructions exactly as written, you will have no problem installing the converter box. The picture and audio are very good quality, and I am able to watch several of the same channels that I had with cable.

We get 40+ stations with this lil guy hooked up to a small outdoor antenna. Our cable input fitting broke and this hooked up to the HDMI and works great. The remote has to be pointed directly at the receiver to work and power on off is a bit slow to react but all in all works good and as for price point, it's a great product.

I bought this primarily as a DVR to record the local team's football games off-air. For this review, please bear in mind that one reason this unit is so cheap is because the Quality Assurance effort applied to its manufacture minimal. You can expect a wide variance in product quality. This review is about my unit in particular. Yours WILL be different, or dead on arrival. I initially tested this with a 47" Visio flat screen TV. I was not initially impressed. There was some jitter evident in the image if one looked very closely. The first test recording "seemed" to have an audio issue. Otherwise, this is a fine product of Chinese engineering. The screens were in good English, by the way. The documentation, not so much. The first thing about making recordings with this unit is that you MUST be getting a picture without dropouts in it (scrambling of the picture and/or audio glitches). If not, you can forget getting useful recordings with the unit. It's not a flaw in the unit, it's the technical reality. I can only get a "perfect" image on a few of the channels where I live. This is disappointing, but not the unit's fault. The most pronounced problem with my first test recording (which was NOT made with a perfect single). Had wildly fluctuating audio. This WAS a problem with the unit, and is disappointing, but read on. Next, I turned off the unit, removed the USB drive I was recording to, and plugged it into my new laptop. Here, I found the following about Video Recordings, which are placed in a subdirectory named "HBPVR": File type: .mts plus .mts.meta CODEC: MP2 Uncompressed Yup, this unit provides a PERFECT recording. What comes in goes out. If you're getting a good signal, you get a recording with all the original image fidelity. It looks _amazing_ on my laptop which has a 4K screen. Now back to the problems I mentioned at the start. The video jitter is _not_ present when I play back the recordings on a computer. And, the audio dropouts are not present either. Unfortunately, there are STILL audio dropouts during playback _on the unit_ even when there is an excellent signal. Further investigation showed the problem is with audio processing in the HDMI interface section of the design. I can live with it, so I will keep it. As mentioned at the top, you may not have this problem (it may be specific to my unit) or, you may have a different fun problem. Other than that, it seems to be a great little unit. And I do mean little. It looks much bigger on the Amazon site. The remote range and position sensitivity is not as bad as I feared from reading reviews. It comes packed in a tiny cardboard box with a carrying handle. Save it so you can carry it around if you ever need to!

I purchased one of these. It lasted for less than a year - minimal usage (maybe 5 hours a month at the most). Then it randomly started failing... it would just go black. I contacted the seller, and they were very responsive and sent me a replacement. Unfortunately, the replacement has started doing the same thing, maybe 4 months into service. (And - it seems to have a knack for failing at the most inopportune time - usually at the end of a big football drive or with 30 seconds left in the basketball game.) I have a Mediasonic RAID disk array that's provided totally trouble-free service for almost 10 years, but the TV tuner has been a disappointment. I'll try a different brand.

Mediasonic ATSC Digital Converter Box works good 💯% 😊.