[McMurdo]

I've just bought one of these dinky things to try out so I thought I'd write a little review.

First, it's small, about the size of a box of cook's matches. (The stock photo of the box and remote suggests it's as big as the remote..its smaller). It is powered off a 5V compact DC wall wart through a barrel DC plug.

In the box comes the unit, the remote, 2 x AAA batteries, a composite AV lead and a remote channel/clock display with velcro pad.

It picks up the usual freeview channels including HD, PBS America and Talking Pictures (Sutton Coldfield tx here). Output is on composite + L/R audio on a 4-pole 3.5mm jack socket, and HDMI. You can use them both at once.

The box is small enough to stick in a drawer, in a cupboard or slip behind a wall-mounted lcd tv. It could, with an engineer's precautions, be hidden inside an older TV or velcro'd to the back.

The box has its own IR receiver for the remote and also a micro USB socket which plugs into the provided mini 7-segment display to show channel number when receiving and clock when turned off. An extra IR receiver is also in the display pod.

There is a USB connector on the front for a USB stick or portable hard drive. You can then record off-air programmes to this either on the fly or scheduled via the TV guide.

I've only played with it for an hour or so but it seems a versatile box especially for feeding an aurora. There are multiple TV display options for the HDMI, eg letterbox, pan and scan, auto, 16:9, 4:3, 1050, 575, interlace or progressive. The composite video can be zoomed both in and out (to quite large degrees) to fill or centre a picture on a 4:3 (or 5:4!) screen although the HDMI also follows the zoom command, so forcing a letterboxed broadcast to fill a 4:3 screen means you lose a bit of the hdmi content all around. The zoom is a 1-touch button on the remote that scrolls through the options sequentially.

The only downside I can see so far is that my tv remote volume buttons keep telling the DVB box to try to play a move on the USB stick! And..the navigation buttons on the DVB remote tell my tv to either mute the sound or change the AV input to 'antenna'. Annoying but this little LCD tv has a weird remote control standard that I couldn't get a universal remote for (a thread a few years ago!).

The photos show the unit, an 'hd ready' lcd tv showing the menu and the little monitor shows the composite output (zoom at normal). The last pic os the clock/channel display/remote eye.

PS: its 20 quid.