You can now record live TV. Two things are needed: a subscription and a drive — a USB stick or a disk in the box’s USB port.
The menu on the right now has a single Recording row, and it answers straight away what is going on: recording in progress, so many scheduled, or nothing being recorded. It opens a screen where every question about recording sits side by side. Record what is on air right now — until the end of the programme, or one hour ahead if the channel has no guide. Pick a programme in the guide, and the recording takes its time slot. Set the channel, date and time by hand. And choose the drive: next to it you can see which one is selected and how much space is left on it.
The drive can also be chosen at the moment of recording. If there is none yet, the app offers to pick one and carries on from where you stopped, instead of sending you off to settings to type everything again.
Lower down on the same screen are the recordings themselves: running, scheduled and finished. A finished one opens in the app, with seeking, and stays an ordinary file — take the drive out and finish watching on a computer.
One channel records while you watch another. The app pulls the stream with its own downloader rather than through the player: the box has a single hardware decoder, and sharing it between the recording and live TV would mean stutter on screen. For the same reason recording barely warms the box up.
If the channel has an archive and the box is switched off mid-recording, what was missed is caught up from the archive the next time it starts. But while the app is closed nothing is recorded: leaving the app stops a recording in progress, and one scheduled for that time will not start. This is a limit of the box rather than an omission — a background service that records with the app closed gets unloaded by the system on some firmwares, and we would rather not promise a recording we cannot keep.
A paid subscription now switches on by itself. The app used to learn about it only at the next daily check: you would pay from your phone, press Recording or Baby monitor, and be offered the very thing you had just paid for. Now the subscription is checked when it is actually needed: at start-up, on returning to the app, and at the moment a locked feature is pressed.
Stream quality has arrived: Settings → Picture and smoothness. Some channels broadcast in several qualities at once, and until now the player always took the best one — which is exactly what causes stutter: the box decodes a 1080p frame at its limit, and the network does not always deliver the bitrate. The app now asks for quality no higher than the one you chose; the default is 720p, and from three metres away on a TV the difference from 1080p is hard to see. If every detail matters, “as broadcast” is one press away. A channel that broadcasts in a single quality is left alone.
The Back button now closes one screen instead of two. From a settings section — Language, Cameras, Picture — it used to throw you straight out to live TV, past settings themselves: the box sends “back” twice, and the app took the second press for a separate one.
Category names in the channel panel are set in the site’s typeface — the same Onest the headings here are set in. Channel names next to them kept the previous font: the difference in shape separates the sections from their contents. And the menu on the right learned to scroll — with a large font and cameras connected, the bottom items did not fit on screen, and there was no way to reach them with the remote.