EchoStar HDS-600RS review

While the Sling Box made it possible to access your PVR over the internet, setting up an extra box and hooking up the IR transmitter created an extra set of cables that had to sit underneath your TV. Now that Slingmedia has been bought by PVR maker EchoStar, the HDS-600RS Freesat HD recorder is the first product that we’ve seen to have Slingbox technology integrated, known as SlingLoaded.

It’s quite exciting as a concept and considerably neater, as you only have a single box and don’t need the IR transmitter. We were quite taken with the look of the HDS-600RS, which retains the Toblerone-shape of the original Slingbox. Touch buttons on the front light up when the box is turned on, adding to the HDS-600RS’s good looks.

Setting the box up is easy. All you have to do is connect two cables from your satellite dish (a Sky dish, if installed will do the job), hook up the HDMI output to your TV (there’s also SCART if you don’t have an HD TV) and power the box on. A simple setup wizard automatically scans for channels, which takes just a few minutes to complete.

From this point, it’s incredibly simple to use. We found the Guide very quick to access. You can view every channel or browse channels by category, including Entertainment, Sports and Music. By default you can hear the programme you’re watching, but the setup menu lets you turn all menus transparent, so that you can see what’s going on in the background. It’s not quite as neat as having a preview window, but certainly the next best thing.

Two and a half hours of programmes are shown on screen, plus eight channels in the list. Hitting OK on a programme switches to watch it, if it’s currently on, but otherwise sets a reminder. Alternatively, hitting Record lets you record a show with the option for series link for every show in a series.

The quality of the channels depends on which one it is. SD channels veer from the decent, such as BBC One, to the poor, such as the 24 hour news channels. Given that it’s the same feed as on Freeview, this is to be expected. The HD channels look fantastic, as they do on Freeview HD, with a much sharper image and no artefacts.

With dual tuners you can watch programme while recording another or even record two channels and watch a recording. If you’re recording two channels and try and change to watch a third, you get a warning that asks you which recording you want to cancel to carry on. It’s easy and neat to understand.

Paused TV and recorded programmes can be navigated at up to x64 speed, plus the dedicated skip buttons let you jump backwards or forwards in 30 second chunks. With the 500GB hard disk installed, there’s around enough space for 300 hours of SD programmes and 100 hours of HD.

The well laid out remote control makes it easy to pause live TV and control recordings, plus it has dedicated buttons to access the Guide and your Library of recorded programmes.

As with all Freesat HD boxes, you can access BBC iPlayer by hitting the red button on any BBC channel. You can’t get the HD stream, although you can choose a Higher Quality version, which gives you quality equivalent to a decent SD Freeview channel. The interface is neat and easy to browse, with a search to help you find the content you want to watch.

It’s the Sling Loaded part of the box that’s likely to garner to the most attention. Setting it up is incredibly easy just by visiting the Sling Website. We had to use Internet Explorer, as Chrome is not currently supported for viewing video. If you’re on your local network, the HDS-600RS is found automatically; to connect over the internet you need the unique Slingbox ID, which you can access through the menus. You only need this the first time that you set the box up.

Quality from the stream depends on the speed of your network connection, but it’s adjusted on the fly so you’ll always get watchable content. On a LAN you get quality that’s around standard SD broadcast. Quality will most likely dip when you’re on the internet, as it’s bottlenecked by your broadband’s upload speed. As most of us use asynchronous DSL services, uploading isn’t nearly as fast as downloading. The Sling technoogy does a very good job of making something watchable out of little bandwidth, but don’t expect miracles from a basic 256Kbit/s upload speed.

If you’ve got an Android smartphone or iPhone, you can install the mobile Slingplayer app, which costs an additional £18. This lets you watch and control your HDS-600RS from your mobile device. It’s a neat trick, but expensive unless you travel a lot.

Our minor problem with the system is that using the Sling Loaded part, you control the box directly. So, what you see on your TV is what you see on your computer. For a device like this, we were hoping that the integration would go further, allowing a remote viewer to watch a recording, while leaving the people at home to watch live TV, for example.

With two tuners it would be nice if the remote viewer could use a spare tuner if it were available, allowing two different channels to be watched. It’s also a shame that you can’t stream iPlayer over the internet either. Using iPlayer on the set-top box disables incoming connections and prevents you from even connecting to the box. That’s not to say that the Sling Loaded technology isn’t useful, but it’s not as flexible as we’d have hoped.

As this box is network connected it’s a shame that it can’t stream music, videos and photos from a UPnP server. It also can’t play this kind of media from a USB stick attached to the prominent port on the front; this is solely for firmware upgrades.

If you absolutely must have access to your TV from wherever you are, the EchoStar HDS-600RS is pretty good value, compared to the cost of a separate Slingbox and Freesat HD recorder. Its value is further enhanced by the quality and simplicity of the PVR. However, even given the Sling Loaded technology, this PVR is an expensive purchase and standalone Freesat HD or Freeview HD recorders can be bought for at least £100 less.