We need to get a new Freesat box; nothing fancy and it doesn’t need to be a recorder. There’s a nice, non-recorder, Humax model that allows an external USB drive to be added for recording but since it also plugs into ethernet for internet services I was wondering whether there were any Freesat receivers that would record to a network drive (our current Sondex one won’t).

If you get a Humax Foxsat recorder they have the ability, with modded firmware, to run an FTP server and to decode HD films recorded on them – perhaps slightly more of a fiddle than you were looking for, but you can easily copy films from the receiver to the NAS box. I normally run them through a PC first before putting them on to a Plex server ( with Handbrake ) but that might not be needed in your case.

My Humax box (which is FreeVIEW not FreeStat) can connect to the rest of my network and play movies from a media server so I presume it is at least DLNA capable.

Never tried moving videos off the box onto server. Think it can probably do that but A) they’ll be in Humax format and B) it has a 1TB drive in it so I’m not short on space.

Sorry that’s all a bit vague.

The Foxsat is DLNA capable – I’d forgotten about that. because I haven’t used it for several years.

Thanks

It looks like there might be options, although external USB drives are pretty affordable to.

I don’t see any advantage to having the recording drive external to the receiver/recorder.

FTPing from the Humax to a NAS simply means installing Filezilla and copying the files over.

With an external drive you’d need to disconnect from one device, plug in to another device and copy the files. You’d also have the risk of cables not being attached/failing when you want to record or transfer files.