The Humax box benefits from all the usual Freeview Play functions, such as a retrospective TV guide with integrated mainstream catch-up players including BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4 and My5, plus Freeview Play curated highlights. There’s also UKTV Play, CBS Catchup, Horror Bites, STV Player and BBC Sounds on board, along with a library of on-demand content from the Freeview archives. Dive into the settings and there are plenty more features to have a look at. One I’d recommend is ‘Dynamic Refresh Rate Scaling’. The Aura scales the resolution of each app to the resolution of the TV (in this case 4K). I found it was too annoying with its constant blinking and oftentimes crashing.

Freeview Play provides 95% of the nation’s most-watched TV, all for free. There are more than 70 live TV channels, alongside nine on demand players: BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4, My5, UKTV Play, CBS Catchup Channels UK, Horror Bites, STV Player and BBC Sounds.

One feature that will certainly be appreciated by parents with little ones to amuse is the aforementioned Kid’s Zone. This is a content-protected area with a cheerful UI that allows kids and parents to browse together for things to watch. Helpfully, thumbnails have clearly marked running times. Along with an HDMI 2.1 port, there’s optical digital audio output, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB ports (one of which is 3.0), and terrestrial aerial loop through. Dual Wi-Fi is standard.

Speaking of recordings, the Humax Aura has three tuners so you could in theory record up to four channels simultaneously while watching another – you can also pause and rewind live TV as it’s happening. There are two versions of the Aura set-top box with a 1TB and 2TB version, the former is good for up to 500 hours of standard definition or 250 hours of high-definition content, while the latter doubles that to 1000 hours of SD and 500 hours of HD. As you’d hope for with any PVR, recorded image quality is transparent to source. That means linear HD channels look crisp and detailed, with bit-starved SD channels a little more bleary around the edges. The recording accurately reflects both, for good or ill. The Aura comes in 1TB and 2TB versions, allowing for up to 500 and 1,000 hours of recording respectively, and both include three digital tuners, allowing you to record up to four programmes while watching a fifth (depending on what you’re actually recording). There’s also the Humax Aura app for iOS and Android that enables remote planning, recording and viewing on the go. The Aura supports connection to a TV’s internal speakers, via optical or HDMI ARC (up to 5.1ch), and Home Cinema via HDMI (up to 7.1ch). But on the app front, there is plenty to choose from within video, music, sports, and fitness. You can count on Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+. Lionsgate+ ITVX, Paramount+, TikTok, Mubi, Deezer, Roxi, Discovery+, BT Sport, Steam Link, Spotify, Vevo, Tidal, UFC, Peloton, BBC Sounds and DAZN. It’s not as many as Fire TV, Google TV, or Roku, but it’s a strong enough proposition.The latter is actually a rather cool addition to the mix, and for parents could prove a godsend. Its clean, thumbnail driven interface helpfully gives prominence to programme running times, while a Search function only delivers appropriate results.

When Brian May plays his solo at the end of the piece, it’s like he’s making his guitar sing. Again, the sense of place is captured brilliantly in a credible rendition of the sound of the old Wembley Stadium full of 72,000 people clapping in time and singing along to Radio Ga Ga.Problematic recording setups and losing programmes - including for a series link having to go into the recording info, deleting and recreating a series link - as just selecting series after pressing the Recording button only selects one programme. This must be easy to fix, so why hasn’t it? Away from the video side, the hi-res audio support is a welcome addition. It means those connecting the Aura to a decent external speaker system can get a strong performance from locally stored or streamed audio files, even if connecting through the HDMI, which can handle up to 24-bit/192 kHz levels. There’s more here than just regular television and movies. The Google Play Store and Stadia give you access to thousands of excellent video games (just add a Bluetooth controller), while Google Assistant can also be used to control your smart home gear including lights, heating and smart speakers. Freeview Play: all the telly, all the time The ultimate test of any piece of tech kit is would you buy it again or recommend it to someone you care for? Nope. Even the way the remote control is layed out is rushed and not intuitive. The button to find your recordings is hidden away and too small. I'm constantly miskeying and once you press the wrong button you lose what you were trying to do and clear the cached program you were trying to watch.