Wyplayer

The Wyplayer is a media streamer, USB media player, Freeview TV tuner and recorder, and photo viewer. It’s also very expensive.

It combines media playback abilities with digital television recording. Like a Freeview PVR the Wyplayer can be used to watch programmes, pause and rewind live broadcasts and schedule recordings.

The electronic programme guide was a bit more fiddly than we were used to (the minimalist remote control meant that we had to press two buttons to get to it rather than the usual one) and it was slow to operate.

The lack of buttons on the remote also mean that different buttons do different things depending on what mode the player is in, so it’s necessary to learn those, as there are no on-screen prompts.

Also, the recording facilities left a lot to be desired: while it's possible to press the record button inside the programme guide to select a programme to save, it can not do ‘series link’ like some other recorders, which will record every episode of that programme.

You can set up manually repeating recordings but these are again fiddly. For instance, to record More4’s The Daily Show we had to programme in a schedule for a daily recording at 8.30pm, and it’s not possible to skip the days when it’s not being shown, leading to extra recordings that have to be deleted later.

One very clever feature is that recordings can be copied off the hard disk to watch on a computer or portable player, although you will have to convert them from the Mpeg-2 transport stream format first.

The media playback was more impressive. The menus made it easy to find music and video stored on other computers on the network, and you can also use it as a network hard disk: copy files to the Wyplayer’s built-in disk and play them from there, which again worked well.

It can also be used to browse Youtube videos.

The player was flaky, though – the menus were slow to respond and it would occasionally seize up altogether, which meant having to pull the plug on it and restart.

Although the Wyplayer does many things well, its flaws made the experience too irritating to justify the cost.