Humax Aura EZ Freely Recorder Box Review: Bumpy Start

The original Humax Aura launched back in 2020 as something quite exciting – a Freeview recorder powered by Android TV, combining traditional recording with a modern streaming platform in one box.

It had its problems, and some of its promises never quite materialised, but the ambition was there.

Five years later, Humax is back with its successor. The Aura EZ takes a different approach – ditching Android TV entirely in favour of Freely, Everyone TV’s streaming platform that’s designed to eventually replace traditional Freeview.

The result is a hybrid box that combines aerial-based recording with Freely’s live and on-demand streaming, all for £249.

On paper, it fills a gap. The Aura EZ is currently the only standalone Freely device that can record – and for viewers who aren’t ready to give up recording but want to embrace streaming, that’s a meaningful proposition.

Unlike the Aero and Pleio Freely boxes, which are streaming-only, the Aura EZ lets you record four channels simultaneously (only from the aerial signal), stores up to 500 hours of HD content on its 2TB hard drive, and gives you Freely’s full live and catch-up platform alongside.

What it doesn’t give you – and this will disappoint anyone who remembers the original Aura – is apps. No Netflix, no Disney+, no Google Play Store. The Aura EZ is a Freely device first and last, and if you want anything beyond the Freely broadcaster apps, you’ll need a separate device.

Whether the hybrid approach works in practice is another question entirely. After two weeks of testing, we have some answers – and not all of them are encouraging.

Who Is The Humax Aura EZ For?

Let’s start with the basics. Freely is Everyone TV’s streaming platform – the organisation behind Freeview and Freesat – and it’s designed to eventually replace both.

Instead of an aerial or satellite dish, Freely delivers live TV and catch-up content over your broadband connection. Same BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and more – just streamed rather than broadcast.

It’s a compelling idea, and devices like the Manhattan Aero and Netgem Pleio show it can work really well in practice. But one thing Freely doesn’t do – and won’t do, by design – is let you record programmes.

That’s where the Aura EZ comes in. For viewers who aren’t ready to give up recording, Humax has built a hybrid box that combines a traditional aerial-based recorder with Freely’s streaming platform.

In theory, the best of both worlds. In practice… it’s more complicated than that.

Because when you actually think about who this device is aimed at, the logic starts to unravel a bit.

If you have good aerial reception and you want to record programmes, why do you need Freely at all? Just buy a Freeview recorder – you’ll get a cleaner experience for less money.

Yes, Freely is supposedly the future of free TV – but traditional aerial broadcasting isn’t going anywhere for at least five years, probably longer. And by the time it does, the hardware market will look very different to what it does today.

On the flip side, if your aerial reception is poor and that’s why Freely appeals to you – what exactly are you going to record? The DTT (aerial-based) channels on the Aura EZ are only as good as your aerial signal. If that signal is bad, your recordings will be bad too.

The one scenario that does make some sense is using Freely as a backup – keeping the aerial for recording while falling back to streaming when reception is dodgy.

That’s a reasonable use case. But as we’ll get into later, the way the Aura EZ handles the relationship between its aerial channels and its Freely channels makes even that scenario more frustrating than it should be.

The honest truth is that if you want a capable Freeview recorder AND a good Freely experience right now, you’d be better served – and less confused – by buying a recorder like the Manhattan T4-R alongside the Aero or the Pleio.

Yes, that’s two boxes instead of one, and may end up costing you a bit more (depending on hard drive capacity). But both devices would do their respective jobs well. The Aura EZ, at least in its current state, does neither job as well as it should.

Setting Up The Humax Aura EZ

The Aura EZ is a decent-sized box – similar in size and weight to the original Aura, and much bigger than the Aero and Pleio.

It looks a bit better than its predecessor though. The original Aura was plasticky and a fingerprint magnet – the EZ has a more textured top panel that feels a bit more premium. Not a dramatic difference, but a noticeable one.

In the box, you get everything you need to get started: the remote control, an HDMI cable, an Ethernet cable, a standard aerial cable, a power adapter, and batteries.

Humax has thought ahead here – you genuinely can plug everything in straight out of the box without needing to hunt for cables.

Then there’s the remote. It’s similar to that of the original Aura – which was already on the large side – but somehow even bigger. Given that the Aura EZ actually has fewer features than its predecessor, the extra bulk is hard to explain.

It’s almost difficult to use with one hand, which is not something you want from a device you’ll be picking up dozens of times a day. It’s also infrared rather than Bluetooth, which means you need line of sight to the box – so unlike the Aero and Pleio’s Bluetooth remotes, you can’t point it vaguely in the direction of the TV and expect it to work.

On the plus side, the remote can be paired with your TV (assuming you find the correct model), and you can then control the volume, the input switching, and turning the TV on and off.

It also has two big, prominent Freely buttons – one for the homescreen and one for the Freely EPG.

Setup itself is painless. There’s no Google account required – which makes sense, since there’s no Google Play Store or any Google services on this device – and the channel scan ran without any issues. The first software update appeared almost immediately, which is normal for a new device.

Once you’re up and running, the interface is a bit slow. Not catastrophically so, but noticeably sluggish, setting the tone for what follows.

Using The Humax Aura EZ

Turn on the Aura EZ and you’re greeted with the Freely home screen – recommendations from Freely channels, thumbnails of what’s live right now, and quick access to the broadcaster apps.

It’s the same Freely home screen you’d find on a Freely TV or on the Aero and Pleio.

The difference is what’s missing: on those other devices, you also have a second home screen that includes Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and more recommendations, all sitting alongside Freely. Here, it’s just Freely.

Freely On The Aura EZ

Press the Freely Guide button and you get Freely’s electronic programme guide – rows of channels, seven days forward and seven days back, and the ability to jump straight into catch-up content from the broadcaster apps.

It’s the same Freely EPG you’d find on any other Freely device, and it works the same way here.

Scroll back through the guide, spot something you missed earlier in the week, press OK – and you’re taken straight to it on iPlayer, ITVX, or whichever app carries it. That part works fine.

Channel switching takes 3-4 seconds on the Freely streaming channels, which is par for the course on most Freely devices – you get used to it (though the Aero managed to reduce this a bit to around 2 seconds).

Like every Freely device, the Aura EZ supports live pause – letting you freeze a channel mid-broadcast and pick up where you left off, for up to 15 minutes.

It only works on some Freely streaming channels rather than all of them, which is a Freely platform limitation rather than anything specific to the Aura EZ.

Worth knowing, though: if you’re watching an aerial-based DTT channel rather than a Freely streaming channel, live pause isn’t available at all (yes, despite this being a recording device).

When channels load, the picture quality on the streaming channels is quite good, and a meaningful step up from what you’d get on a dodgy aerial signal – some channels even come through in HD on Freely that aren’t in HD on a traditional aerial.

When they load, that is.

I lost count of how many times I hit an error code instead of a TV channel. Freely has a whole page dedicated to deciphering them – you type in the code, and it tells you what went wrong.

One code means there’s a reception problem. Fair enough – my aerial reception isn’t perfect, though it’s decent enough to watch most channels without issues on a standard Freeview box.

Another code I saw regularly is explained on Freely’s website as simply “there’s a problem” (no kidding) – followed by a long list of general troubleshooting steps. Not exactly illuminating.

The DTT Channels – And Where It Gets Confusing

Ignoring the errors and bugs for a moment, this is where the Aura EZ starts to show the strain of trying to be two things at once.

When you connect an aerial, the box receives DTT channels – Digital Terrestrial Television, which is essentially the same channels you’d get on a Freeview box, delivered the same way, just under a different name on Freely-certified devices.

The channel numbers are different from Freeview’s familiar numbering, so you’ll have to get used to new numbers and locations – and no, you can’t set up your own list of favourite channels (which was a beloved option in previous boxes).

The intention of blending aerial and broadband channels together, as far as I can tell, was to make all of this seamless – here are your channels, watch whatever you like, don’t worry about how they’re being delivered.

In practice, it creates a confusing mess that you’ll constantly bump into.

There’s no indication anywhere on screen whether you’re watching a streaming channel or an aerial one. You can sometimes guess – if the Freely pause feature is available, you’re on a streaming channel.

If the picture quality looks worse than expected, you might be on the aerial version.

And if the Freely streaming channels look noticeably better – which they often do – you might wonder why you’re not always getting that quality.

The BBC channels, for example, default to the aerial version when an aerial is connected. That means no Freely live pause, and picture quality that depends entirely on your reception.

However, on bad weather days when reception was choppy, the BBC STILL defaulted to aerial – but I couldn’t really watch anything on those channels.

ITV, on the other hand, has its streaming channels in the lower numbering, with the aerial version tucked away starting at channel 234 – which I only discovered by accident.

ITVX sign-in isn’t required for the aerial version of ITV, but it is for the streaming version – so if you don’t know where to look for the aerial channels, you’ll have to create an ITVX account (or log into one) before you can watch any of ITV’s channels.

It’s a different logic for different channels, with no clear pattern and no way to know what you’re going to get.

But wait, there’s more – the Freely EPG and the recording EPG use different channel numbering. The streaming channels and aerial channels sit in different parts of the guide. When something goes wrong – and things do go wrong – it’s genuinely difficult to know where to even start troubleshooting.

It’s worth noting that none of this channel numbering confusion is entirely Humax’s fault. Everyone TV’s decision to separate DTT and streaming channels, with different numbering for each, is a platform-level choice that any hybrid device would have to live with.

But the Aura EZ makes it more apparent than any other device on the market, simply because it’s the only one trying to bridge both worlds simultaneously.

There is, apparently, a nuclear option: you can delete the Freely app entirely, at which point the Aura EZ behaves more like a traditional Freeview recorder. Which does rather raise the question of why you paid £249 for a Freely device in the first place.

Recording

Press the Record button on the remote while watching a live show, and you might expect it to… start recording. It doesn’t. Instead, it opens the recording EPG – a separate, smaller guide that covers only the aerial-based DTT channels.

It’s a visually similar guide to the Freely EPG, but with different channel numbers and a completely separate set of content.

And here’s the frustrating part: pressing Record doesn’t even take you to the same channel you were just watching in the Freely EPG. It takes you to wherever you were last in the recording EPG, or back to the beginning of the list, depending on its mood.

So if you spot something you want to record while browsing the Freely guide, you then have to go and hunt for that same channel all over again in a different guide, with different numbers.

Once you’re in the recording EPG, you can scroll forward through the guide to find upcoming programmes and set recordings – individually or as a full series.

You can’t scroll backwards, which makes sense since you can’t record something that’s already aired. And at launch, there was no way to jump to a specific day on the recording EPG – but this was thankfully added in a software update.

What doesn’t make sense is that the guide information doesn’t appear to be stored locally – it feels like it downloads fresh from the aerial every time you open it.

The result is that you’ll regularly open the recording EPG to find large chunks of the schedule simply unpopulated. No programme information, no way to set recordings, just empty slots. Come back later and it might be there. Or it might not.

Series recording does work – when it works. I set up several series recordings during testing, only to find that future scheduled episodes had silently disappeared from the recording list with no explanation. Not cancelled, not failed – just gone.

Failed recordings are their own special frustration. Some show up in the recordings list marked as failed, with no indication of why – was it an aerial reception problem? A technical error? The box doesn’t say.

Others appeared to record successfully, played back fine once, then refused to play the next time I tried. And some worked perfectly. You never quite know what you’re going to get.

When recordings do play back properly, the experience is fine – smooth fast-forward, picture quality in line with what you’d expect from your aerial signal, and you can set padding before and after scheduled recordings to catch programmes that run over.

The fundamentals of recording are there. They’re just buried under enough reliability issues to make it hard to trust the device with anything you actually care about watching, let alone preserving.

One thing that might have made the recording experience more manageable is the companion mobile app – which Humax says would let you schedule and manage recordings remotely from your phone. It was listed as “coming soon” at launch. At the time of writing, it still isn’t available.

The Missing Apps

This one is straightforward: the Aura EZ has no third-party streaming apps. No Netflix, no Disney+, no Prime Video, no YouTube.

Beyond the Freely broadcaster apps – iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, 5, and a handful of others – there is nothing else, and there is no way to add anything.

This is intentional. Humax has been clear that the original Aura was their Android TV device for streaming and apps, while the Aura EZ is their Freely device for recording. Two separate products, two separate purposes.

That’s a fair enough distinction to draw – but it does mean that at £249, you’re buying a device that can’t replace your streaming stick.

If Netflix or Disney+ are part of your daily viewing, you’ll need another streaming device alongside the Aura EZ (could be your smart TV, of course).

Oh, and it also means that even though the box puts “Ultra High Definition” front and centre, the only place you can actually watch anything in 4K is BBC iPlayer, with its very limited choice of Ultra HD content.

The Bugs

We’ve touched on a few issues already, but it’s worth laying out the full picture – because taken together, it paints a concerning portrait of a device that wasn’t quite ready to launch.

The Search button on the remote does nothing. Not “opens a limited search” or “only searches certain content” – it literally does nothing at all.

When I asked Humax about this, they explained that the Search button is specifically designed for the DTV environment – meaning it only functions if you disable Freely entirely and use the box as a basic aerial recorder.

So it’s not technically broken – it’s just a button that’s useless for the vast majority of users.

Back to the bugs – Channels disappear mid-session for no apparent reason – not aerial reception issues, just gone – requiring a full restart to get them back. Menu options stop responding entirely, again requiring a restart.

On multiple occasions I was greeted with a completely blank screen on startup, with only the menu working, and had to restart the device before I could watch anything at all.

At one point, the box became convinced there was a recording in progress (for days) when there wasn’t – and refused to let me do a channel rescan as a result. Restarting didn’t fix it. The only thing that eventually cleared it was a software update.

Which brings us to the worst bug of all.

During my two weeks of testing, two software updates arrived. Generally, that’s a good sign of the company working on those early-day bugs.

But the second update, which arrived after two weeks of use when I had already built up a library of recordings, included an added surprise.

I was prompted to install it – and did. When the update completed, everything was gone. Every recording, every setting, every login, every channel scan – wiped. A full factory reset, with no warning, triggered by a routine software update.

There is no polite way to say this: that is really bad on a recording device. A software update should never delete your recordings without an explicit warning and confirmation.

When I asked Humax about this, they confirmed that “in some instances the update may initialise the internal hard drive, which could result in previously stored recordings being removed” – and that they are “reviewing both the update process and the associated customer communications.”

For a viewer who had been carefully building up a library of programmes over weeks – a box of this type’s entire reason for existing – losing everything without warning is a devastating failure. Hopefully, this won’t happen again in future updates.

How Does It Compare?

The Aura EZ’s two main rivals in the standalone Freely box market are the Manhattan Aero and the Netgem Pleio – and the comparison is not straightforward, because they’re not really trying to do the same thing.

Neither the Aero nor the Pleio can record. That’s the Aura EZ’s one clear advantage, and for viewers who consider recording non-negotiable, it’s a significant one.

But both devices offer something the Aura EZ doesn’t: third-party streaming apps.

The Pleio runs Android TV with access to the full Google Play Store – Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, NOW, and hundreds more.

The Aero runs TiVo OS, which covers the major services – Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, YouTube – with a few notable gaps like NOW and Apple TV+.

The Aura EZ has none of that. It only offers the broadcaster apps that are a part of Freely.

Both devices also offer a less confusing Freely experience than the Aura EZ. That’s not to say they’re perfect – as I covered in both reviews, the separation between the Freely side and the rest of the device creates its own friction.

But at least on those devices, the Freely side is purely streaming. No aerial DTT channels mixed in, no separate EPGs with different numbering, no silently defaulting to a weaker aerial signal without telling you.

The confusion on the Aero and Pleio is frustrating at times. On the Aura EZ, it’s a different level entirely – especially with the current bugs.

And at £70 for the Aero and £110 for the Pleio, both devices are considerably cheaper than the Aura EZ’s £249 asking price.

Bottom Line – Is The Humax Aura EZ Worth It?

The idea behind the Aura EZ is sound. There’s a real gap in the market for a device that bridges Freely’s streaming platform with traditional recording – and for viewers who aren’t ready to give up recording but want to future-proof their setup, a hybrid box makes some sense on paper.

The problem is that this isn’t that device. Not yet, anyway.

The Freely and over-the-air implementation is confusing in ways that will frustrate even patient viewers. The recording is unreliable in ways that matter – failed recordings, disappearing schedules, playback that works one day and not the next.

The bugs are frequent enough and severe enough to make the device genuinely difficult to live with day to day. And a software update that silently wipes your entire recording library is not something that should happen on any device, at any price.

If you record a lot and want Freely support, you might be tempted to wait for software updates to iron things out. Humax has a loyal fanbase for good reason – there are people still happily using their Humax boxes from 15 years ago, and the brand has earned genuine goodwill over the years.

Software updates have already been released for the Aura EZ, suggesting Humax is actively working on it – so it may very well get better in the future.

But it’s also worth remembering what happened with the original Aura. A handful of meaningful updates arrived in the first year, and then – largely silence.

A significant overhaul was hinted at for years (for the Aura) and never materialised. Whether the Aura EZ gets the sustained support it clearly needs is still an open question.

So yes, the Aura EZ is the only standalone Freely device that records. But right now, that’s both its biggest selling point and the most generous thing you can say about it.

Note: The Aura EZ was supplied by the manufacturer for this review. As always, this did not influence my unbiased opinion of the product.