In a moment of weakness I went and bought the above named gizmo yesterday. And within 24 hrs it's become one of those "How the hell did I live without it" appliances.
In a nutshell a Personal Video recorder (PVR) is a decendent of the TiVo boxes. Basically it's a Freeview box with a hard drive. The unit allows you to record TV programs broadcast to the Freeview bit onto the hard drive. There are two tuners so for the first time you can watch one program while recording another, or record two programs at the same time. While that was always possible on the old analogue system through a normal VHS recorder, it's not something that has been easy or indeed possible through a Freeview box.
A second neat feature is the abilty to pause live TV. As long as you have had the Freeview box swiched on and tuned to a specific channel for a while, you can pause the program for upto 30 minutes. So if you're watching a movie and the phone rings, the pizza's arrive or you need to go to the bog, simply pause the program and when you get back hit play and off you go. You can fast rewind or forward as well should you want to rewatch a bit of Tv such as a penalty or a dodgy foul etc etc.
The DigiFusion has a 40gig HDD which gives between 10-20 hours of recording depending on the compression (and therefore picture quality) selected. There is also a 7 day downloaded program guide that allows you to set the timer to record any program upto seven days in advance by simply selecting it from the guide. Manual recordings can be made weeks or months ahead if you know the program start and end times. You can dump recordings off the unit onto either tape or DVD if you want permanent copies.
The HDD could be upgraded should you want although the warranty would be void and future models will have bigger harddrives and a slot for a TOP-Up TV card.
I've got the DigiFusion (£170) although Thompson do a very simlar unit. Panasonic are bringing out a £250 unit with an 80 gig HDD and Humax do a £130 one but it only has one tuner so you can't watch BBC1 and record ITV.
In only one night I've fallen in love with the thing. Might make a nice if expensive present. Google will show you the way :)
I put a freeview capable card into my computer (Avermedia DVB-T) which pretty much sets my computer up as a PVR. The software that comes with it is a little buggy and the whole things smacks a bit of doing things cheaply in China, but it does work and when I have a decent arial (as with all freeview boxes) the picture etc is great. Main gripe with the PVR functoinality is the video codec it uses doesn't seem to be a standard one and I can't see how to change it.
Don't suppose anyone out there knows of a good opensource/freeware TV and PVR style software project/package do they? :rolleyes: (sorry for semi-thread hijak :devil: )