I’ve been meaning for ages to mention the Digilogic PVR that I got from Argos a while back – the FVRT95 (incidentally it’s identical to the T90, but that’s Argos code).
For under £100 you’ve got an 80 GB single-tuner PVR which’ll record around 40 hours of television. As it came supplied it could timer record programmes via either manual timings, or, more likely, the 7 day guide. You could also pause live TV in a Sky+ like ability.
All very well, and I loved it. But there were a few issues. There were only 8 recording slots for you to program – somewhat less than you might want if you go away for a week or two. Deleting programmes sometimes left the machine in a crashed state, and it’d then take a while to identify all the true free space it had.
Well this weekend saw a significant firmware upgrade. Now the 8 slots have been replaced by 32 – even I’m unlikely to use that many (apart from anything else, I’ll have filled the disk). Rewinding live TV’s been introduced (something Sky+ has always had). What that means is that if you’ve been watching a programming, and suddenly want to double check what just happened, you can rewind, irrespective of whether you were recording the programme. This functionality also means that as long as you were watching from the start, you can decide you want to keep a recording of the programme you’re watching. Finally, the much needed skip function is in place. By default it’s 3 minutes. So you’re watching a recorded programme from commercial TV. An ad break comes up, and you immediately skip forward 3 minutes and continue with your programmes. Advertisers love this sort of thing.
In truth, this doesn’t have any functionality that Sky+ doesn’t already have – indeed the series-link button is still missing (Record every episode of The Line of Beauty in one button push). Also Sky has recently started having green button prompts during trails to encourage you to set timers for those shows. It also needs a second tuner – there is a model available but it hasn’t got the new firmware.
But this comes in the week that Freeview’s announced the forthcoming Freeview Playback as a “brand” name for Freeview PVRs, which’ll no doubt include some generic functionality that all devices must include.
Now what I’d really like now is some kind of PC link-up with my device so that I can grab the raw mpeg2 recordings and burn them onto DVD. There are various people working on such things, but not with my particular firmware, and the machines require you to open them up and remove the hard-disk, before plugging it into another PC (or an external hard-disk case). I’d like the next generation of boxes to either have a USB connection or even a CAT-5 connector. That way I can quickly and efficiently burn DVDs from my recordings – perhaps editing them first.
In the meantime, if you’ve got a few quid in your pocket and are happy with Freeview, then I can think of very little reason not to jump at getting one of these.