What I want from a PVR

Before we moved house, we lived in a Freeview area. I’d bought a great cheap Humax box which acted as a Freeview box with hard disk recorder. It was great, no messing around with videos, automatic channel change, timeslip function, the works.

Then we moved…

Now I live in a Telewest area, so we use that instead, a much cheaper option than upgrading the TV aerial to digital etc. And we use the cable for phone, and I use the Internet option for work. All round a good cable solution.

Except I really miss my nice Humax box (now donated to my brother…) Now I could use my video recorder, but that has these problems:

  * You have to use tapes. Once you get used to the convenience of recording to disk, you never want to go back to recording onto tapes which you then need to label, keep track off (now where was that half-hour program I recorded 3 weeks ago?)
  * You have set two machines not one each time you want to record a show. Thanks to the advances of modern technology, your Telewest box won't automatically change channel when your VCR wants to record, so you can only record what the Telewest box is set to. So you must set the Telewest box to switch channel at the right time, and the VCR to record at the right time. Way too much hassle
  * No timeslip.

So given that I can’t find one to buy, I’m going to build one. Watch this space to see how…