Another PVR

[ffutures]

My old PVR has let me down yet again, freezing during most of Doctor Who for no readily apparent reason. Fortunately I saw it on another TV anyway. Since it's well out of warranty I decided to get another - this time I thought I'd live dangerously and try Maplin's cheapo DIY offer, a twin-tuner box made by Nikkai (who?) and currently priced at £39.99 in their sale. The reason why it's so cheap is that there's no hard disk included - you add your own IDE drive, which means that if you want to you can shove something silly in there like a 300gb, or swap out drives and store hundreds of hours.

To start off I've shoved in a spare 20gb drive, which seems to be working fine; eventually I'll fit something bigger. Installation is dead easy - take off a plastic panel, plug in the drive cables, and slide the cover back on - no tools needed. Setup is also pretty easy and tuning is incredibly fast compared to previous freeview receivers I've used. So far the only downside I've noticed is that the programme guide colours are HORRIBLE and can't be changed. Reception is good, and everything seems to work the way it should.

I'll post more when I've tried recording a few things - so far it's looking good.

Later Rough estimate of capacity based on a short recording is about 16 hours on a 20gb hard disk.

A couple of other negative points - you get a red dot on the screen when you're recording. It doesn't go away. And there are no outputs for sound other than a digital phono socket - I had to use an adaptor to tap sound from the SCART lead for my amp since I'm using the digital phono on that for my DVD player.

Comments

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

Ouch, that red dot has to be annoying. Kind of like an old artifact some VCRs had during recording huh? I've never done anything to the DVR I got with my DishNetwork subscription, although sometimes I'm tempted when I get lazy and my 100 hours of recording time fills up :)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's a bit of a distraction for the first couple of minutes, but it doesn't flash so it isn't that bad. After a few minutes I didn't really notice.