PVR tips and tricks revealed

This new breed of recorders has certain things in common; first, they all record the digital broadcast directly to the hard drive, giving you the same quality on playback as on live broadcasting – unlike Tivo, for example, which digitises an analogue video input.

They also rely on broadcast programme data for their built-in Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). This means that – with the exception of Sky+ – there’s no real metadata; the extra information that tells you a programme is episode six of series three, or that it stars Harrison Ford.

With Sky+ and Tivo subscriptions, it’s really the metadata you’re paying for; that’s what allows a box to record every episode of a series, for example, no matter if one week’s show is two hours late because of the football.

Without this, and an unmodified box, you’re restricted to basic repeating timers, or having to check the EPG manually to make sure you don’t miss a changed timeslot.

Storage space

While the latest PVRs may be sold as consumer electronics items, they’re not just something you plug in and leave under the TV. Built around a hard drive, one of the most obvious things you can do is to upgrade the amount of storage – if you’re frustrated by a mere 40 hours or so of disk space, just whip out and replace the hard drive.

On most units, as you can see in our workshop, it’s a simple matter of changing the drive and picking the Format option from the menus; the system software is stored in flash memory, so you don’t need to worry about copying anything from the old drive.

>> Follow our workshop on How to Upgrade you Sky+ PVR

It’s important, though, to make sure that you pick a drive with similar power consumption – there may not be as much spare capacity on a PVR’s power supply as a PC’s, and heat can be an issue too.

If lack of storage space is an issue, upgrading the hard drive isn’t the only way to do it; some PVRs – such as Humax’s integrated digital LCD TV with PVR, have a USB socket and act as USB hosts; that means you can plug an external hard drive into them, and copy programmes from the internal drive to the external one. Plug the drive into your PC, and you’ll have access to the video files.

That, of course, is a long way round. And – perhaps surprisingly, given the worries about copying music digitally – many PVRs now come with ways to link them directly to your computer.