Personal Note: For some reason I feel this strong rant to talk about home entertainment devices. So, over the next few days I am going to state my opinions of these technologies. If you find this subject boring, I have a great deal of different topics planned for the future...

Personal Video Recorders

I have to admit I personally love the PVR (Personal Video Recorders) technology, it has changed the way I watch TV. I can watch my favorite TV programs when I want too, and I don't have to be subject to the television programming schedules.

The technology to record and playback TV programming has been available since the 70's with invention of the VCR, but it still doesn't match the experience of a PVR. The features I love most about PVRs is that you can pause, rewind, stop live TV, plus you can skip through commercials on any of your recorded programming. You can also search for new programming to record.

So, If you don't have a PVR go out and buy one now! Once you start using one of these devices you will wonder how you lived without it.

There are a few things that you need to know before you go out and buy a PVR.
- The most popular PVR makers are Tivo and ReplayTV
- If you get your TV reception from analog cable or over the air TV transmissions. Then you should be in pretty good shape to use one of these devices out of the box.
- If get your TV programming from a digital cable system or satellite provider then things get more complicated.

If you have DishNet as your satellite provider then you have to use their proprietary PVR technology. If you have DirecTV as your satellite provider then you can get their PVR with Tivo technology. As far as digital cable is concerned contact your cable provider.

As much as I love the PVR, this technology also has it short comings. Having used by current PVR system for more then a year now, and having seen what is available; I see the biggest problems with this technology is:

- You can't offload content to a removable media such a CD or DVD.
- Doesn't support HDTV programming, yet! (this should be coming soon, hopefully before 2004)
- Not enough disk storage space to hold all the programming. Most PVRs come with 40 or 80 hours of recording time. I sounds like a lot time, but it is not if you're trying to save your favorite shows to watch at a later.

While I believe that the future of PVRs is bright. I also believe it can be sum up in one word 'convergence'. The next generation of these devices needs to include:

- Support the ability to save recorded content to a DVD disk.
- The ability play DVDs.
- Network-enabled with the ability play/display content (music, pictures or video) off your computer.
- Support larger hard drives.

Personally I admit I am a big fan of the Tivo technology because of the amazing range of enhancements products that are available for it. They range from open source software, to 3rd party hardware modifications. For more information about these product see: DealDatabase

Privacy Note: Tivo tracks all the information about your viewing habits, the arrogates the data and sells it movie and television companies.

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