Changing the Way I Watch TV

A few weeks ago I purchased a PVR. PVR stands for Personal Video Recorder – see more info here. I’ve been following these machines for about six months now because we were using a VCR on the kids TV for recording and it was a real pain to record stuff and then I had to watch it on the kids 51cm instead of the 68cm TV in the lounge. I had a few options for our TV recording including a DVD recorder but I settled for a twin digital tuner PVR with a hard drive. There are a few on the market to choose from but I settled for the Mediastar 920PVR. It was not a company I had heard of before but on the recommendation of many on the DTV forum I took the plunge and haggled Harvey Norman down from the RRP of $699- and got it for $550-.
I must say that it has changed the way I watch TV. The digital tuners mean that the picture quality is perfect (DVD quality). It can chase play, which means you can pause live TV (like when you're interrupted by the kids when they should be in bed)and then continue watching in delay (catching up by fast forwarding through the ads). This means that now we often start watching a show 15 minutes after it starts and then skip through all the ads and by the time the hour is over you’ve caught back up to real time.
The Mediastar is a true twin tuner which means you can record one channel and watch another live at the same time or you can record two channels at once and watch a recorded show at the same time. The Digital tuner gives acces to ABC2 and SBS2 and these are actually broadcast in the same ‘channel’ so you could record ABC, ABC2, SBS, and SBS2 at the same time while watching a recorded show.
Because it has a Hard Drive you can also store MP3s on it and play them through the TV (or, in my case, the home theatre system connected to the PVR).
So, while Annette still says it was an unnecessary purchase she has to admit that it is a great way to watch TV. It is now easier for TV to be our slave rather than our master.