There are lots of kind of poor man's Tivos (hard-disk recorder with DVD burner, €300-€600 range) available here (Croatia) recently, form the likes of Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Sony... Does anyone have any experience with them, recommendation, caveats..?

We've got a Pioneer 510H here at work that we bought for transfering things to DVD. For that, it works perfectly. It's not however, a PVR. You have to manually reccord anything you want to record, and the playback interface is horrible. It's a great VCR replacement, but a horrible replaytv/tivo replacement.

YMMV, but if someone sells something with a guide service and a halfway decent interface you'd be doing much better to buy that.

Matthew

No, but I wouldn't bother with anything that you can't get guide data for. A digital VCR is a waste of money without the other features (season passes, especially)

Have you looked into building a MythTV box? Is there guide data available in your area for that?

As you guessed, guys, the guide data is the problem. One of the vendors' (Pioneer?) machines do have a sticker advertising access to a guide service I never heard of, but I am almost sure it is not available here (I will check, obviously). Other than that, there is a free web site that scrapes various channel's sites and presents what is found in a half-decent format, sends e-mail alerts etc, but I am almost sure it won't work with any of those boxes.

This, of course, makes Myth (or anything else hackable or programmable) an attractive option (since I could, conceivably, rig it to "read" e-mails and program itself accordingly). However, I don't think I have patience to build my own box at the moment...

I agree that thing like this is a little more than a VCR replacement, but even replacing a roomful of tapes with a disk and/or a stack of DVDs (with better image quality) is some improvement. So, I would settle for something I have to program myself, but I would like to know few details:

• Does it play all the stuff most stand-alone DVD players do (DviX, mp3, jpg...)
• Does it interface to a PC in some way, and if so, what functionality it offers
• What is playback functionality like
• What kinds of DVD archives it produces
• etc - you see what I mean

Thanks!

Commenting only on the Pioneer we've got here at work, which is a year or two old, but was top of the line at the time.

Quote:
Does it play all the stuff most stand-alone DVD players do (DviX, mp3, jpg...)

Nope, not at all as far as I'm aware.

Quote:
Does it interface to a PC in some way, and if so, what functionality it offers

Nope, not at all. It's got firewire input/output for video, so you could reccord stuff to/from your PC over that.

Quote:
What is playback functionality like

Poor. Finding what you want is a
pain, retitiling anything requires the onscreen keyboard. Once you've selected the show, it's easy to ff/rwd and play and pause.

Quote:
What kinds of DVD archives it produces

Very playable ones. Since it's got a hard drive, you (generally) reccord onto the hard drive and are then able to burn things onto discs later if you want to. We've never had any problems with unplayable DVDs.

With a replaytv, I always watch tv through the replay. With this thing, I could set it to reccord my favorite shows, but I'd never use it to just watch tv through. Go for the Myth box if you think you can get guide data for it.

Matthew

I did some searching around some of the MythTV resources. I couldn't find a whole lot about setting it up to get a program guide in Croatia, but I did find one person on the mailing list who has done it, here.

And of course the nice thing about MythTV is the answer to all your questions of whether it can do these things is "Yes, it can."

Ah, thanks, I wasn't aware of Phazer's XML export capability!

Now, am I too lazy to roll my own MythTV? It could be fun....

I got one of those endless TigerDirect rags in the mail today and saw this system and thought it might make a good myth box if you can get drivers for it. It's pretty pricey though.

EDIT: Doesn't appear at first glance that the included Avermedia A169 is supported with MythTV

Give it a go, with a DVB card I can get an existing linux box running MythTV in about half an hour (excluding compile time). Listings are even easier now Myth supports EIT, I get an 8 day EPG over the air thanks to freeview.