Experience with Tivo-like devices

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!

Quote:
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...

Well, I wouldn't certainly call setting up MythTV easy, and it's not particularly cheap, but getting the basic functionality out of it is downright trivial if you choose your hardware well and use Knoppmyth. If you buy a Hauppauge 250 or 350 tuner card, a network card that works with Linux, and pretty much any decent motherboard and chip, setting up the software to watch and record live Tv and have the program guide (in the United States anyway) can be done in probably 20 minutes or so, with little Linux knowledge required. And a lot of that is waiting for the HD to format and such. I know you can get guide info for it for just about anywhere in the world, but I don't know how hard it is to setup.

It's all the other stuff that takes the time, like getting the remote working or using tuner cards other than those two I listed or interfacing to my windows box or getting Internet radio on it or the billions of other things this thing can do. It doesn't help that my Linux knowledge is a bit limited.