Friday, September 01, 2006

Recording TV

This is about my 4th post in the last hour, suppose I didn't do any yesterday.

I have been looking into recording TV, I mean Sky+, Freeview PVR and Windows Media Center. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them. Sky+ is great but it costs £99 for the box, £60 for installation and working out the minimum amount you would have to pay a year (12 months contract) it will cost £294, thats a total of £453.

The Freeview PVR is a lot cheaper but from reading the reviews they are rubbish and constantly crash and have poor interfaces. You only get the basic channels as well. This would be around about £150 for a cheap one.

The final option is a Media Center PC, this in some ways appeals to me the most. Probably because I am some sort of computer geek. The cheapest ready built PC I can see is just under £500 and only has a single tuner. Yet I am fairly certain I could build my own for a hell of a lot less if I didn't put top spec components in. Just enough to do the job. The advantages of the Media Center PC are you have a fully working PC that you could do anything you could on a normal PC. A major advantage is I could watch the shows that it records on any other computer in the house or on my Xbox. You can also write the recorded shows to DVD if needed. There is also no ongoing costs for subscription like there is for Sky+.

So the cheapest is a Freeview PVR but poor quality, the most expensive including ongoing costs and setup is Sky and the other option is a Media Center PC which has a very variable price but probably about £300 spiraling upwards.

I still need some money before I could get any of these though at the moment.

I'm gonna give up spell checking my blog at all, it keeps adding weird symbols and messing words up even more than I do in the first place.

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