Our video cassette recorder (VCR) stopped working this week. Not so long ago, this would have meant a trip to the repair shop, a £35+ charge and a few days’ wait. Now the repair shops have all gone from the high street, and a VCR with a fault is just a box to be disposed of. I still find that difficult, and I have to overcome the instinct to make do and mend which has been passed down through countless generations of my family. So I still haven’t quite got rid of the dead VCR, and I am considering eBaying the remote control – which would salve my conscience whether or not someone bid on it.
In the meantime, I have discovered the world of the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) which is to the VCR what the mobile phone is to the quill pen. OK I exaggerate, but it’s such a radically different way of using television that it’s difficult not to use such hyperbole.
If you don’t know what I’m enthusing about, then imagine doing a ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ exercise about television. You know – the sort of free thinking fantasy where you imagine a future world in which everybody wears hover trousers and robots do all the household chores. My friends and I have predicted one or two inventions that way over the years in drunken late-night conversations. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the lights turned on automatically when you entered a room?’ and ‘Wouldn’t it be great if your favourite music was all stored in a chip implanted in your brain?’ and ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could send a line of text down the phone which could be viewed at the other end on a calculator-like display?’ are three fantasies I remember from the 1970′s which have (more-or-less) come true.
Well, wouldn’t it be great if you could record Freeview TV and radio programmes without tapes, pause and rewind live TV, record two programmes simultaneously whilst watching a third, search for a programme by name or by genre and then schedule a recording with one press of a button? If I told you that all this and much more was available now in one box costing less than £190 you would be forgiven for thinking I was dreaming of hover-trouser times to come.
Our sleek, black Humax PVR-9200TB has replaced both the VCR and the Freeview box, and dozens of videocassettes too. I bought it online from CWDigital Ltd and was delighted with the plug ‘n’ play setup, and the intuitive controls. But what is laugh-out-loud amazing is the way you can control live television almost as if it were a recording. I knew that you could start watching a programme while it’s still being recorded (chase play), but I hadn’t quite got the concept of being able to pause, rewind and fast forward a programme which you haven’t set to record. This blurs the distinction between live and recorded TV. One remote controls both, and most features are available with both. For example, if you record ‘Coronation Street’ and later, when you are watching, you decide you would like to see the subtitles, you can switch them on!
Let’s say you are watching a live football match, and you want to replay a tackle. A press of one button instantly replays the last 15 seconds. Then the phone rings, so you press pause and take the call. Later, the commercials come on, so you press another button to skip forward.
Get it? The PVR is always temporarily recording live TV just in case you want to do these things. It has a 160 Gb hard drive so there’s plenty of room for this ‘buffer’ plus all the programmes you permanently record. There’s also a space allocation for mp3 music tracks and jpg photos which you can transfer from your PC via a USB cable. If you want to transfer a TV or radio programme to the PC and burn it to DVD you use the same connection.
Because it’s got twin Freeview tuners you can record two programmes and play back a third all at the same time. You can even view a third channel live if it’s in the same multiplex as either of the programmes you are currently recording. A bit technical, this. All the TV and radio channels are broadcast in six bundles called multiplexes. If you are recording BBC One (which is in Multiplex 1) and Channel Five (which is in Multiplex A) you could watch, say, BBC Two or BBC News 24 (which are in Multiplex 1) or watch five US or listen to MOJO radio (which are in Multiplex A) but you couldn’t watch More 4 because that’s in Multiplex 2.
Sounds a bit complicated, but what’s so delightful about the Humax is that they have developed a very sophisticated product which is easy to use. After decades of struggling to set up and use VCRs, this machine is a breeze. For those wanting to get more out of their Humax, there’s even an enthusiasts’ website:
http://www.hummy.org.uk/invison/
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