PVR tips and tricks revealed

You can use personal video recorders for more than just recording TV programmes

For some people, the flexibility of a PC-based entertainment system, such as Microsoft XP Media Center can’t be beaten.

But what if you don’t want a PC in your living room? You want something that’s designed from first principles to be a reliable TV recording device?

Well, personal video recorders (PVRs) aren’t new – Tivo has been around for years – but the latest models are cheaper than ever and work directly with today’s digital satellite and terrestrial broadcasts.

And if you thought a PVR simply meant a Sky+ box and an accompanying monthly subscription, think again.

Some of the latest PVRs are potentially much more than a closed box of consumer electronics. You can easily add larger hard drives for more storage, transfer mp3s from your PC for playback in the living room, and even develop your own software to run on them to change the look and feel of the interface, or link them to the rest of your home network.

When you consider that you can do all that for less than £300, they start to look like an interesting alternative to a full-blown media centre PC.

We’re going to take a look at what sort of PVRs are available in the UK, how computer-friendly they are and how easily you can enhance and tweak them, from upgrading hard drives, to networking and even remotely setting TV recordings via your mobile phone.

For many people in the UK, a PVR means Sky+, a box designed to work with BSkyB’s satellite service Sky, and which allows you to record two channels at the same time, directly onto a hard drive.

For some, Tivo – no longer sold new in the UK – is the only ‘true’ PVR, with its intelligent searching and ability to recommend programmes it thinks you might like.
Over the past couple of years, however, the PVR market has changed substantially, with the increasing popularity of Freeview, the digital terrestrial TV service.

There are now more and more PVRs that work with Freeview, ranging from £100 models that can only record the thing you’re tuned to – in effect, simple digital video recorders – to sophisticated twin-tuner models that can let you record two things while viewing a third, with the ability to search for programmes by genre, play back music files and link up to a PC.

And there are satellite options too – less popular in the UK, where to most people satellite and Sky are synonymous – which will let you receive free-to-air satellite broadcasts.

This new breed of recorders has certain things in common; first, they all record the digital broadcast directly to the hard drive, giving you the same quality on playback as on live broadcasting – unlike Tivo, for example, which digitises an analogue video input.

They also rely on broadcast programme data for their built-in Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). This means that – with the exception of Sky+ – there’s no real metadata; the extra information that tells you a programme is episode six of series three, or that it stars Harrison Ford.

With Sky+ and Tivo subscriptions, it’s really the metadata you’re paying for; that’s what allows a box to record every episode of a series, for example, no matter if one week’s show is two hours late because of the football.

Without this, and an unmodified box, you’re restricted to basic repeating timers, or having to check the EPG manually to make sure you don’t miss a changed timeslot.

Storage space

While the latest PVRs may be sold as consumer electronics items, they’re not just something you plug in and leave under the TV. Built around a hard drive, one of the most obvious things you can do is to upgrade the amount of storage – if you’re frustrated by a mere 40 hours or so of disk space, just whip out and replace the hard drive.

On most units, as you can see in our workshop, it’s a simple matter of changing the drive and picking the Format option from the menus; the system software is stored in flash memory, so you don’t need to worry about copying anything from the old drive.

>> Follow our workshop on How to Upgrade you Sky+ PVR

It’s important, though, to make sure that you pick a drive with similar power consumption – there may not be as much spare capacity on a PVR’s power supply as a PC’s, and heat can be an issue too.

If lack of storage space is an issue, upgrading the hard drive isn’t the only way to do it; some PVRs – such as Humax’s integrated digital LCD TV with PVR, have a USB socket and act as USB hosts; that means you can plug an external hard drive into them, and copy programmes from the internal drive to the external one. Plug the drive into your PC, and you’ll have access to the video files.

That, of course, is a long way round. And – perhaps surprisingly, given the worries about copying music digitally – many PVRs now come with ways to link them directly to your computer.

Programme transfer

Tivo, of course, has long had the option of a network card on newer US models, but UK users have had to fit one themselves. For those looking to buy new equipment, the Dreambox satellite PVRs have an Ethernet connection, allowing you to link them directly to your home network and offload programmes, which you can then convert for DVD authoring.

If you’re thinking of doing that with Sky Movies, though, think again; while satellite PVRs have slots for subscription modules, there’s no such module available for channels carried by Sky; if you want to record its channels digitally, you need its box.

Look out, though, for Sky's free satellite services from the BBC on Freesat, which will be broadly equivalent to Freeview, give or take a few channels.

The Dreambox isn’t the only way to access material from such channels via your computer; there are other satellite PVRs, notably from Humax and Topfield, that offer USB connectors for transfer of files to and from your PC.

As well as transferring recordings to the PC when the PVR’s disk is almost full, you can copy mp3s in the other direction, to play back through your TV or home cinema system.

For an increasing number of people, digital terrestrial television – the DVB-T Freeview service – is becoming the best way to get a PVR, without having to pay monthly fees.

With the likes of Aldi selling Freeview PVR boxes for under £100, replacing your video recorder and getting extra channels into the bargain is a great way to go digital. But don’t expect to find sophisticated features on the cheapest models.

When it comes to linking up to your PC, there are really two main products on the market right now – the Humax 9200T and the Topfield TF5800.

Both have twin tuners, allowing you to record two channels simultaneously, and even watch a third in some circumstances. They have a Common Interface slot, allowing upgrades to work with pay television, such as Top Up TV and they both have a USB port and software to link them to your PC for transferring files back and forth.

Both, then, allow you to copy recorded programmes to your PC and convert them to DVD – provided you’re prepared to spend the time; though both boxes boast USB2 ports, the fastest transfer speed you’re likely to see is around three times real time, or 20 minutes to copy a one-hour programme to your PC.

For faster transfers, Topfield users can pop the hard drive in their PC and use a program called TopFHDRW to read the hard drive directly. A similar tool, called Syphon, can read the hard drive format used by some Thomson and Fusion PVRs, thus overcoming their lack of a USB port – though obviously removing the hard drive to copy files is going to invalidate your warranty and can be fiddly.

Bear in mind that the exemptions from copyright in the UK do not cover making an archive of programmes for repeated viewing; just as is the case with video recording, all you’re legally allowed to do is timeshift, that is, to record content for watching at a more convenient time.

DVD creation

If you want to create a DVD from a programme recording, perhaps to watch in a more convenient place, you’ll find that both Humax and Topfield boxes – together with their satellite counterparts and the output from tools such as Syphon – give you an mpeg Transport Stream; that’s slightly different to the Program Streams used on DVDs, but a wide range of tools can convert them.

One of the most flexible is a Java application called Project X, which will also process the header that Topfield PVRs put at the start of the video file.

Then, all you need to do is load the mpeg file into a DVD creation tool such as those from Cyberlink, Nero or Roxio on the PC, or Toast on the Mac, and you can burn a disc without having to re-encode the programme.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also edit it, to chop out adverts, or even extract the subtitles from the broadcast video and convert them for DVD, but be warned – when you start doing more complicated things like that, you can spend hours getting the right results, and making sure sound and vision stay synchronised.
When you consider the low bit rates on many Freeview channels, the lack of surround sound, and the time you’d have to spend to create a DVD with subtitles, it may just be easier to bite the bullet and buy the retail DVD boxed set.

In fact, as well as converting a stream to a format suitable for using in DVD authoring tools, Project X works the other way round – so you could take your wedding DVD, convert it to a Transport Stream and upload the resulting file to your PVR, to have accessible whenever you want.

Going further

While both the Humax and Topfield models allow file transfer and playback of mp3s – they’re both built on a very similar hardware platform, NEC’s EMMA2 – for those who want to get a little more into tweaks, hacks and enhancements, there’s little doubt that, short of going for a full media centre computer, whether Windows or Linux based, the Topfield PVRs are currently the most flexible.

That’s because, uniquely for consumer electronics products like this, they’re designed to allow additional software to be run on them; unlike devices such as the Linksys NSLU2 (see missing link box), you don’t have to replace the firmware – there’s a built-in mechanism to launch additional applications, a published API for programmers, and an open-source tool chain based on the GCC compiler, so you can write your own code to run on the box.

And – perhaps partly because of that – the box has attracted attention from non-Windows users, with the result that there are tools such as mpeg Streamclip for the Mac and Puppy for Linux/Unix systems, to provide the same file transfer features that the manufacturer supports under Windows.

Running Taps

Topfield’s system for add-ons is called Taps – Topfield Applications.

A Tap typically works like the old TSR (terminate and stay-resident) applications on a Dos PC; it can be started manually or automatically by putting it in the ProgramFiles/Auto Start folder on the PVR, and then it receives notification of events – channel changes, key presses on the remote, and so on – until it sees an event that it’s programmed to handle.

That’s typically a press of a remote key, which signals the Tap to do its stuff; before you get too carried away, the API is somewhat limited and since the core operating system isn’t built in Linux, you’re a little limited – though some of the more enterprising coders have found ways to hook directly into the firmware, changing the front panel display, for example.

The Topfield API provides for control of playback, recordings, management of timers and the EPG, on-screen displays, file functions, and communication via USB and serial ports.

It may not sound a lot, but even within those constraints, it’s amazing what some programmers have achieved – there are even versions of Sudoku, Doom and Lords of Midnight that run on the box.

But what of enhancing the PVR itself? Not happy with the look of the built-in timer list, or the fact that it takes several key presses to reach it?

Load up the UK Timers Tap, for one-button access to a much easier to use, more colourful version – which can also import a list of recordings to create from the Digiguide desktop TV scheduling application.

Or if you find the built-in EPG frustrating, there’s a wide range of alternatives, giving you a Sky+ style grid view, or a more compact view with more channels shown.

And since some Freeview broadcasters seem to find it hard to maintain a reliable EPG, tools such as the popular Jag’s EPG can be configured to save received data to the hard drive.

Even more useful, it can search the data too, and automatically set recordings – so even if Bleak House appears at a different time each day it’s broadcast, you’ll still be sure of catching it, and you can miss out the repeats too.

And while the Topfield’s built-in mp3 playback is adequate, it’s not a patch on the mp3 jukebox Tap, that can display album artwork and make use of the information tags in your music files.

Reaching out

These, of course, are mostly just enhancements to a box that sits under your TV. But the USB connection makes things much more flexible; potentially, you could use the serial port to link your Topfield to a home automation system, for example, sending messages to turn lights on and off with the TV remote.

Other users have experimented with on-screen notifications of email received on their PC. And the USB connection can be a source of EPG material too; the Radio Times website makes its data freely available for personal use, and it’s widely used by the XMLTV project, providing listings for lots of open-source PVR projects too.

It’s also key to some of the add-ons for the Topfield, such as Mystuff Extended info, which uses Radio Times data to replace the broadcast Freeview listings, enabling tricks like searching by genre, or displaying ratings for films – as well as more detailed episode information.

There’s even a Mac application, called MacTF-EPG that will let you search the lis tings on your desktop, creating timers which can then be transferred to the PVR to schedule recording.

With a little work, in fact, you can even set recordings remotely; with three different Taps able to read a file and create timers from commands in it, all you need to do is create a file via a web interface and copy it to your PVR.

So, while media centre PCs get most of the attention, take a look at the current crop of PVRs – you may be surprised just how much you can make some of them do.

The missing link: how to network your PVR

While domestic PVRs such as the Humax and Topfield models have USB ports, they don’t come with Ethernet – though expect to see a wireless Topfield model for UK digital terrestrial TV late in 2006, which may even include a built-in web server.

In the meantime though, how do you network a box that has no network connection?

The answer lies in small devices such as the Linksys NSLU2 – affectionately known as a Slug – designed to share USB hard drives over a network, or an increasing number of wireless routers that have USB built in too.

Flashing the firmware on these devices with alternatives such as Unslung or OpenWRT turns them into general-purpose Linux boxes with network and USB connectivity, onto which you can install tools to communicate with your PVR via USB.

Some, such as Puppy, simply provide a command-line tool to copy files to and fro, while others let you present the PVR’s disk to the rest of your Lan as an FTP server.

At the moment, the only tools for models we’ve looked at here are aimed at the Topfield, but it probably won’t be long before enterprising coders work out the USB commands for the Humax models.

It’s not just file access, either – many of the tools we’ve talked about, such as EPG harvesters, can run on these small Linux devices.

With PHP and Perl, you can script backups of programmes onto your PC, and you can even run media server apps such as Twonkyvision on them, so with a little scripting, they could make selected content from your PVR available to streaming media players around the home.