PVR UK: PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and DVR (Digital Video Recorder) news, reviews and how-tos for the UK (including Sky plus, TiVo, MythTV and Freeview)

Sky HD pre-ordering now available

Head on over to the Sky HD pre-order site and plonk down a £30 deposit (refundable) to get your name on the list.

Sky by Broadband worries

PC Doctor has an article about Sky's Broadband service (download movies and Sky Sports headlines to your PC) that not only finds it slow to download material, but that it installs a peer-to-peer file-sharing service (Kontiki) that carries on running and using your bandwidth after the main Sky application is shutdown. Kontiki also sends back encrypted data about your PC. On uninstalling Sky by Broadband, Kontiki is left installed and running on your PC. If you want to know how to uninstall Kontiki, take a look at the PC Doctor article Serious issues with Sky by Broadband service.

The BBC prepares for HDTV

Chrichton Limbert, Head of BBC News Production Modernisation has written an article about BBC News's High Definition Vision, on the BBC web site.

High Definition television on a large screen with 5.1 multi-channel audio is a fantastic home viewing experience. In the US, HD Sport from ESPN and Fox is particularly successful and is strongly driving TV sales. HD in Australia, Canada, Korea and Japan is also well established and growing.

Europe is following. The Premiere HD Channel launched in Germany and Austria last year and is predicting huge demand for the World Cup in HD. HD is about to start in France and Sky will launch HD in the UK later this year. A real push will come from the launch of the PlayStation3 that comes with a HD Blu-ray DVD player.

By next Christmas there will be a much wider range of easily available HD pictures - including the BBC HD test service, a limited technical trial of the practicalities of transmitting in HD, due to start later this year.

There's still life in TiVo

For those of you who still follow TiVo's fortunes, Thomas Hawke has summarised a recent interview TiVo's CEO Tom Rogers gave to Bloomberg. There's some news on the upcoming Series 3 TiVo in there.

The Mother of all PVRs

The Snapstream Blog has detailed it's Godzilla PVR project, which allows them to record 11 shows at once, including 4 HDTV ones. It uses 4 * 250Gb drives configured for RAID 0 (striping) for the video alone. Truly a monster of a system!

More on HD Sky+

One of our readers emailed the following:-

Hi,

Just thought you guys would like to know... I was flicking through my Sky+ channels when I happened upon a nice sight, channels 311 and 312 have the names Sky Mov 9HD and Sky Mov 10HD respectively when selected to view you get the "Call 08702 404020 for further information on how to receive this HD channel". Well it looks like the new boxes will be out soon!

Regards

Josh

Also, Sky have updated their website.

Wing it with mobile TV

Hauppauge have released Wing, a software application for Windows that will record TV shows into the correct format for the Sony PSP, Apple video ipod and div/x player.

There are three ways to use Wing. If you use TitanTV to schedule your TV recordings, Wing will allow you to record in a mobile format with one click. If you schedule regular recordings (for example: Desperate Housewives every Sunday night), you can use the latest version of WinTV-Schedule which now includes the mobile video recorder. If you have TV shows which you recorded previously, Wing comes with converter program which will turn the MPEG videos into a mobile video format.

Wing is compatible with all models of the WinTV-PVR, including the WinTV-PVR-150, WinTV-PVR-250, WinTV-PVR-350 and WinTV-PVR-USB2.

Full information available on the Hauppauge Wing page.

XBox 360 Media Extender

If you have Windows Media Center and an XBox 360, you probably want to take a look at using your XBox 360 to play back content stored on the MCE box. Underground Online have had a quick look at setting this up, and conclude

Media Center Extender successfully makes Xbox 360 more than a gaming console in your living room and gives new life to the multimedia OS outside of the computer room. If you're starting from scratch, setting up a Media Center isn't the simplest or cheapest task in the world. But, once you have the hardware in place and the software installed, it's straightforward streaming for all of your multimedia needs.