HDD Recorder

That's the thing with this Aldi one - it's way cheap in comparison. Can't comment on the quality though - might be OK, might not...

Our family uses an old, superseded PC as our media computer. Cost around $150 for a dual channel, digital tuner card and I spent around $100 on a 750 GB hard drive. We installed DVB Web Scheduler, available at no cost, to control the recording, and installed Media Player Classic and VLC Media Player to play the recordings. They are also free. The hardest part was getting the EPG (electronic programme guide) to work, but that only involved about half-an-hour of work.

Now, I'm able to program the recording schedule and watch programmes streamed over our network on any of computers. I don't bother with the ad skipping possibilities, because a couple of turns of a mouse wheel and I'm through the ad; besides most of what I watch is from ABC anyhow.

The computer doesn't have to be at all powerful, as the digital transmission does not need to undergo any great computation before the broadcast stream is stored on the hard drive. I can edit and record to DVD any programmes that I want to keep. I can also watch HD TV with those programmes that are worth the extra space that HD takes.

Cheap. Easy. Versatile. I'm not locked into a proprietary system. Simple to add more storage if I need.

Highly recommended if you have a spare computer to use.

Has it been a while since you've tried this? We've now set up three computers and it really is quite simple. One was with a cheap plug in USB digital tuner on special for a rediculously cheap price at ALDI. That worked straight out of the box, and it was our most recently acquired tuner.

Our main media computer has been running flawlessly for a couple of years now. The closest we've had to go to getting our hands dirty was about two weeks ago when we vacuumed out the interior of the case - but you should do that regularly for any PC computer system.

It seems so much more sensible than getting locked into a proprietory system.

My son has more trouble getting some of his games to run!

Or the BLUE screen of death!!! I had that happen to me about 2 weeks ago. arghhh...

I've have had my TiVo for a week and I must say overall, I'm impressed!

I agree with the comments so far that unless you have a reasonable understanding of how computers tick, then you're better off sticking with an appliance instead of a Media Centre.

Installation and set-up was simple, even with the external wireless dongle I had it up and running in 20 minutes. The user interface in simple and logical that even my grandmother could use it (well, maybe not grandma but certainly my dad could!).

Although I didn't compare feature-for-feature with the other manufacturers, what I really like about the TiVo was the non-metered downloads from my ISP (since I'm with Internode) so it wasn't going to chew up all quota, Blockbuster movie download capability (which triggers downloads at 2am in the morning) and the remote recording capability from the web (via Yahoo7).

Some of the downsides of TiVo are the limited storage space, if you turn on suggestions then you can quickly fill up the 160GB drive (however the 1TB expander should help that). No dual antenna sockets on the back for pass-through to other devices which was a real oversight, however nothing you can't fix with a T connector. The disk crunching is also a little noisy, I have it set up in our bedroom for the moment so we can hear it churning away at night, better move it to the lounge quick smart.

So far it has been very reliable from an operational standpoint and had no problems with maintaining internet connectivity for the updates, but lets see how it goes over the next few weeks.

This has been on the cards for a year now, and has been delayed quite a few times. Here's hoping they will actaully, finally, get it out (as I too have been waiting (and waiting) for PlayTV - it's what will eventually allow me to justify buying a PS3 and moving my Media Centre PC out of the cinema!).

Just get a ps3.. can't get much better value than that..