More for the mind's eye

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch brandish the commercial importance of digital video recorder technology as a major new phase for world media. But what does that mean for business people too busy to watch TV? As it happens, quite a lot. A digital personal video recorder (PVR) can let you chomp through hours of TV in minutes. Now you can catch Channel Nine’s Sunday program, every ABC news broadcast, and even the occasional movie in just minutes.

Set up the record by remote control (potentially from your office if you like), blast away advertisements and off-load whatever programs you like to a laptop for your boat or holiday retreat. You can even access video on the computer wirelessly from televisions throughout your home. The new technology, for both Windows and Mac, ensures you will never seem out of touch to guests again and can cost just a few good dinners.

Microsoft launched its new Windows Media Center in Australia last October and one of its key competitors, Elgato’s EyeTV for Apple Macintosh, has been available for some time. If your idea of television is a vagued-out couch flop with a beer can, you may not be impressed by these profound changes going on in the digital entertainment industry. But if you like the best of everything – and don’t mind spending a little time getting used to something new – your efforts will be well repaid by this ‘big new thing’ in TV.

Certainly the media czars love it – Rupert Murdoch raves about it and Foxtel’s CEO Kim Williams calls it a category killer. Market analysts wonder how the PVR will affect the free-to-air television industry’s long-term profitability. And ordinary TV viewers everywhere marvel at the amazing value of being able to jettison the advertisements, cut TV to DVD and turn the TV viewing experience mobile.

Microsoft’s Windows Media Center will come installed in a growing number of new PCs and laptops from vendors in Australia such as Acer, HP and Toshiba. Elgato’s EyeTV for the Apple Mac is available now in various models that each have different capabilities for around $650. Vendors such as Development One also sell home media centres for between $1699 and $1799 which can store up to 180 hours of TV and come with a TV program guide that permits effortless setting of the record function.

The EyeTV is a small, light box about the size of a book that plugs into your computer via a FireWire connection and lets you set a start and end time to record a particular TV show. The program you record is stored on the hard disk of your computer and you can either watch it while you record it or later on. Once the TV show is captured digitally, you can use a remote control to move through it much faster and more nimbly than with a traditional VCR using tape. This is useful if you want to jump through an entire night’s Rage video clips at, say, one minute intervals, which should let you ferret out and save your faves in just 20 minutes.

You can export and save the digital recording – with or without advertisements – as a digital file in some other location, such as a DVD you may burn the video onto, or the hard disk of your laptop. There are no technical restrictions on the number of times you can copy the digital recording to a new location or the number of people who can view it. Available export file formats include MPEG, DV (the same as most video cameras) and Quicktime. In addition, both EyeTV and the Media Center manage and serve up more than TV. They also exhibit on the TV your photo collection and MP3 music.

Unfortunately, apart from Development One’s program guide (which only works with its hardware), there is no online electronic program guide in Australia available cheaply and able to automatically program PVRs. This is partly because the TV industry is ambivalent about whether it should be encouraging PVRs. It is also because it is hard to establish a profitable service for such a small market.

Nevertheless, it is very simple to set a recording. Times at which a recording is scheduled are listed and you can easily set a new recording manually after consulting a TV guide. The new recorded programs are clearly marked when the recording is finished and can be played with a double click.

Once you start to accumulate a collection of recorded TV shows, you may want to watch them on your TV rather than your PC.

Exporting a recording to DVD is a simple matter of creating a version of the recording that can be burned to disk using a standard program such as Toast (for Mac) or Nero (for Windows). Another way to watch your recording on TV is to purchase an inexpensive playback box such as the Elgato EyeHome that plugs into the TV and plays video from your computer via a wireless modem’s 802.11g connection (this method requires a $219 Apple Airport Express or similar modem for each TV). Alternatively you might settle for running ethernet cable around your house (preferably via a gigabit switch using something like a Netgear FS105). This will let you move your recordings between PCs swiftly but the cabling can be unsightly.

One important decision you need to make is whether to purchase a normal consumer digital set top box that can receive the DVB-T signal or use something like the EyeTV instead. If you want to use an EyeTV alone, you would probably select the EyeTV410 which receives the digital TV signal directly, but if you already own a DVB-T receiver, or you are willing to settle for analogue TV transmissions (while they last) instead of digital TV, then you would be best placed to buy the EyeTV200.

The EyeTV200 has both an analogue TV tuner and composite, S-Video and stereo audio connectors that let you hook up and record from your video devices such as VCRs, camcorders or DVD players. Consider buying both the EyeTV410 and EyeTV200 models if you want the best of all worlds and already have, say, a pay-TV cable or satellite box that you want to record off. The only drawback when using an EyeTV to record programs from an existing pay-TV set top box is that you need to change the channel on the pay-TV box manually for each recording.

We should know before summer is over whether Microsoft (perhaps via ninemsn) will launch an electronic program guide that works with the Windows Media Center in Australia. Even if it does, it is unclear whether the special Media Center guide will allow pay-TV to be auto-programmed as well.

With Foxtel’s new PVR modelled on BSkyB’s in the UK, Foxtel will most likely offer its own digital program guide direct to its subscribers. But however the market evolves, TV viewers can look forward to a much more efficient and enjoyable TV experience.

And when TV shows eventually become available via IPTV on ADSL connections and on other broadband devices such as 3G mobile phones, a new era for Australian television will have truly begun.

Reference: December 2004, volume 74:11, pp. 46-47

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