(See email from inessential.com)

I was pleased to find, a while back, a bit of a rundown on the PVR situation in Australia. I’ve read a lot about TiVo in the US, and even remember hearing about some of the ANU staff’s efforts to hack them back when I was in my first year there. (I was lucky enough to be in a small Advanced CS tutorial with Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame back then. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me, but what the hell.)

Anyway, if I had the money at the moment, one of the Topfield PVRs listed on that page would probably be high on my list. In reality, I probably would be just as happy with one of the Strong STR ones, but there’s something about the idea of being able to write my own software for the Topfield one which makes it seem worth the extra $500 or so. As Peter says, “This is really an amazing facility for a consumer electronics product”, though I do wish that wasn’t the case (i.e. that it wasn’t amazing because it was common). In the end though, maybe what I really want is a Mac mini with some sort of video input

Never having used one, I may well be way off, but the best thing (Other than TiVo’s season pass feature) sounds like Topfield’s feature of always recording whatever you are watching and hence letting you rewind live TV without setting anything up in advance. I assume that the others do it too, but I haven’t actually seen it documented for anything else except TiVo. Perhaps I’d also get hooked on skipping through adds, which everyone else seems to be big on, but to be honest adds have never really bothered be all that much.