Fed up with having to sift through a seemingly ever-shrinking VHS collection to find just the right amount of space to squeeze a long-play recording of QI between two unwatched episodes of a program I’d probably cropped the start and end off, I spent an inordinate and unhealthy amount of time in December trying to find a more elegant and workable solution to the problem of wanting to watch TV, but never being in front of the tellybox at quite the right time.

My not unworldly requirements were as follows:

• Freeview
• A hard drive to store recordings
• Some sort of EPG, or at the least a simple way of recording and labelling so I know what I’ve got recorded with the minimum of effort.

Optional nicenesses would be the ability to transfer from hard drive to some other medium for long-term storage, and that’s about it.

My first thought was to get a DVD Recorder, but can you buy a DVD-R with freeview and a hard drive for a reasonable price? Can you heck. At the high end there might be a few lurking, but replacing a VHS just so I can record a few programmes off the telly should not cost the earth. So, onto the current crop of PVRs. Right now, in the UK we’re pretty starved of really good PVRs, unfortunately, with offerings from Topfield, Humax, and Digifusion at the top of the pile, and a few cheapos offering competition at the bottom end of the market.

The Topfield seemed too pricy, at £250+, and I didn’t like the idea of TAPs, which come across as extensions you have to add to your Toppy just so it can do the things a PVR should do. The Humax 9200 hadn’t been out long, and while the 160Gb hard drive and the USB connection to allow you to transfer recordings to a PC (although this is a one-way street, you can’t move recordings onto the Humax, and although I’m sure there’s a very good reason for that, it’s surely not too much to ask, is it?) drew me in, rumours of flakiness and unreliability drew me straight out again. Plus it was still £225 or so, and in the end I decided I probably would very rarely want to record anything and keep it once I’d watched it. And into my line of vision came the the similar, but slightly less specced, Digifusion VRT200.

Digifusion FVRT200

With its 80Gb hard drive, twin freeview tuners, chase play (which the Humax doesn’t properly do - can you believe that?), pause and rewind live TV, and all the usual features you’d expect from a PVR, this was clearly the box to go for. And for 6 weeks, it’s worked almost perfectly. Apart from the occasional hang-up and freeze, it’s been a joy. The menu backgrounds are garish but I can cope with that, the navigation system feels cumbersome and illogical at times (what’s the point of allowing you to store recordings in folders if you always get the default view of all recordings when you open the library? Even more: what’s the point when it then takes about ten button presses to navigate to a folder?), but other than that, no pain and plenty of joy has ensued. Being able to go out on New Year’s Eve, safe in the knowledge that the magic box was recording 5 hours of Bleak House, or being able to record from two channels simultaneously; how great is that?

And now, every Monday when I’m always out, I can safely record University Challenge, and Life On Mars (the only series so far this year I’ve made any effort to watch) and watch them the following day. Bliss.

Until this morning, that is.

Switch on the box, press Library. Oops. It’s empty. 90% of the hard drive is suddenly free, and I have no recordings whatsoever. About the only thing left is that my weekly Monday recordings are still scheduled. Well whoopee-do! I’ll just crack open the champagne, then, shall I?

The cause of this, it turns out, is that the software is just rubbish. That’s all there is to it. There’s no mystery, and the Digifusion support people, to their credit, make no attempt to hide this. I phoned them up, talked the problem through, and was given a very honest, “yeah, when you don’t have much space left there’s a bug in the software that can end up deleting everything” response. While I applaud their honesty, for the love of sanity, what in the hecky-heck of hecking were they thinking letting this thing loose in the wild?

That’s pretty. Does it work?

My Dad once introduced me to a fundamental design principle. He had been watching a famous designer cast his eye over some fancy-dan designs, for teapots I think, some of which looked just so purrty and lovely. Only problem was, they were crap at pouring tea. Now, what’s the one thing you really want a teapot to be able to do - look hot, or transfer hot liquid from one container to a smaller one that’s a bit more practical to drink out of? The designer pointed this out, and decided the one he liked best was the one that poured tea the best. It made perfect sense to my Dad, and now it makes perfect sense to me. What do I really, really want a PVR to do for me? I want it to record the programmes I ask it to record, and make them available for me to watch when I want to. Nothing more, nothing less. What I don’t want it to do, apart from pour tea all over the carpet, is mostly record stuff, and then occasionally delete everything I’ve ever recorded.

So, I’m kind of hacked off that this is a feature not explicitly detailed in the user manual. Also not detailed are the two bits of advice I was given by Digifusion support. The first, in a Gremlins style, was to never ever ever record in Long Play. Right. So, a feature that allows me to use less space for recordings should never be used. Fair enough. I’ll just have to be more selective about watching and then deleting. Second piece of advice: Try to keep enough space on the hard drive - preferably keep it over 40% unused.

I can cope with the first advice: I rarely record in LP anyway, but to supply an 80Gb hard drive, and then advise customers to use no more than 48Gb if possible is clearly insane. I have an alternative solution, which is elegant in its simplicity - don’t ship cack software with your products. If you have software thaat kicks in and performs some operations overnight, make sure that one of the things it can’t do is delete everything from the hard drive. Try, at all costs, to design it in such a way that if it needs to, say, compress a recording from SP to LP overnight, but finds there isn’t enough storage space to do it, that the software simply doesn’t attempt that compression. Is it me, or is that far more logical and thorough than letting it get on with things, only to find it can’t finish, can’t back out, and so destroys all around it in a hissy teenage fit?

Then, when the hapless user switches on in the morning, perhaps present them with a warning that some operation couldn’t be performed, and help them do whatever they need to do to make sure that it can be done next time it’s scheduled.

Maybe I’m just naive, but to me, it’s that simple.

Still, the good news is that Digifusion are working on a fix. It should be out in the next month or so. Month? GaaaahhhH! I give up.

For more info on which PVR is right for you, check out:

• Digital Spy Forums
• CNet
• PVRuk

Tags: none