Personal Video Recorders

Personal Video Recorders

PVRs are also known as digital video recorders (DVRs) and hard disk recorders (HDRs). The difference is only in the name. The most common name for them may be the brandname TiVO.

Personal video recorders (PVRs) are the most revolutionary devices for watching television since the VCR. The PVR uses a disk drive to store any video program instead of VHS tapes that VCRs use. The PVR has been called a suped-up VCR, but they are alot more since you can do several things that you can't do with a VCR. Examples are:

Skip commercials instantly - Tired of fast forwarding to far and tehm rewinding too much? Skip in 30 second intervals with many PVRs. ReplayTV was the best when it skipped all commercials automatically by monitoring the black levels of the program. They've been sued into bankruptcy for this feature.
Pause live TV - While you're recording the show, stop to answer the phone or get a beer without missing any action. This lets you jump back and watch missed scenes when your spouse is talking (this happens to me a lot).
Integrated electronic programming guide (EPG) - EPGs let you find programs for weeks in advance and record them with a click of a button. EPGs make recording shows easy - no more flashing 12:00s on VCRs or TV Guides.
Record tens or hundreds of hours of shows - No more shuffling through VHS tapes to find that show you recorded two weeks ago. The PVR automatically labels the recordings and keeps it on the PVR for quick playback
Record shows that are similar to ones you've already recorded. This Tivo feature is feared by the paranoid, but it's a pretty good feature that might help you find some good shows.

PVRs aren't perfect yet though. Some things that need to be improved with PVRs are:

Some PVRs (Tivo) don't show you how much time you have left on the disk drive. PVRs should show you how much recording time you have left.
Some have integrated WiFi so that you can view the recorded shows in other rooms on another PVR. The Tivo Series 2 doesn't have enough throughput to do this in real time. The video recordings take about 2-6 Mbps of bandwidth and TIVO only provided about 2 Mbps of throughput. If they're going to support WiFi, then they should do it all the way and support streaming.
EPGs are not updated when programming changes. This is probably more of a problem with the networks who don't update the EPG than the PVR. I've missed the end of major sporting events when they go into overtime or extend past the regular scheduled time.

The PVR is the first generation of entertainment server and lets you control the programming you want to watch. Find out what PVRs are going to be here.