HD DVR Recommendations

One of our community members is interested in buying an HD DVR. Should he get a dedicated PVR, like a tivo, or an addon, like a TV Tuner card?

Video Transcription

The advantage of streaming live video on the web and we do that at live.pirillo.com is that when we are answering questions everyday, that begs more questions to be asked and one of the users are arracnads at live.pirillo.com asked a question about the sling box demonstration a couple of minutes ago and though his question was not really the sling box it was certainly in the same neighborhood. So I am going to playback that video file here for you. (Video playing back) Okay so, I know the volume probably was not optimal there but essentially what he was asking was, should he go out and get a dedicated PVR personal video recorder also known as the DVR or digital video recorder or get an add-in for his computer. I have both, I like the fact that the tuner that is not associate with the computer at all tense to do what it does and does a good job at that. It is not connected in any software although that being said it has locked up on me at times in the past. People are quite happy with their Tevo’s, Tevo happens to be a brand and if that is the brand that you want to go with, you know, so be it. The advantage of that is that with the setup box that you can plug in to just about any television and take it away from your home office. The advantage on the other hand of having a PC based tuner is that if you are spending most of your time like me in front of this than having a TV window up to the side or over here if you did not have a sling box like I earlier demonstrated having a TV tuner would allow you to not only watch TV here but control it here and in some cases record it here as well. That is the big advantage of using a windows media center software whether it is XP media center edition or the media center that comes with some versions of windows Vista. You could record, save, transfer, trans code everything on the computer if that is something that you really, really want to do like saving the files and saving the shows that you record the advantage would definitely go to a TV tuner. If you are like me, you do not really have a lot of slots open inside your computer, you may think about picking up one of this. Now, I tried to install this inside of windows Vista but it asked me for a reboot and I just was not ready to do that. This is from penicle it is the PC, TV HD stick. So it is a TV tuner that connects to your windows PC by USB which we all have a million USB ports and if we do not you can go out and get a USB hob and extend how many USB ports you have. This is also an over the air HDTV tuner. So this antenna, the small antenna and of course you can get bigger antennas attach this to the other end of the USB stick. An HDTV over the air or from your local stations broadcasting HDTV like even local PDS station which by the way there is a lot of really good HD content that is happening on PBS like outstanding HD content. This is a nice thing to have whether or not you actually decide to go with PC based tuner for most of your television watching or a stand alone DVR like a Tevo this is nice to have because you can take it around with you wherever you go. That is the advantage of sling box which again we have recorded earlier allows you to access your DVR from all places online this is an actual TV tuner that you can take with you wherever you go and watch and record and schedule everything on either a desktop PC or let us say it happens to be a laptop because that is the nice thing. If you only have a laptop this little thing can buy you as big. Do you want more of a television experience that connects there and sits in your family room or are you doing this all the time. It is kind of up to you. Now, of course if anybody has any other things to say about DVR stand alone units versus HDTV tuners by all means suggest away we are always looking for those suggestions. If you had an experience with the penicle HDTV USB tuner or any other tuners for that matter we would love to hear your opinions. We are always live on the internet at live.pirillo.com.