Digital Video Recorder (DVR)

These devices are getting more and more popular. Currently 3.5m homes have it and Forrester, a research firm says 25m American homes will have it by 2006.

What lies behind its popularity?

Let's begin with what it is. It is basically a hard disk drive. Television signals can come from satellite, cable or antenna sources and goes to its built-in-tuner. Signals from antenna or cable are brought to the MPEG-2 encoder where the signal is converted from analog to digital. The encoded signal goes to two places. One the hard drive for storage and the other to the decoder where the digital signal is converted back to analogue and sent to the TV for viewing.

Now what are the merits of DVR?

The most amazing thing is that the device can record and play at the same time whereas you can only play material after recording is completed.

It's almost like video on demand. You can even pause "live" programs. When you hit the pause button , the device begins to record the program immediately and freeze frame give an illusion of stopping. When you are ready to continue watching the program , you simply hit the " play " button and the recorded material will begin.

Late by half an hour for an one hour program? No problem, just sit back, relax and watch the show from the beginning.

My favourite feature of the DVR is the simplicity of searching and recording the program you want. No more setting up of recording time for each and every episode.

You can go to an onscreen guide and pick the program you want. There are also search tools where you select programs by name of actors or other keywords.

Hard disk capability allows you to access any program almost instantaneously. Skipping advertisements is even easier on a DVR than a VCR.

DVR comes with different capacity ranging from 30 to 320 hour recording length. Actually the amount of recording time depends on video quality selected .

The DVR is also linked to a host computer of the service provider by the use of an ordinary telephone line and modem for the downloading of latest and newest program grids.

Tivo charges monthly fee for subscription while Replay TV forgoes the charge but their DVR cost more.