The way that we save, catalog and digest television, movies or other forms of media is vastly different than ten years ago, or just even five years ago.  DVR services like TiVo rose and fell in popularity over the years while the DVR technology made its way slowly into the home theater through cable boxes and satellite receivers.  Even for the more technically apt HTPC crowd, the number of DVR options in hardware and software has climbed dramatically.Enter the Hauppauge HD PVR set-top box.  This high-definition personal recorder has a fairly versatile design, allowing the consumer the ability to connect any high-definition source via component cables into the box and output that feed simultaneously to your HDTV / Projector and your home PC.  There’s no hard drive inside the PVR, hence you have to connect it to a PC to ...

Introduction My father is pretty high-tech for a guy in his early sixties. He has an iPhone and can make his Mac laptop jump through hoops, including wirelessly pumping music (and often vintage jingles from his days as a program director at WIBG in Philadelphia in the late 1960s) to his Wilson Audio and Krell-based audiophile system in his living room. His music students at the University of Southern California demand this level of tech savvy, but where he had admittedly fallen behind was with his home theater system. Installed in an odd niche in his house in Scottsdale, Arizona, this system was pretty state of the art in its day, with a big Sony CRT standard-definition television set, a DVD player and a custom installation in a nifty cabinet. However, by 2008 standards, a 40-inch standard-definition tube TV (which ...

Introduction Every time I hear about a new high-def DVR from Dish Network, I get excited. “Will this be the one that finally has dual-zone HD output via HDMI?" I ask myself. I have been successfully using Dish Network’s line of non-high-def and high-def dual output DVRs for years. The one feature I have been waiting for is dual HDMI support, so I could run two HDTVs independently and simultaneously. I currently have a mirrored version of the picture on my big screen also going to the smaller kitchen LCD, but ideally I want to be able to have two different high-def shows on simultaneously. Dish Network has been a real innovator in the DVR market for several years, as they were the first company to feature units with multi-room capabilities. This not only saves the consumer on monthly DVR fees, but ...

Introduction Nothing stays stagnant in nature or in consumer electronics. The VCR, one of the last vestiges of the analog world, is about to meet its successor and I don’t mean digital videotape. Personal TV (PTV) is a brand new product category. One of the first units comes from a joint venture between service provider TiVo and consumer electronics manufacturer Philips Electronics. More than just another black box, PTV uses an attractive and intuitive graphical user interface that overlays the TV broadcast signal. It’s possible to record shows and store them on the PTV’s internal hard drive. TiVo can also time-shift material, functioning as your own personal instant replay system. There are two differnet PTV components. For $499 you get a PTV unit capaible of recording upto 14 hours of TV programming. For $999 you can buy a machine with more hard drive space providing up to 30 hours of recording time. On top of ...

Introduction For almost a year, I have enjoyed having the ability to record and play back high-definition programming from Dish Network on my Dish Player 921 satellite receiver/PVR combination machine. It has been a true workhorse, recording my favorite shows without fail, having virtually no downtime and other than the occasional lock-up that usually just requires a simple re-boot (these PVRs are essentially computers in an AV-like metal box), it has been a nearly flawless performer. It has powered my main home theater and has given me hundreds if not thousands of hours of HDTV viewing bliss, but something was seemingly missing. I recently cooked up the idea of adding a second television to my living room/kitchen area downstairs, but I didn’t want to have to install a second dedicated satellite receiver and PVR to control this TV. Enter the Dish Player 942 dual mode HDTV satellite receiver/PVR. Dish Network last year released an ingenious product ...