Having just about finished configuring our home-brew PVR/DVR, I was, of course, interested to see an announcement from UPC that they will soon be offering their own PVR/set-top box in one.
On the face of it, this might be reason to groan about the amount of time, money and energy I've invested in our MythTV box, but this is UPC we're talking about, so let's not groan too soon.
Serious shortcomings of the upcoming UPC PVR:
- Capacity for a mere 65 hours of recordings.
- Single-tuner unit: it's not possible to record two programmes broadcast at the same time.
- No intelligence: it works with channels and time slots, just like a VCR. There's no ability to record your favourite programme, regardless of channel or broadcast time.
- No ability to transcode recordings or archive them to other media.
UPC's sales pitch is predictably poor. For example, they say that you no longer need a DVD recorder, because their PVR will do the same thing. Well, no it won't. A DVD recorder uses removable media, whereas a PVR has fixed media that fill up. Their system offers no means to archive recordings, so in that regard, it's less flexible than a DVD recorder.
They also tout their well-worn favourite slogan of digitale kwaliteit (digital quality), an absolutely meaningless phrase, since digital refers only to the means by which the data stream is encoded, something that is essentially unrelated to the quality of the picture. A heavily compressed video clip, intended for download by dial-up modem users, is digitally compressed and encoded, but would you want to magnify it to fill a 94cm 16:9 LCD TV screen and watch it? No? I thought not, even though it's digital quality.
Obviously, they're trying to pull the wool over the consumer's eyes. UPC's customers are not very sophisticated, so this underhand strategy will probably work for them, too. After all, they've been using this slogan to sell their digital TV packages for quite some time, and the bit streams of some of those channels are definitely on the rough side. Besides, there are few commercial PVR alternatives on the market over here and MythTV or even Microsoft's MCE are not for everyone.
It's clear that this is not going to be the TiVo of the Dutch cable market. The only reason to get one of these PVR set-top boxes is if it's free and can just be dropped in to replace the usual UPC set-top box. As long as it has all of the same ports on the back, you would gain a very limited PVR for emergencies and lose no existing functionality. In other words, we'd just keep using MythTV, but we'd now have a set-top box with a hard drive, just in case it was ever needed.