Remember how watching TV used to be? The old fashioned way was that you turned on the TV when your show was on, watched it, and that was it. If you were patient enough to figure out the controls, VHS recording allowed consumers to watch some shows later, but slow control of playback, and playback quality itself, made this a less than satisfactory experience. That’s all in the past now though, with digital technology and hard disk drive (HDD) recorders changing the way we experience television completely.
HDD recorders usually work by sitting between your various inputs and the display in your home theater system. Good models have twin digital TV tuners built in, so you can watch any TV station as normal, and record a different channel – or even record two channels at once! The most powerful feature of these recorders is the ability to access digital program guides, showing in advance which show will screen, when. To record a show, it is usually as simple as navigating to that show in the program guide, and selecting to record it – you don’t have to figure out the date and time, or program anything else manually. Best of all – when you watch your recorded show, good players offer the ability to automatically skip ads, so look out for this feature when shopping for a hard disk recorder. Another invaluable feature is the ability for live TV to be paused or rewound. Your recorder can be set to store a certain length of the most recent show, and you are essentially playing this back in real time. If you pause the show, the recorder keeps on recording, so you can take a pit stop at any time and pick up from where you left off.
As the name suggests, your HDD recorder uses an internal hard disk drive to store information, just like in your computer. Disk drives are measured in Gigabytes (Gb) and the bigger your drive, the more shows can be stored. As a rule of thumb, a 160Gb drive should offer around 100 hours of recording. As with any piece of consumer electronics, many models offer extra features that can enhance your home theater experience significantly. These can include built in DVD or Blu-Ray players, USB playback of other media files, and even the ability to burn recorded shows to disc. Choose the features you need in advance, and you are less likely to make the wrong choice when buying your HDD recorder.
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