Best Non-Subscription DVR?

ngc5194 asks: "I'm thinking about joining the 21st century and purchasing a Digital Video Recorder. However, I DO NOT want to subscribe to any services. I understand that this will limit what my DVR can do, and I'm fine if it just acts like a solid-state VCR. Given the constraint above (no subscription services), which would be the best DVR to purchase and why?"

Comments

Missing Information...

[BandoMcHando]

It would be helpful to know what country you are talking about, as this will affect lots of things...

eg here in the UK we have freeeview, which is just a brand name for free-to-air terrestrial digital television, and many DVR/PVRs over here are built with this in mind.

But I have no idea what the situatuion is with non-subscription television services in other countries

Plenty of choice out there

[Snospar]

I use a MythTV box which was fairly hard to get working but is simple to use. It can change channels on my Sky Digibox so I can record shows automatically using the built in TV guide. I can archive recordings to DVD or play back DVD's on the same box. It cost around £400 (GBP) to build 2 years ago, with a lot of the money going on a Hauppauge PVR-350 card and a small form factor case.

I've also bought a Pioneer DVR for my father in law, the DVR-540HX-S with 160GB hard drive, this was much the same price and does almost as much as the MythTV box including controlling a Sky box. It's also quieter and lacks the initial setup complexity of the Myth box (meaning less support for me!).

If you want total simplicity go for the prebuilt DVR - for total control it has to be MythTV

Re:If you're worried about artificial limitations.

[jasonwea]

I'm sorry but I've got to ask the question: How many years since the last time you used MythTV? I find MythTV very easy to use[1].

It's slow and clunky

I run a shared backend and frontend on my Athlon 2000 server which has 3 tuners. When I have 3 recordings active it takes a couple of seconds to start playing a video but other than that..

uses an odd format

My DVB-T recordings come out as bog standard MPEG-2 files. If you're using analog tuners, there are tools available to transcode the Nupple format. mythtranscode even comes with MythTV and has a GUI frontend called MythArchive that can even burn video DVDs.

and has a god-awful interface

I'm running the MePo Theme on my frontend and I love it.

It's so ridiculously focused on TV that you have to go up 5 levels of menus, then down 5 more, to look through the other videos you have available.

This is a gross exaggeration. See the screenshots linked to above. "Media Library" contains "Watch Recordings" which is for TV recordings (third screenshot) and the next item down is "Watch Videos" which lists all my XviD, VIDEO_TS, etc files as they are laid out on disk from my file server (which happens to be the same box).

And to get back to the TV programs? Yep, just as many steps.

Press the back button twice (once to leave Videos, again to return to Main Menu). Or if you have spare keys on your remote, you can bind buttons to jump straight to whatever screen you want.

[1] Yes it is harder to setup than some other solutions and there's far more configuration options that can be a bit confusing (hint: defaults are generally fine).

If you can get your tuners working (I'll assume DVB tuners) in Xine or similiar or even just scanning correctly (tzap, scan), it's an apt-get and 10 minutes of configuring your channels and playing with some preferences to suit your taste. There's many howtos out there on how to do all this.

</rant>

Edit: I forgot the obligatory "I know I'm going to be modded down for this" :)