On Tuesday 14 February 2006 22:05, Malcolm Herbert wrote:

> I jumped straight to the bit where I handed over some money to make
> the problem go away and bought a Topfield 5000PVRt, since there is no
> official TiVo sold in Australia[1].

Having tried MythTV and found it lacking in so many ways, I'll second the=20
Topfield approach. In the UK, the 5800 model is a great bit of kit for=20
DVB-T. From an ease of use PoV alone, MythTV can't touch it; my=20
five-year old son can use it. It's also cheap, even with the 250GB disk.

=46rom a hacker's PoV, as Malcom said, you can upload your own MIPS=20
binaries to run on the machine. These interface with the firmware using=20
a published API which provides a fairly good range of features. There=20
are some good third-party EPG front-ends, and even games written this=20
way, for example.

I've had no trouble downloading recorded programs and burning them to=20
DVD, though 4:3 material pillarboxed in a 16:9 frame takes a bit longer=20
to do right.

Cheers, Steve