I’m in the middle of upgrading our “entertainment” system, and after looking at a few PVRs (ie Personal Video Recorders… digital set-top boxes with a hard drive for recording TV), we settled on a dick smith DS6200PVR

Its basically a rebadged homecast system.

It doesn’t have bells and whistles like component outputs (just composite, svideo and scart), no high definition (hdtv)… just standard definition (sdtv).

But the software works well, its easy to use, and the PVR has a dual tuner (so we can record 2 channels simultaneously).

All up, its much better than any VCR I’ve had in the past. And the picture quality is much better than VHS.

At some point in the future, I might upgrade the hard drive from 160Gb… I just need to make sure I do that before all IDE drives disappear in favour of SATA!