Top, Top, Toppy!

I took delivery of our new Topfield TF5800 PVR yesterday afternoon. Anyone who already knows what a PVR is will need to skip to the first photograph to avoid having the pants bored off them. A Personal Video Recorder (also now starting to be called DVR or Digital Video Recorder) does virtually the same thing as a VHS recorder, only it uses a computer hard disk drive (HDD) instead of a tape. The first such device on the market was a TiVo, but since then more generic PVRs have arrived (and TiVo has been rebadged as Sky+ although you can still get them on eBay).

Because HDDs are random access devices and already optimised for fast reads and writes, this introduces some interesting possibilities. Firstly, you can watch a recording while making another. The HDD can easily cope with simultaneous accesses to different recordings. This also means you can watch a recording before it has finished, a practice known as chase-play. So you come in from work and you don't have time to cook dinner before your favourite soap starts? Kick off a recording, make the dinner, then sit down and start watching whether the recording has finished or not. The first few times you do this, having been used to tape, it's a revelation. But it's one of those things that soon becomes second nature (and another of those things that our kids will take for granted and listen with wonder when we regale them with stories of the days when we used to have to wait for a recording to finish before we could watch it).

When you chase play shows with ad breaks it's not unusual to catch up with real time, so you end up finishing watching at or close to the time the live show finishes. Fast-forward and rewind are much faster than with tape. But perhaps the most significant difference is capacity. Our model has a 250GB HDD, which gives us very roughly 125 hours of recording at broadcast quality.

So now to the Topfield. Here it is newly unpacked. It replaces our old Sony RDR HX-1000. We'd had that less than two years, but since it only has a single analogue tuner and we kicked Sky out when we moved, we had no way of recording digital channels. The Toppy has twin digital tuners allowing us to watch one and record another (as before), record two different channels while watching something else we've previously recorded, or, because of the way digital TV is broadcast, in some cases if we pick the right channels we could be recording two things AND watching two other different things using the picture-in-picture facilities.

In common with most good TV equipment nowadays, the Toppy was simplicity itself to set up. Two minutes to make all the aerial and SCART connections and about ten minutes to go through its automated channel scan and that, basically, was that. The standard EPG (Electronic Program Guide) that it comes with receives seven days' worth of program information over the air and to record any program from the guide takes two clicks of the OK button on the remote. If you try to record too many overlapping programs, a warning message pops up. Since the Toppy runs Linux under the covers, you can rename the recordings (they default to the name of the first program on the recording) and arrange them in folders.

Here's our new stack in close-up. The Topfield is on the right, sitting on top of the Pioneer media box. On the left is our (relatively) new Pioneer AV surround-sound amp. XBox at the bottom. I'm sure I'll be writing more about this new toy in future. We're running it in "vanilla" mode to start with, but there's an active community of developers writing "TAPs" (Topfield Application Programs) that replace or supplement standard features, so we might be trying some of them out soon too!