Thomson PVR10 vs Commercial DVR

[n10ct]

Hello,

I brought back my PVR10 from London about 3 years ago... sadly its been sitting on a shelf ever since, never had the time to investigate the work that this awesome oz/nz tivo team have been doing!

I'm trying to figure out if i should go to the expense of getting a couple of decent 250- 400 gb drives and a cachecard of some description and the nztivo thomson image all setup. OR would i be better just getting a commercial DVR these days.

I can't imagine these commercial ones allowing you to do half the stuff you can do with a tivo. and i love my peanut remote... all the remotes that come with the commercial ones are pathetic.

I guess i'm after some opinions or direction that i can take, from those of you who have been using the tivos in NZ, and possibly also played with the commercial models.

Personally id be happy to just have it work as a DVR without the whole sky debarcle at this stage.

Ive seen many different cache cards, which is the better to get and easiest to obtain?

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks. :D

[thomson]

I guess i'm after some opinions or direction that i can take, from those of you who have been using the tivos in NZ, and possibly also played with the commercial models.
Commercial PVR's do sometimes offer a 1.3x playback which can be handy in some situations. Other than MySky and MCE I do not know of any commercial PVR's with guide data. The GBPVR (http://www.gbpvr.com/) software is great if you have a system to run it on, but nothing beats the simplicity of the TiVo.


Ive seen many different cache cards, which is the better to get and easiest to obtain?
There is only one "cache card" and that is the one by 9thtee (http://www.9thtee.com/tivocachecard.htm). The "cache card" is both a network card and an (MFS) database cache to speed up menu access when you have a large number of programmes in the No Playing list. I personally don't see the benefit of the cache card, although if you are going to be using a couple of large drives then it could make quite a difference (best to find somebody with a large setup and see what they feel).

There are many different "network cards" such as the (turbonet, terbonet, X-Factor, etc) which will all provide network connectivity. It really is a matter of sourcing whatever you can get your hands on.

[Darren King]

I personally don't see the benefit of the cache card, although if you are going to be using a couple of large drives then it could make quite a difference (best to find somebody with a large setup and see what they feel).

Like Thompson says I do not see the benefit of a cachecard and I will also add that if you are intending to incorporate two hard disks and a cachecard equipped with 512MB of RAM then you will be shortening the life of your power supply as they were never designed to take this extra load. One large hard disk plus cachecard plus RAM, or two hard disks and a cachecard with no RAM or (as a cheaper option) a Turbonet/Terbonet/X-Factor/TV-LAN1.0 card is the recommended setup.