[FreeYourTV]

Just for info, I did make the purchase last night.

The only reason I made the purchase is that my 2.5 year old video/ dvd recorder was faulty and I got a voucher for £150 to buy a replacement. I got a price match and paid £180 for the Philips.

I don’t use videos anymore so went for this machine. I only have a V+ so did not need to worry about the fact that it is only an analogue tuner.

For anybody thinking of making a similar purchase, primarily for archiving of programs from the V+, so far it seems quite nifty:

160GB hard drive
Multi dvd format including dual layer
Editing modes for both hard drive and dvd recording

The really nice touch….it has a satellite box recognition function, which means that if you leave in standby, it will automatically recognize when you archive from the V+ box to hard drive on the Philips.

I did 6 programs last night easy as pie.

You can archive to the Philips whilst still watching recorded V+ programs

Once archived to the Philips, (it did the 6 programs as one recording, ) you can then divide the recording as required, including deleting the 1 and 2 minutes at front and end of programs, hiding out the breaks and naming the titles, which can then be filed by genre.

Once edited on the Philips hard drive, you can copy programs from hard drive to DVD, and the nice bit here is it burns at 4x minimum speed, which you can’t do from V+

Other nice touches: it has a 6 hour live tv buffer for those who might need it, (as opposed to ?1 hour? On V+) and also has a partition for photos/ mp3s and divx files.

As it even has a usb port you can literally take music/ photos on a memory stick, (apparently up to 10GB) copy to hard drive and then have a slide show with music backing. Also you can of course do the reverse.

In summary, this machine does seem to nicely compliment the V+ particularly for archiving.