We bought a Pace Twin Freeview box some years ago to replace the cable service we were using. It gave us all the channels we needed without a monthly cost and allowed us to record to disk. This has been so much better than using tapes. I know it's pretty standard now, but it was a revelation at the time. It wasn't as intelligent as the Tivo boxes I saw at the time, but it is generally good enough. One limitation was that you could only record 10 hours of TV on the 20GB hard drive. It uses a 2.5" drive and those were relatively expensive at the time. Now they have come right down, so I finally bought an 80GB unit to upgrade the Twin. This sat on the shelf for a few weeks until we managed to watch everything on the old one, but I did the swap today. It was very easy to do. The unit seems very well put together. It should last a few more years. There's not really anything to wear out apart from the drive.

My other method of recording TV is on the computer using my Haupauge DVB card. I'm still using ZapDVB despite it's limitations. I use this when we need to record multiple things simultaneously or if it's something I know we will want to keep, mainly for the kids. I had to install it again after my latest expisode so I'll just publish the steps I had to follow in case they are useful to someone.

• You can install from a deb file as I did, but I later found that it is in the Ubuntu reportitories, so an apt-get install zapdvb will do
• sudo /usr/local/share/zapdvb/setup conf - asks various question, but I'm not sure it actually set up what I need. See below.
• sudo apt-get install dvb-utils - required to scan for channels
• sudo apt-get install kjscmd - for a slightly better GUI
• sudo apt-get install wmctrl
• sudo apt-get install mpg123 - required to listen to radio
• sudo apt-get install sox - to convert to OGG
• cd /usr/local/share//zapdvb
• sudo ./setup --scan - gets the channel list. Will be written to a file in the config folder
• In config/zapdvb.conf set:
  • source0=config/dvb-t_uk-SandyHeath.conf ter 0 3 "Terrestrial"
  • pathvideo=/data/tv             # movie file
  • pathaudio=/data/radio             # music files
• Run zapmcc - can add to the menu as required

It lacks any sort of EPG, so you need to know when things are on. It also may have issues if one recording is to start immediately after another finishes. I need to test that some more. I still like it as it uses minimal CPU and does it's thing in the background. Maybe I should look at things like MythTV, but I can't justify dedicating a PC to TV.

My next job is to get video into the PC from our camcorder via Firewire. I've had this working in the past, but for now I can't even get the camera to mount as a device I can access. This needs further investigation.