30th September 2002
Question: What is a PVR?
Answer: PVR stands for Personal Video Recorder. Some of you may have heard it by the different name of DVR, or Digital Video Recorder. If you still don't know what I'm talking about, then maybe you will recognize the names Tivo, ReplayTV, or UltimateTV. All of these systems are PVRs, and they are causing a revolution in the way that people watch TV. With a PVR, you can pause live TV. The PVR usually buffers approximately the last hour of TV, so you can pause anything live. This same concept comes into play if you turned to HBO and left the room to make popcorn (or a phone call), and when you came back you realized that you had missed the first ten minutes of the movie. With a PVR, it's not a problem, because with that buffer you can rewind and watch the movie from the beginning. This, of course, brings up the question of "Can I watch a movie while the PVR is recording it?" Yes, you can! The PVR is basically a computer hard drive with an MPEG-2 encoder/decoder, and like a computer, you can multitask. There are several advantages to having a PVR over a VCR, but the major drawback is the media. With a VCR, you just have to pop in a new cassette when you run out of space. To add more space, PVRs would require you to either obtain a new unit or to delete saved programs. There are some Web sites out there that tell you how to remove the hard drive or add more storage to a PVR, but you would be voiding the PVR's warranty to do this. Overall, I see this as the next step in the evolution of VCRs, and I hope that in the future we can adapt these PVRs into the now-available home DVD recorders.