Last week I mentioned I was thinking about buying a philips/pioneer/sony harddisk recorder. Well, I changed my mind and build a computer with a harddisk in it. And the result? Amazing.

Just as a tv-programm two weeks back mentioned: it totally changes the way you watch television. The idea is that you put a dual television tuner card in a descent computer (which is not a bigtower of course, but more like a big tape recorder, with remote control) and then you simply have a harddisk recorder.

One of the amazing things I found is that when the phone rings while your are watching television, you can press the Pause button. When the conversation is over, you simply press play and the show continues where you froze it. I knew in theory that would not be difficult to do, but I did not know the software was already that advanced.

All you want is there (picture-in-picture), electronic program guide (based on xmltv), skip commercial breaks (several methods, watching the broadcasters logo seems to work best). You can constantly have those two tuners to your disposal, so you can tape 2 programs on different channels. You can view a program before it has finished, so you can watch the program whenever it suits you!

Of course you can watch your DVD’s, place them on the harddisk (and import the data about the movie from IMDB, copy from your digital camera or your video camera, burn things on DVD, play your mp3 or watch the photo’s and video (via xine or mplayer or …)

For recording television, it has a dozen or more options, you can tape the same title every day, every week, only on a particular channel, on every channel, etc. It even has priorities and auto expire, so you can keep the last 2 versions of the news, but only tape it if there is nothing else to tape.

The software is coming from mythtv, they have a lot of screenies online which are impressing. I’ve put some on my site as well to show how cool it is.