30-JUN-2006

I bought a Digital-Everywhere Fire DTV FireWire based external DVB-C digital-TV receiver for the cable network - the only one I know of with a Common Interface module making it possible to watch more than just free-to-air channels.

It works great. The hardware looks nice and does what it is supposed to do, but the real star is the bundled myTheatre software. It has all I need and very little unnecessary.

This is a stark contrast to the kitchen sink software that came with my Pinnacle PCTV 200e, not to mention my old Hauppauge Nexus DVB-C PCI card that was slow and unreliable - watching TV turned into rebooting Windows.

Minutes after I got the Fire DTV to work, I went to get a soda and pressed "pause". I immediately started using the time shift feature without thinking about it, in this day and age, it seems so natural that I didn't think twice about pressing pause when watching live TV.

I also noticed that myTheatre creates a timeshift buffer backwards whenever I switch channel, making it possible to skip back a few seconds or minutes for those "what was that?" -moments. And thanks to this buffer, if you realize you want to record something, pressing "rec" will start recording "one minute before you pressed" so you will not have those videos with the first seconds missing anymore.

The screenshot is with a small window and the channel selection list visible, making the video temporarily shrink to thumbnail size.

This is what TV should be like.

...and radio. With these radio channels available as high quality layer-2 streams in my computer, there is no reason for me to buy an FM receiver.

And yes, you can select to stream a channel to external computers. I have not tried this feature yet, but it opens interesting possibilities.