USB and PCI add-in card digital TV tuners have helped make the long-term dream of an all-in-one entertainment unit a reality. But adding a tuner to your PC doesn't mean your system is a passive device like a television; adding a tuner card turns your PC into a powerful hybrid of a PC, TV, VCR, PVR and at times radio.

While you might be familiar with VCR you might not be so au fait with PVR (personal video recorder - sometimes referred to as digital video recorder (DVR)). The PVR concept is the same as VCR - it's about recording TV, but PVRs are so much more powerful. PVRs can feature what is called time-shifting - the ability to pause, rewind and replay live TV broadcasts without stopping the recording. You could start recording a game of cricket, pause the TV while you make a coffee, come back and see what you've missed, even as your PC keeps recording the action. If nothing's happened, you can scan forward to realtime again. With time-shift you really cannot miss anything ever again.
Digital quality broadcasts can now become DVDs in several easy steps. Hard disk, non-destructive editing of TV programs is now a possibility.

What's so good about a hard-disk recorder as opposed to the trusty old VCR?
One of the latest buzzwords is 'time-shifting', it just means you don't have to watch something in realtime. Both VCRs and hard disks can do this. What digital recording CAN do is stop and start watching a program while it's still recording. Take THAT VCR!

PVR refers to a recorder that uses a hard disk instead of tape, and usually in conjunction with some sort of digital program guide. This makes finding programs to record much easier.

Recording a digital signal onto a digital medium such as hard disk, or even straight onto DVD, means that quality isn't lost when recording tapes. And fewer moving parts means you don't have to keep fishing lengths of tape out of the machine when the thing stops playing.

Several DVD/HD recorders are available on the market, but as this month's labs has shown, a dedicated PC with digital tuner and DVD recorder is a much more flexible entity, and only slightly more costly. And for the truly dedicated, a homemade PVR could be built from PC parts for less than the price of a DVD-only recorder.
Multimedia, as promised for years, is finally available.