Video Recorder

One great feature of digital TV is that the video and audio arrive in compressed format using a system called MPEG-II compression. This means that although your PC has to do a bit of work to uncompress and display the data when you’re watching a programme, if you want to save the data to disk there is no more compression to be done.

In effect, the broadcasters are saving you disk space. Just to take an example, a one-hour long programme should take up about 1 to 1.5 GB on your hard disk if recorded in its original MPEG-II format. If you were to try and record the same programme in uncompressed form, not only would you need a very fast disk drive (because of the massive data throughput) but you could expect the final file size to be upwards of 20 times bigger!

DigiTV takes advantage of this fact by providing you with a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) that will only record and playback in the original MPEG-II format. An additional benefit of course is that you can use your favourite media player to playback any recorded programmes, although DigiTV does that too.

DigiTV contains a fully MPEG-II compliant CODEC (Coder/Decoder) so that you can replay any file that was recorded in this form (usually .mpg or .mp2 extensions) even if DigiTV did not make the original recording.

The Recording Directory

In order for DigiTV to record programmes using your hard disk, it needs to know where to put the recordings. When you installed DigiTV it was set up to use the ‘Recordings/’ directory from the ‘…../Nebula/DigiTV/‘ directory where DigiTV resides (usually under ‘C:/Program Files/’).

You can of course change this directory by using the mouse to click on File -> Settings -> Recordings -> General.

This will bring up an explorer-style window that will ask you where you want to put any future recordings. When you change the recordings directory, any future recordings will be placed there. It is also the directory that DigiTV will use to form the ‘Play List’ when asked to play back a recording. See Playback Recorded Programmes.

Instant Record

DigiTV has an ‘Instant Record’ or OTR (One Touch Recording) function that you can use if you urgently need to record a programme, or just want to record everything on a particular channel.

To use instant record, hit the ‘R’ key on the keyboard and you’ll see DigiTV start recording. You'll also see a countdown timer appear starting at 30 minutes. Hit 'R' again and you can add 30 minutes to the recording time up to a maximum of 12 hours. Recording will stop automatically when the timer reaches zero.

In v3.5 you are now able to change channel while a recording is taking place, so you are not limited to viewing what you are currently recording. The number of possible channels you can view at the same time will be dependent on the number of physical DigiTV tuners you have installed on your PC. If you have a single tuner, you will be able to change to any other channel being transmitted in the same channel multiplex, but with additional tuners you can view any other channel (as long as they are not being used to record another TV/radio program).

Tip: Use the remote control’s ‘REC’ button or 'R' on the keyboard to start recording the current channel. If only one recording is in progress, pressing the ‘STOP' button on the remote or 'S' on the keyboard will stop the recording. If multiple recordings are in progress, pressing 'STOP' (remote) or S (keyboard) will result in a list of recording activities. Use the keyboard, mouse or remote to select the appropriate recording to terminate.

When DigiTV records a programme, it creates a file with the same name as the programme name and adds the file extension ‘.mpg’, for example ‘Eastenders.mpg’ or ‘BBC News.mpg’, although this is configurable for the advanced user - see Recording Settings.

If you try to record a programme with the same name on two separate occasions, DigiTV adds a number to the end of the file name to indicate the order in which the programmes were recorded. For example, if you recorded a week’s worth of Eastenders you would end up with the following files in your recordings folder:

Eastenders.mpg	Monday’s episode
Eastenders 1.mpg	Tuesday’s episode
Eastenders 2.mpg	Thursday’s episode
Eastenders 3.mpg	Friday’s episode

Each file is also time and date stamped so that you can see which recording was made when.

If you wish you can set DigiTV to continually record all programmes on a particular channel for up to 12 hours. If you do this it will separate each programme into its own named file in the recordings folder so that it’s simplicity itself to find the programme you want when playing back.

Note: In this mode, DigiTV will keep recording until one of the following happens: the recording is terminated (either by pressing S on the keyboard or STOP on the remote), the OTR timer naturally reaches zero or you run out of disk space. Running out of disk space is generally a bad idea so you might like to keep an eye on how long it has been recording. Alternatively use the Video Recorder Timer function to record a specific programme or record over a range of times.