Death of a Digital TV Recorder

Two years ago my digital TV recorder box (aka a PVR) started to go wrong. It was still in warrantee so I took it back to Maplin and, rather than having the hard disk drive installed in a new box, I decided to upgrade to a new box with a bigger disk and richer functionality. The implication was that I would lose the contents on the hard disk. I decided that this wasn’t a problem as they were mostly films and, with the number of channels now available, it wouldn’t take too long to have a range of films at my disposal.

And now that new PVR has also started to go wrong, with the display not working correctly, although it is possible to still view recordings. The box, a Sagem, has a USB port so it is possible to export the data – although I discovered that they use a proprietary format and so can only be re-imported to a Sagem box.

However it’s probably time to buy a new box. And it seems that I’m happy to accept that recordings from the TV may not be available for long term access – ironically the digital recordings seem to have a shorter life that video recordings! And I’m willing to accept this.