Ordinary Gweilo

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I already have a device that can record digital TV. It’s the Now TV/DVB combined set-top box that can receive Now HD and terrestrial digital channels.  All you need to do is add an external disk through the USB connector, and off you go.

Admittedly the functionality is rather basic and the user interface is fairly horrible, but it does the job.  The most annoying feature is that you can only set it to record something from the EPG, and that is only available 7 days ahead.  You can set it to record at the same time every week, but it’s not clever enough to work out if the time changes, and there is no facility to add a few minutes at the start or end of the programme – and there appears to be no way to amend the start or end time manually.  So my reccording of Saturday morning’s Presidential debate ends before the programme ended.

It does keep the subtitles with the programme, and the quality appears to be the same as the original (which is it as it should be with a digital device).  It’s also possible to record one channel whilst simultaneously watching another digital terrestrial channel in the same frequency range (e.g. TVB Pearl and ATV World) or anything on Now TV.

The weirdest limitation is that it’s not possible to record programmes from Now TV.  Seems kinda obvious that a Now box with recording capability would allow you to record Now channels, but no that definitely isn’t included.

What they are offering is a facility to record programmes on to a central server to watch later, but this currently only applies to their own News & Business News channels, and EPL games.  I’m having trouble trying to imagine why anyone would want to record news or business news, but the facility to record an EPL game could be attractive – though some games are already available as part of their on-demand service, which is bundled with Now Sports, whereas this new facility costs HK$15/month.

Let me know when you have it available for other channels, and then I’ll consider it.