The Home Media Centre has an additional worthwhile feature. Using its Ethernet card, it can connect to the Internet and download an electronic program guide (EPG) maintained by Development One.

It’s a feature that produces the most accurate, user-friendly video recorder you’ve ever used. You can schedule a recording with a few clicks on its remote control, and it will automatically name the program and save it, so that you can select it from a menu and watch it when you like – a procedure that’s called “time shifting”. Push a button on the remote, and you skip past the ads 30 seconds at a time.

The Home Media Centre looks like a PC – albeit a very small one – and its PC design makes it less than totally desirable as a component of a home entertainment system. It tends to be noisy, it emits a good deal of heat, and it doesn’t have a quick wake-up function that would save power. Intel is working on a new motherboard form factor that will address those issues.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been playing with a product called the Topfield 5000PVRt. It doesn’t look like a computer, and therefore doesn’t suffer from some of those disadvantages of the PC form factor.

Officially, it’s a set-top box (STB) and PVR (Personal Video Recorder). Like other consumer devices – and unlike the current version of the Home Media Centre – you can put it on stand-by, and it will wake itself up when its timer tells it to record a show. That saves a lot of power.

But it does have an operating system, and a hard drive. It also has a USB connection. It is, in fact, a computer, which means it can be programmed. It also has two video cards, which allows you to record two programs at the same time, or watch one while recording another.

Until recently, it didn’t have an EPG, but now you can subscribe to the Iceguide service from IceTV, which we wrote about last year, when it was still being developed by Blue Mountains-based inventor, Peter Vogel. You can buy a subscription for $3 a week.

The Iceguide covers all the free-to-air channels in Sydney and Melbourne (which will shortly extend to other capitals), up to seven days in advance. The software is simple to install on your PC, and it fetches the updates and uploads them to the Topfield without a hitch.

Iceguide also works with systems from MythTV, ShowShifter and Media Portal. It’s not officially supported by Windows Media Centre, but there are third-party applications that will hook it up.

The interesting thing about the Topfield is that it has spawned a user community that not only loves to exchange information on the product, but also likes to tinker with it.

They are able to do that because the Korean manufacturer released the Topfield’s API (Application Programming Interface), and continually improve its features. If you know how to program, you can use the API to produce modifications called TAPs (Topfield Application Programs). You can find a list of them here.

Probably the best we’ve seen is ProgressBarKeys, which was written by a Perth programmer, Andy Cullen. For $20, it adds considerable functionality to the remote control buttons.
If you invest in a PVR of any type, you’ll quickly find that you’ve enlisted in an ongoing war between viewers and the program executives of the various channels.

Your object is to use the PVR to watch programs at your convenience, preferably without ads. The networks want you to stick to their schedules, and to watch every second of the paid commercials. They don’t like PVRs, and they have developed strategies for frustrating them. For instance, they might abruptly change the published schedule, so you end up with a partly-recorded program. And because these systems work on clocks, they run their programs on different clock times.

TAPs allow you to counter those tactics, by automatically padding out the recording times, and quickly jumping over the ads. ProgressBarKeys does many things, but it is particularly useful for that. It programs the red key on the remote to jump three minutes at a time, and – for those inevitable occasions when the jump takes you past the program resumption - to scroll back 10 seconds at a time.

We’re pretty sure this is an activity that thousands of Australians will quickly find themselves mastering, as they begin to use what we’ve come to think of as our second computer.