Our review of the TiVO has been delayed by the fact that the Bleeding Edge TV antenna is currently a tangled mess on the roof, as a result of recent storms, and we're waiting for the antenna man to fix it.

But we knew that it wouldn't be long before they would be looking for the 1TB My DVR Expander which was finally released by Western Digital only last week ($299.99). If they followed the usual trajectory of the obsessive time-and-geography-shifter however, they'd probably exhaust even that apparently huge storage, and regret the absence of that network package, as they juggled their files between the TiVO and their computers.

Hard core addicts aren't content with those arrangements. Their interests have spawned a growing armada of network media players and media-oriented NAS storage servers, which act as a permanent bridge between your digital media storage (usually a PC or Network Attached Storage) and a TV or audio/video player, thus relieving one of the side-effects of this addiction: constant weariness from having to burn files to CDs or DVDs or copy them to portable storage, then trek from desktop to lounge to play the music or video.

Even Western Digital has a variation on the theme with the WD TV Media Player. While it doesn't quite compete with more expensive players, at $199 it's definitely worth considering.

In the UK, The Guardian's Technology Editor named the Neuros OSD “absolutely my favourite device of the year”. Bleeding Edge was less impressed with it. We were more taken with the MediaGate MG-450HD.

The device that has excited our own addiction, however, is the DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A. The combination of its array of connections and range of formats makes it well worth the $500 to $600 we've seen on staticice.com.au. It can stream and transfer multimedia files via a LAN connection, at either 10/100 or 1Gbps. That works even with Windows Vista, through an application called NetShare 2.02 beta .

You can hook it up to a digital camera, flash drive or external hard drive via two USB host ports. You can turn it into a set-top box with an optional HDTV tuner, to record shows in MPEG2 on an internal SATA hard drive.

Then there's the array of output options. Aside from Component, S-Video and Composite, there’s HDMI, and digital (Coax/Toslink) audio connections. It can interpret the most common formats like MP2, WMA, PCM, DTS, WMV9 and WMV-HD, DIVX, DVid, HDV and the new H.264 (MKV) files at 1080p resolution. It can handle a DVD ISO file, amd plays back 1080p video and still images. You can add a Wi-Fi dongle via a USB port if you can't get a cable to it.

For the most part it is easy to setup – although it took quite a bit of fiddling to get Vista to co-operate - and you control operations via a central panel or remote.

If you own any of these devices, you should consider signing up to mpcclub.com, because it's a great source of information and new firmware. We regard it as a public safe-injection room.