Analogue 1, Digital 0

[almostwitty]

Ages ago, thanks to my ex-workchums at BBC Wales (thanks guys!), I bought myself a Freecom Network Mediaplayer - basically a hard drive which you can connect to your TV. I gleefully set about downloading about 350 Gigabytes of ancient TV programmes from your local friendly non-official sources, looked forward to my digitally converged future, and pretty much left it sat underneath my TV set while I watched endless repeats of Top Gear instead.

Then last night, I rashly invited my neighbours (inclduing Miss Whovian) to come and watch the recent Doctor Who 2007 Christmas special (the one with the Titanic) with me.

First problem - my Sky Plus had inconveniently forgotten to record any of the Christmas programmes I'd set it to record. So instead, I set about downloading it off the Internet, transferring it over to my Mediaplayer, and we could all watch it from there. After 20 minutes of frantically trying to get the laptop to see the hard drive (by mostly rebooting endlessly, and sticking the USB cable in and out), the file transferred over and I thought all was fine and dandy for the big show.

So the doorbell was rung, dinner was ready, wine was poured, and we all sat down to re-watch Doctor Who. Except about half an hour in, the hard drive started spluttering and freezing. Despite numerous reboots, the device refused to work, although the file itself was fine. Bah.

Thus it was that after a suitable soujourn into town for drinks, we all stumbled back into another neighbour's house at 1am, to finish off watching Doctor Who. On her trusty ol' VHS tape. Analogue 1, Digital 0.

Can you recommend any handy devices that'll let me watch downloaded videos on my TV? Preferably ones that come with a DVD player that'll upscale via HDMI, and ones that'll also record off a digital TV signal on demand. Oh, and if it can connect directly to my sound system, that'd be great too.

Comments

[evilfen.livejournal.com]

at least you get to see the dr who special, who knows when it'll be shown here and i seem to have hit my d/l limit for this month :(

repeats of top gear would make me drool, one day i must get all of those too!!

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

I can only tell you what I use, which is a modded original Xbox running Xbox media centre. The drawbacks are that you have to have external storage (the hard drive is a meager 8GB) and it can only upscale to ... 720p I think. The processor isn't quite beefy enough for proper HD.

The pros are that it's awesome.