Digital video recorder

consumer electronics device that records television shows to a hard disk in digital format.

This makes the "time shifting" feature (traditionally done by a VCR) much more convenient, and also allows for "trick modes" such as pausing live TV, instant replay of interesting scenes, and skipping advertising. Most PVR recorders use the MPEG format for encoding analog video signals.

The most popular PVRs on the market are TiVo's TiVo and DNNA's ReplayTV. Many satellite and cable companies are incorporating PVR functions into their set-top box, such as with DirecTivo. In this case there is no encoding necessary in the PVR, as the satellite signal is already a digitally encoded MPEG stream. The PVR simply stores the digital stream directly to disk.

Upcoming entrants into the market include products such as Digeo's Moxi, and Microsoft's Media Center.

In 2003, the Yakima, Washington Police Department began using PVRs in their patrol cars to record the activities of officers and suspects. Since then, many other police departments have followed suit, due to the increased reliability and decreased cost compared to analog video systems.

There are ways to make one's own PVR using software and hardware available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems. There are even people working on turning the Xbox into a PVR with a modchip.

PVR Software

There is PVR software available for Linux and Windows for people who make their own homemade recorders.

Linux

The two main PVR applications for Linux are MythTV and Freevo both of which are GPL open source software.

Macintosh

El Gato makes a PVR device called .

Windows

Microsoft Windows has several open source PVR applications including myHTPC, GB-PVR, OpenHTPC, and Media Center Portal

There also are several proprietary applications including SageTV, BeyondTV, ChrisTV and Hard disk recorder