Philips Hard Drive/DVD Recorder

Philips showed us a hard drive DVD recorder today which is half fab, half not so much. Let's deal with the fab bit first - it's sunny here so I'm feeling charitable.

The idea behind the DVDR5570H is that there's a hard disc which is separated into an area for adding media content, such as photos and music, another for storing your recorded TV and a third which acts as a buffer. This last bit stores up to 6 hours of the television you've been watching (so if you skip about the channels the skipping about will be stored). There's an EPG for your digital tuner and something called Commercial Block. This scans through anything you record, such as a film, and puts markers where the commercials start and end. This means when you watch it back, you can skip forward through the commercials with just a press of a button. More on this in the 'not so fab' area.

There's a Media Jukebox element which allows you to plug in anything USB to the USB port and view the media on it. You can also transfer the files back and forth, so you can transfer all the songs on your MP3 player to the hard drive of the recorder, or stick photos back onto the media player from the recorder.

Which all sounds marvelous.

Unfortunately, there's only one tuner, which means you can only watch and record one channel, rather than being able to record QI whilst watching Eastenders. Boo. The Commercial Block also has its down sides - you need to leave the recorder in standby for 20 minutes to process the commercial breaks for one hour of programming.

Pricing is going to be about 399 euros for the 120GB version and 499 for the 250GB version. Ouch. Weirdly, despite the fact that it's 'just been lunched' you can already pick one up on Empire Direct.