Telewest TVdrive: My Views So Far
I finally got my Telewest TVdrive, which is Telewest’s answer to Sky+, installed last week. The actual installation took over 4 hours as the box kept resetting itself as soon as I tried to use any of the interactive functions or the actual TVdrive itself.
On Tuesday a Telewest engineer replaced the box and everything has been working fine since. The picture quality looks excellent, doubly so to me as for the last 5 months I’ve been watching TV via Windows XP Media Center Extenders. I find the interface quite easy to use, although some reviewers have described it as complicated.
Overall though I think Windows XP Media Center beats it on usability. It is much easier to record a program (click record once) or a whole series (click record twice) with MCE, whereas with the Telewest TVdrive several confirmation screens have to be negotiated as well. MCE also has a built-in search facility to find shows, whereas with TVdrive the user has to navigate to the actual showing via the Guide and then choose their recording settings.
There are still some issues surrounding wide-screen content via a HDMI cable and there is also no 5.1 output, but Telewest are working on fixing this which is good - hopefully in time for the World Cup.
What has surprised me is how quickly the 160GB hard drive fills up. I’m lucky that I live alone, but I’m not sure how a household would cope with the service which holds 80 hours of TV. I think this falls to 20 hours for HD content which won’t go a long way.
Speaking of HD content, the BBC Pride shows available via Teleport look absolutely amazing. Although I’ve been running my Xbox 360 in HD for a while on my new TV, seeing an actual HD TV show blew me away. The Pride show is only upscaled so I can’t wait to view a native HD show!
Related: Telewest TVdrive Vs Sky+ 160 Review
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[...] finally got my Telewest TVDrive fixed yesterday (the HDMI signal had died) and whilst my TVDrive was out of action the BBC HD and [...]