I’ve spent the last few days fiddling with my new PVR system now affectionately dubbed “PiVo”) getting things just right, and last night was the machine’s first true test. Sunday night I told the machine to “record every episode of American Idol from now on,” and last night my little digital recording pal did just that. Quietly in the background, hard drives spun up, the channel changed, and the computer recorded American Idol. After the kids went to bed, we got to sit down at watch the show at our leisure. It’s like a VCR that programs itself and never forgets. During playback, I didn’t realize that the ComSkip software I installed worked in real time. Through some magical technology, GB-PVR and ComSkip detect when commercials stop and start, and automatically jump over them when you watch your programs. The only downfall I so see so far is that by removing commercials, I’m also removing all my bathroom breaks. At least pause still works.

Susan wasn’t thrilled with the quality of the recording. I guess I’m so used to watching video on a computer that I didn’t miss the miniscule ticks and stutters that Susan picked up on. The machine right now has 512 meg of RAM; tonight, PiVo gets upgraded to a gig. We’ll see if that doesn’t make a difference.

I also got “transcoding” set up and working now on a nightly basis. “Transcoding” is a process that goes through each recorded video and compresses the normally uncompressed MPEG files into highly compressed AVI (divx or vxid format) files. The process runs in the middle of the night so I never see it happen, and the compressed files show no noticable decrease in quality. Just to give you an idea, last night’s two-hour American Idol took up almost four gig of drive space in MPEG format. This morning it has been shrunk to around 1.3 gig. Although this won’t prevent the purchasing of an additional hard drive, it’ll certainly postpone it.