Author Topic: Recording TV from Now?  (Read 949 times)

Recording TV from Now?
« on: 19 December, 2018, 06:05:35 pm »
We have a now tv box and are in Scotland which on the main channels has different programs to England. My wife would like to be able to record some of these and send them to her cousin south of the border.

Is there a gadget that would enable this and further would it record Now TV too?

Thanks in advance,

PH
Bees do nothing invariably.

Re: Recording TV from Now?
« Reply #1 on: 20 December, 2018, 12:43:25 am »
if your wife's cousin can get BBC I-player then that may offer a route to getting BBC TV programmes without a lot of effort on your wife's part.  But if you want to do it other ways or record from a Now TV box then

a) you could record programmes onto any memory device (eg a USB stick) using the functionality in some TVs. However recordings so made may only play back easily on similar TVs.

b) the route that still works (and is very flexible) but is rapidly going obsolete is to record onto a HDD recorder and then to dub to DVD.  This can be pretty slick if you use the right equipment, but I have a horrible feeling that buying blank DVDs will become increasingly difficult and expensive as time goes on.

 Having gone through a fair bit of misery at the time (over ten years ago now) in choosing a suitable machine I settled on the Sony RDR-HXD series machines (not any other sony models unless you don't require a freeview tuner in which case an RDR-GX series model may do) as being the thing to use for recording and dubbing to DVD. It does high speed dubbing so a 4.7G DVD (~2hrs to ~four hours laying time at sensible resolution)   can be dubbed in about ten minutes.

An RDR-HXD  machine has a built in freeview tuner and making series recordings from that is very easy. It will also make timed recordings from an external source. Recordings can be varied in quality from less than 1GB/hr to over 3GB/hr. Recordings are always in SD but the machine upscales the output to HD if you use the HDMI output.   However to connect it to a Now TV box may require another converter; IIRC a Now TV box has only a HDMI output and these recorders have an HDMI output but don't have an HDMI input, so you need to convert to a SD video signal of some kind. I think you can buy boxes on ebay or amazon that will do this.

You can pick up an RDR-HXD series machine from £25 to £100 on gumtree. I just looked and there are several on sale north of the border right now (including a RDR-HXD995 model which has a decent size HDD in it for only £50 which is pretty good value).  FWIW you can also upgrade these machines to accept a much larger HDD if you want to store lots of recordings without dubbing them to DVD.

cheers