Can you remember buying your first VCR? They were great when they came out. Then came DVRs which are also very useful. But right now how can you record over the air TV? Amazon has its Fire TV Recast which can run as high as $279 and allow you to store many hours of HDTV shows. And they aren’t the only ones.
TiVo is another one that has a long track record, but unlike Amazon’s Fire TV recast some of TiVo’s model has a monthly service fee. Now they are both very powerful. In fact, I remember hearing when VCRs first came out they were really expensive.
Maybe you don’t want to record a whole season of NCIS? But if all you want to do is to record a TV show that you can’t catch there is a far cheaper alternative. I did a review on a Mediasonic TV converter box. They are really inexpensive and are still being made. And there are many other ones on the market easily found on Amazon.com or Walmart.com. Just put “TV converter box” in the search box and you will find many. Here’s the one I bought. The company sent me one to review in 2014 and it’s still working!
But these companies making them don’t realize the really compelling reason to buy one of these. You could have a nice HDTV now and you may be thinking I don’t need a TV converter box to pick up channels. And if it’s tied to the internet you can watch a rerun easily enough. But sometimes you can’t or you want to watch it tomorrow and not next week. These boxes allow to record the show and watch it later.
For HDTV recorded in 1080 I would use a hard drive connected to the box’s USB port. It will give loads of room to store hours and hours of video. But I was watching an old movie and I put it on a USB thumb drive and it worked well. Mediasonic will warn you not to use a thumb drive, but mine worked well. The hard drive will be better of course and you don’t have to worry about running out of space. They are priced anywhere from $45 to $75 so they are quite reasonable.
In addition, Mediasonic is just one of many out there as a solution for how to record over the air tv. All you need to do is look for one that has a USB port and in the description it will say PVR for personal video recorder for how to record over the air tv. Think of it as an inexpensive VCR that records not on videotape but on a hard drive or a USB thumb drive. My Mediasonic PVR records wonderfully!
