Hi Nigel,
I'm in Canada where pirating of American satellites is a booming business. The American satellite companies can't prosecute anyone here. The Canadian satellite companies were losing a lot of business, so recently forced our government to ban selling of the pirate ones. It is still a booming business, I don't think the new law is enforced. The government even says that soon they will outlaw users (who is going to pay someone to search for the millions of pirate users and confront them?).
BTW, an American satellite company came-up with a heavily encryped system with so many bits in its code that they said it would take an army of the latest computers 100 years or more to break its code. It took a single geek about two weeks.
My PVR certainly is impressive. I recently got new glasses (tri-focal) and couldn't believe how much noise and interference that my analog cable had. A call to my cable company to find out what's new led me to this PVR. The salesman was so hungry for his commission and meeting his quota (it was near the end of this month, I should have called today) that I talked him down to only 2 bucks per month, then he sweetened the deal with a discount on my broadband internet. Of course he also wanted to sell me a cell phone deal and even offered a free camera phone that I asked about.
The PVR's digital picture, sound and recordings are absolutely perfect. I don't see the need for HDTV anytime soon.
I had to boot the thingy only once after a lightning storm, it got all confused.
Yeah, it does record 2 channels at once plus you can view something that was previously recorded.