Foxtel, Humax, Fetch and Beyonwiz lead the PVR market

It’s better to record free-to-air shows than watch them later on a low-res catch-up service. Here’s how you do it.

Clockwise from top left: Foxtel, Humax, Fetch and Beyonwiz.

The introduction of catch-up TV means there’s less need to record free-to-air programs.

But not every show is on the catch-up service, and streaming quality can be poor. A new breed of personal video recorders is offering alluring reasons to have a PVR.

They include an ability to see your recorded TV programs as an network drive on your home network. So you can play recordings on PCs, phones and tablets around home without being tethered to watching them on your central home TV system. Beyonwiz and Humax below offer this. Others in the market provide apps to effect the same.

Here are four of the best.

Beyonwiz T4: Local outfit Beyonwiz makes feature-rich PVRs and the T4 is no exception. Its four tuners can record up to 10 programs simultaneously across four channel groups. You can stream TV live and record to iPad, iPhone and Android with its WizOS app. There’s full 1080p quality playback with downloadable plugins for Plex, IceTV, YouTube and more. Comprehensive but the Linux interface may be a bit over-tetchy for some. From $599 plus hard drives.

Foxtel IQ3 Box: iQ3 is another subscription box that makes a fine PVR. You can play live TV and record subscription and free-to-air programs. IQ3’s “start over” feature lets you go back to the beginning of a show that already has begun. Tuning in late is not an issue. The guide also goes backwards in time by up to 24 hours. Select a program and iQ3 will stream it from catch-up TV where available. All content is treated as a unit, no matter the source. IQ3 starts at $125 plus $25 for a self-install kit, plus a monthly subscription cost.

Fetch TV Gen2: Fetch TV’s box not only offers streamed channels and movies, it’s also a PVR with space for up to 585 hours of standard definition recording. It has a comprehensive EPG, three tuners that record up to four channels while you watch another, and integrated access to ABC, SBS, Seven and Ten catch-up services. You pay $15 a month to access 35-plus premium channels. The box connects only through ethernet to your network. Buy through an ISP or $399 outright.

Humax 4 Tune: Humax’s HMS-1000T PVR is feature-rich with a user-friendly interface. It has four tuners and one terabyte of storage; add an external hard drive to increase storage further. You can live stream to two mobile devices, access media files from across a home network, remote record from mobile devices and transfer media files to and from other devices across your network. Its 15-day EPG includes the seven previous days, and it fetches already broadcast programs from catch-up services. $699