I did more research on whether PlayTV would suit my needs, and it looks like there are a couple stumbling blocks:
- PlayTV only records to the internal HDD. Given that it doesn’t compress the files, and will be sharing the drive with game saves and installs, I can see this filling up very quickly.
- One can copy files from the HDD to an external USB drive, but there are extreme limitations. The PS3 only understands external drives in FAT32 format. This has a maximum file size of 4GB. Normally, this is fine, but under HDTV, you can squeeze maybe 30 minutes of TV. Forget longer shows or movies.
- No ability to stream back from the PS3 to devices on the network other than the PSP.
This is sufficient dealbreaker for me, so I’m going back to building my own PVR. So far, I’ve built up an pretty impressive machine which will cost around $600. I still haven’t added in the tuner or remote control, but still not a bad deal.
I’m also mucking around with MythBuntu in a VM to see what it’s like (lack of tuner notwithstanding).