V+ : A Nerd's Review

I've had my V+ box for about a month now and I felt the urge to write something about it. You may be wondering if you should get one, you may be looking to compare it with your TiVo, VCR or Sky+ box or you may just enjoy sniggering at any use of the word "Virgin" in print. Whichever it is I hope this fulfils your desires and informs, educates and entertains.

When you press the V+ button on the remote, you are taken to the menu screen. Whatever you were watching at the time continues to play in a smaller window on the right. Throughout this article you will see images from something called "Shipwrecked". I wasn't watching this - my box happened to still be on Channel 4 after last night's "Peep Show". Young people in bikinis being vacuous on a tropical island is not my ideal way of spending Saturday morning.

One of the most useful things on this screen is the bit which tells you how much space you've got left. Something that bugged me about TiVo was that there was no way of knowing how much room was left on the hard drive. Your actual V+ box can hold 80 hours of television goodness (TiVo had only a quarter of that) and the quality is excellent because it records the raw data signal rather than doing an on-the-fly conversion.

The V+ menu structure has a lot a screens to go through. This can be a little cumbersome at first but fortunately they allow you to use the numbers on your remote so you don't have to scroll through all the options every damn time. Virgin's software people have followed the Microsoft principle that there should always be as many ways of seeing and doing the same stuff as possible. So you don't just get a list of recordings if you press "Recorded Programmes", you get three different ways of listing said recordings.

The recordings by date gives you a newest-first run down of everything you've asked your new best friend to record for you. It gives you the channel, the date, the status and the duration of each recording. Highlight a programme and press OK and you're watching it in a few seconds. "Now" next to Annie Hall means it is currently recording.

Because the V+ has three tuners (allowing you to record two shows and watch a third) it isn't immediately obvious what is recording at any given moment. You will see one or two red lights on the display...

...but neither of those red lights is recording channel 104 so you don't know what it is up to unless you do some menu delving.

The second way of viewing your recordings is alphabetically. Rather than give you a long list, the programmes are broken down into seven groupings which can be selected using left and right or by pressing blue. Thus, once you get used to the navigation system, it is really easy to find what you want.

And finally, you can opt to view your recordings by series. V+ has a series link function which means you tell it to record every episode of a particular series and it does so automatically. This isn't unique - most PVRs have a similar idea - but it scores over TiVo's series link because it is able to distinguish between episodes which are part of the series and episodes which aren't. Or, to put it in a way that makes sense, suppose I wanted to record the new series of CSI on Channel Five. V+ would record each week's 9pm CSI premiere and nothing else. TiVo had a habit of recording the main showing, any repeat showing, any repeats of earlier seasons and - because it thought me a CSI junkie - any airings of CSI on any other channel. Without manual intervention it was all but impossible to get TiVo to record only the episodes I wanted.

When you choose the series display you get an alphabetical list of your chosen series. You'll see that Virgin's EPG department have added little notes to some of the titles to help resolve the problem described above. It doesn't mean that it will only record Doctor Who Confidential if it is on at exactly 19:45, only that it will record the Saturday night Doctor Who Confidential and not the other showings of either Confidential or the cut-down version.

If I select a series from the list and press OK...

...it gives me all the episodes I have recorded so I could watch them in one exciting lump should I decide to do so. Again, this is a huge improvement over TiVo's single date-ordered list of recordings.

But we don't just want to watch programmes - we want to record them too. So it is back to the main menu (a simple press of the V+ button will do this - no need to go back through all the above menu goodness). In good, old fashioned Virgin Media plain English we have "Set New Recordings".

Again, we have a list of numbered options. The TV Guide is the easiest way to pick what you want to record (and this can also be accessed in various formats while you are watching TV by pressing "Favourites", "Guide", "Home" or just plain "TV".

The Virgin EPG is tonnes faster than the old ntl: one. One of the things I loved most about TiVo was that the programme guide was faster than Ronaldo and meant I didn't have to spend an evening trawling through ntl's frankly pathetic attempt at an EPG. Even though VM's is very responsive, they still give you the option to filter it before you start. It is well worth picking your twenty or thirty favourite channels and adding them to your Favourites list so you don't have to browse through three hundred channels each time or learn channel numbers like a geek.

The EPG layout gives you a couple of hours and half a dozen channels. Using the up, down, left and right buttons you move around the screen, stopping at any points of interest to press the i button for extra info.

When you find what you want, you highlight it (so it is in yellow) and can do one of three things. You can set a reminder so you don't forget to watch it, you can press the yellow button to record the entire series or press the record button to just record this broadcast.

Your planned recordings show up in red so you can easily see them while browsing the EPG at a later date. If you recording clashes with other recordings, you'll get a warning which tells you either to cancel other recordings or you won't be able to record this one. With two tuners this should only happen on rare occasions but if you pad your recordings (i.e. add minutes at the beginning and end) and they overlap you might see warnings more often.

You don't have to use the EPG if you don't want to - you can set manual recordings if you prefer.

You are asked to specify the date, start, end and channel number - reminiscent of setting a video recorder but without having to lie on the floor and squint. Alas, the manual recordings don't give you the option to set a repeating recording (daily or weekly). This probably wouldn't cause too many problems (because regular recordings would almost certainly fit within the scope of the EPG) but it wouldn't be too difficult a piece of functionality to add and it stands out as something TiVo offered that V+ doesn't.

Again, if your manual recording clashes you will get this message. You can determine your order of priorities elsewhere in the system so it could be that you want your manual recordings to record no matter what. It would be nice if it told you which programmes were causing the clash.

Finally, if you are just browsing round for something that is your mug of tea, you can pick option three - categories.

The categories menu is surprisingly short with only seven entries. Some - such as movies, sport and kids - are fairly self explanatory but "Entertain Me" is rather vague. Equally, lumping together "series, soaps and drama" is a bit awkward.

If we select the aforementioned "Entertain Me" we get...

...another menu. And quite a mixed one at that. Note that at the bottom of the sub-menu in their catch-all category they still have a "General" option for those shows (presumably) which are entertaining but you can't quite put your finger on why. The two main problems with the category search are that it takes AGES to bring back all the (for example) comedy programmes because it searches through every single EPG entry and brings back all those tagged as comedy (rather than having pre-sorted lists downloaded alongside the regular EPG information)...

...and that the results are pretty much useless when they finally arrive. I don't believe for one moment that this is the list of all today's comedy shows (starting with A to H) on all existing channels. A very quick glance at DigiGuide tells me that "Everybody Loves Raymond" is on Paramount this evening so thumbs down to this poor quality filtering. I would also add two other weaknesses in the category search - firstly that it lists channels I don't subscribe to (and therefore can't record from) such as Star News and secondly...

...if you pick one of the listed radio programmes...

...it tells you that you can't actually record radio programmes. So why list them? It is a known issue that you can't record from radio channels and VM say they are looking into it for a future upgrade but it is still pretty annoying for anyone with the patience to actually get this far.

Going back to the main menu, if you want to see what shows are scheduled to be recorded you press 3.

Another sub-menu lets you view by individual programme or by series .

The programmes list does include the items also included in the series list so you don't need to check both if you want to know what is coming up. Series entries have a little circular symbol next to them. You can cancel recordings from this screen by pressing the record button.

The series menu shows you three things - firstly, the priority that determines which programme would be recorded in the event of a clash. The default is to assume the earlier you set up the recording, the higher the priority. Until I looked at this screen shot I didn't know you could change the priority so we've all learned something today. The second thing it shows you is the upcoming episodes if you press the blue button. The final thing you can see is the personality of whomever owns this particular V+ box. That would be me. I only record "Totally Doctor Who" for the cartoon. I do. Really, I do.

The fourth item on the main menu is "V+ Extras" which is useful but not as exciting as it might sound. You might imagine it contains exclusive On Demand content for subscribers or other goodies. Instead it is mainly system settings - all useful stuff but not glamorous or "added value" as DVD extras are often referred to as.

The most useful "Extra" really ought to be on the main menu page as it doesn't fit with the settings list at all. TiVo had a "copy to VCR" function but it was limited in that you could only record one thing at a time (if you had two things to record you would set the first recording and when it was finished you would repeat the process for the second and so on).

V+ lets you put a recording list together and I love it. It really is fantastically useful. You can queue up a bunch of stuff, go off to work and when you get home it is all done. Again, the alphabetical grouping is used to make it easier to find things and recordings of the same name are oldest-first.

A running total shows you how long your list will take to copy. You aren't limited to six items - the seventh would go onto a second page (et cetera). While the recording is in progress you will get an updates page which lets you know what is currently being copied and how long the whole list has left. The V+ box is very well designed because, if you have it connected up properly, you can still watch TV (or V+ recordings) while it archives your old recordings without disturbing your DVD-R or VCR. This age of multiple tuners really is awesome.

If you're anything like me (and if you are, you should consider suing your genes) you don't trust TV channels to broadcast things when they say they will. Hence the usefulness of being able to extend your recordings.

You can pick how long to add at the beginning and end of each programme using the left and right arrow keys.

The last setting is how the box will react when it is full. TiVo would just automatically delete recordings. This wasn't great as the hard drive was so small that programmes generally only had a life of seven to ten days (and, as mentioned above, there was no way of knowing how much space you had left). It is impossible not to know if you are running short of space but just in case you are away or careless or you have something hanging from the top of your TV which blocks out the top third of the screen, you get to make a choice about how V+ will cope.

There are three options and they pretty much cover every solution (short of the box growing new memory and expanding its capacity by organic magic).

The last main menu item is the help function. Rather than a dry, text based format, Virgin have opted for some explanatory cartoons.

Each of the five help items is explained by this politically correct family group. I haven't watched any of them but I'm sure they're fine.

So overall I think V+ is pretty damned good. It is a lot more convenient than my old TiVo, the multiple tuners are an enormous boon, the box's capacity is excellent, everything is logically laid out and it is quick and simple to use. The areas for improvement are the EPG's limitations if you want to search in a non-linear way (TiVo and DigiGuide are both much better and let you search by title, actor, presenter, key word etc), the inability to record radio programmes and the not-as-helpful-as-they-could-be error messages. Another improvement would be around padded recordings - if I'm recording to consecutive programmes on the same channel, the four minutes of overlap (2 added to the end of one and 2 added to the start of the other) mean I am using both tuners and so can't record anything else at that time. It should really only use one tuner because it is only recording one channel (and for those four minutes record the same data to both files).

Hopefully the service will continue to improve - it only launched in February - and fulfil its potential. Future enhancements could include the third tuner being activated as a recorder and integration with the On Demand/Catch Up functionality (so you might be setting a recording of Doctor Who and the box tells you that this show will be available via On Demand so you could save disc space by not recording it yourself).

It is a great toy and one I would recommend to anyone. You don't have to buy the box (unlike Sky+) and, depending on the VM package you're on, V+ can even end up costing you less than you were paying for a normal box. Remember - Virgin Media are desperate for new customers so ring 'em up and they might make you a really good offer.