PVR Wire

Flash video recorders are all the rage these days. At least that's what the manufacturers of these products must think because we've seen a swarm of them hitting the market in the last few months.

We've covered the Neuros MPEG-4 recorder, the i.Tech, the Evergreen, and the Storvision miniVCR SV-1000 MPEG-4. We've also covered the Hagiwara Easy Recorder 2 for Memory Stick Duo.

The fine folks at Hagiwara were kind enough to loan us an Easy Recorder 2 for review and the second installment of Up Close takes a look at the product to get the 411 on these "record directly to a memory card" devices to see how they fair.

Admittedly, video to memory card devices fulfill the needs of a very niche market. The Easy Recorder 2 caters to the PSP and iPod owning group because it creates content in MP4 format that is formatted specifically to fit on the smaller screens found on these devices.

However, with the advent of sites like YouTube and its competitors, devices like these are my tools of choice for capturing content from any device with an A/V out. For instance, the video in this post was captured from my TiVo and uploaded to YouTube using the Easy Recorder 2.

On the whole, we came away pretty impressed with what the Easy Recorder 2 had to offer. Find out what we thought about the product and get an exclusive coupon code for a discount after the jump.

To kick off the new Up Close feature, the kind people at VidaBox were nice enough to loan PVR Wire one of their recently released RoomMate Media Center PCs.

We covered the VidaBox line-up of Media Center PCs in a cursory manner back in July; however, an opportunity to take a closer look at this quaint little PVR arose so we hopped on it.

VidaBox RoomMate Up Close after the jump. Also, be sure to check out the VidaBox promotion at the end of the write-up.

At PVR Wire we're always looking for ways to improve on our ever-evolving content and at the same time provide our readers with the best PVR information available online.

That being said, we're premiering a new feature this week called Up Close where we take a closer look at some of the products we cover in our day to day postings. We're not a review site per se, so don't expect any benchmarking or even a score for that matter. Do expect detailed looks at various products - full of opinions and subjective thoughts. This is a blog afterall.

So manufacturers of PVR related hardware and software alike, consider this an open invitation to send us an email if you'd like PVR Wire to look at one of your products with a more inquisitive eye. We can't promise to always be nice, but we do promise to talk about your goods or service and there's a good chance we can give it a bit more exposure.

In future weeks you can look forward to taking an up close look at the Headache Free MythTV and the PVR upgrades coming to Nero 7. As usual, leave us any thoughts or suggestions in the comments.