A recording you make on a hard-drive recorder sits on a drive in your lounge room. It stays there when the licence expires, when the catch-up window closes and when the streaming service shuts down. No subscription offers that. For live sport, for the nightly news, and for anyone who wants to watch free-to-air on their own schedule without a subscription, that is still worth having.
Far fewer are sold here than there used to be. The Good Guys' entire recorder range is two Panasonics, and no other brand appears in it. Everything else that looks like a PVR in search results is either a UK Freeview Play box that will not tune Australian broadcasts, or a set-top box that records to a USB stick you supply.
1. Best overall: Panasonic 1TB Twin Tuner Smart PVR
Two tuners and a 1TB drive, which Panasonic rates at up to 1,000 hours. It records one channel while you watch another, or both at once while the TV is off. Owners rate it 4.3 across 456 reviews at The Good Guys.
Beyond the recording it has built-in wi-fi, YouTube, and an app that schedules recordings and plays them back on a phone or tablet away from home. Old Full HD material is upscaled on the way out to a 4K TV. At around $600 it is the cheapest of the two Panasonics and the one with twice the storage, which is the reason it leads here.
What We Like:
- 1TB across two tuners
- Remote scheduling from the app
- Cheaper than the Blu-ray model
What We Don't Like:
- No disc playback at all
2. Best for streaming and recording in one box: Fetch Mighty 4
Four tuners and a 1TB drive rated at 585 hours, so it records up to three channels while you watch a fourth. No other box sold here records that many at once. It also carries the streaming apps, a combined guide across free-to-air and streaming, and voice search across both, so it replaces a streaming stick as well as a recorder.
The catch is the money. Fetch states the devices are not sold as standalone hardware: the box is around $660 and will not run without a Fetch Access subscription of about $5 a month, plus a small one-off activation fee. The Panasonic costs less up front and nothing after that.
What We Like:
- Records three channels while you watch a fourth
- Streaming apps and free-to-air in one guide
- Voice search across everything
What We Don't Like:
- Will not work without the monthly subscription
3. Best for a disc collection: Panasonic Blu-ray Player/500GB Twin Tuner Recorder
The same twin-tuner recorder with a Blu-ray deck built into it, so one box replaces a recorder and a player. It handles BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R including dual layer, and upscales discs to 4K. Owners rate it 4.4 across 260 reviews.
It suits a household with shelves of discs and one HDMI input to spare. It costs about $100 more than the HWT260 and gives you half the recording space.
What We Like:
- Blu-ray deck and recorder in one
- Handles dual-layer recordable discs
- 4K upscaling from disc
What We Don't Like:
- 500GB, half the storage of the cheaper model
4. Cheapest way to record free-to-air: Linsar Set Top Box
Around $49, with a program guide, an HDMI output and a single USB port it records to. It has no drive of its own, so recording means leaving a USB stick or portable drive plugged into the back. Owners rate it 4.4 across 69 reviews.
It suits an older TV in a spare room, or anyone who records a couple of hours a week and does not want to spend $600 to do it. One tuner means one recording at a time, and nothing to watch but that channel while it runs.
What We Like:
- Around $49
- Program guide and Full HD
- Adds recording to an old TV
What We Don't Like:
- One tuner, so you watch whatever it is recording
What to check before you buy
| Tuners | Storage | Discs | Ongoing cost | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linsar LSSTB | 1 | Your own USB | No | None | $40–60 |
| Panasonic DMR-HWT260GN | 2 | 1TB | No | None | $550–650 |
| Fetch Mighty 4 | 4 | 1TB | No | About $5/month | $650–700 |
| Panasonic DMR-BWT460GN | 2 | 500GB | Blu-ray | None | $650–750 |
Panasonic and Linsar figures and prices are from The Good Guys; the Fetch figures are from Fetch's own store listing.
Count the tuners, not the hours. Storage is rarely what runs out first. Two shows on at once on different channels is what defeats a single-tuner box, and it happens most weeks. Two tuners covers almost every household; four only matters if several people record independently.
A recorder still needs an antenna. Every box here tunes broadcast television through the aerial socket. Fetch can stream free-to-air over the internet instead, but its own listing notes some functions are unavailable that way, and recording is one of the things affected.
Watch out for UK recorders. Freeview Play boxes sold through Amazon look like good value and will not work here. Australia broadcasts DVB-T with a different guide system, and a UK tuner finds nothing.
Think about where the recordings end up. None of these boxes lets you copy a recording off to a computer in a normal file format. What you record stays on that drive, and if the drive dies the recordings go with it.
