Why do people keep saying recording has to be enabled at the server end? It does not. It has to be a feature enabled on our boxes. The data flows into our box and our box simply puts the data on a hard drive, memory stick, or whatever as long as the box has the software to do it. It doesn't work any differently than our satellite receivers. I hit record and the show records to a hard drive because the receiver manufacture wrote software to do it. Dish Network can stop the capability to record from their end because they have software control over their receivers. They do this on occasion with some PPV and special events. Guess what, I can still record because they don't have control over my receivers software. If the box manufacturers wrote recording software and provided a firmware update we could record the data coming into our boxes regardless of what the servers supposed capabilities are.
Now, as far as a work around to the lack of the recording feature that our boxes do not come with, I plug my AVOV box into my DVD recorder and when something comes on I hit record on the DVD machine. My DVD recorder has a hard drive in it so it has PVR capabilities. When I have the AVOV plugged into the DVD machine it records the video and I can pause live TV and rewind, and with enough buffer time I can fast forward all done through the DVD machine. Granted this is analog but until the box manufacturers support the recording feature this is the best I have.