I said I’m pleased with my new Panasonic DVR but I’m just discovering how good it is.

I put on a music CD this morning for the first time. It recognised it and played it but also put a track list up on the screen with the titles and times of all the tracks! I’ve never seen this before. It’s obvious now: all this information is encoded in the TOC (table of contents) in the inner track of a CD, but you can’t usually see it on a CD player.

Then after a minute or two, it switched the TV screen to a screen-saver display of quite good built-in photos of mountains, trees, flowers and so on. Nice! I’m sure I’ll become blase about it soon enough, but I’m impressed at the moment.

But wait, there’s more: I’ve had a DVD for a while with 24 old Sgt Bilko episodes in black and white that someone gave me (thanks Colin). They’re in .avi format, downloaded from the web. I’ve played one or two on the computer, but it wasn’t the ideal way to watch.

I just put it into the Panasonic to see what would happen. Bingo! It recognises them as playable by the DiVX decoder and lists them on screen complete with titles. Select one, press play and Ernie’s your sergeant.

Amazing.