With so much to record over the Christmas period I'm concerned that I may not have enough space on the hard drive. Is it as simple as plugging in an external hard drive to the usb socket to give extra capacity?

Can you record direct on to the external drive or do you have to transfer files from the internal drive?

What about formatting and such matters?

Any advice welcome!

You can't record to an external device you can only transfer material. The is a limit on the size of a file that will transfer to a drive formatted FAT32 is 4Gb. To overcome this limit you need to use a drive formatted EXT3.
And yes you can simply use the USB but transfer times are slow especially for HD content. ITV HD content won't transfer.

Personally I use an external drive and as long as you housekeep reguarly it's not a bad way to keep more recordings without the immediate outlay of upgrading the internal drive.

Thanks for your advice. Just one more question, is it possible to play back the transferred files directly from the external drive or must they be transferred back on to the internal drive?

Yep you can playback directly from the external drive ( and since the firmware upgrade this has also been possible with transferrred HD recordings too)

Just a thought, is there any way to transfer files using the network port ?

Thanks
Keith

No - it would open up all sorts of interesting possibilities, but Humax (bob_cat) have said that the processor isn't up to the job. Shame.