With Digital Switch Off looming, and a general accumulation of obsolete kit and spaghetti wiring, I have finally got around to re-cabling the living room. This was more of a pig of a job than I thought it would be. Mostly I'm now happy with things, simpler and better working.

The one thing I'm not happy with is the DVD recorder. I replaced my old and much loved Panasonic EH68 with one of the newer XW390s. On paper it should have been a vast improvement - twin freeview tuner instead of one analog tuner, DLNA server to stream recorded material around the house, larger hard drive etc. It connects both to a UHF aerial and (via the good old yellow, white and red AV cable) to the Sky box.

The freeview tuners work fine. I can record etc without problems.

What isn't working is timer recordings from external sources. I can set it to record from composite by pushing record, and I can tell it how long to record once I have done so (eg record for two hours, SP mode). However, I can't set a timer - eg record from AV from 3am to 4am. I can do this for over the air sources, but not from the external AV source.

My EH68 could do this, and could my even older e85H, and it's fairly vital to me. Most of what I record is things like the late-night military stuff on the History channel for watching the next day. Book it on the sky box, set the recorder for the right time, and it works fine. However, I can't figure out how to do this on the XW390, and have had to reinstate the old recorder in the meantime.

Question - does anyone with one of the new Panny DVD recorders (or Blu Ray recorders, it's probably the same) know whether/how timed recordings can be set from an external source? (Not from Freeview using the tuners - that's easy)

I feel a bit silly asking, but I have reached my frustration level with the manual etc.

Any help much appreciated.