(no subject)

[ravencallscrows]

A few weeks ago, we acquired a TiVo unit, courtesy of zaratyst and mholmesiv. It's a pretty damn neat gadget, which, for anyone not familiar with them, is basically a Linux box which is set up to digitize television and store that data to hard disk for later viewing. This particular one is even hacked with what amounts to a network interface, so with a length of CAT-5 it connects to our router and gets programme information courtesy of our broadband connexion, rather than having to use a telephone line and call out daily . It's even possible, since they use DHCP to obtain an IP address to get these little machines on the internet- i'm thinking seriously about doing so with this just to be able to connect to it from our main 'puter and copy recorded shows to CD-ROM (so that they're still around but not taking up space on the machine's hard drive). They even have some logic built in which allows the unit to attempt to figure out what sorts of things you watch and suggest- even record- things for you which may be of interest.

All in all, a pretty spiffy bit of technology.

There's one feature which they don't have, though, which i find to be annoying. With a VCR, you have a TV/VCR switch, so that you can record one show while watching another- basically using the VCR tuner to record one thing and the one in the TV to watch another. With TiVo, you can record a show while watching another pre-recorded show, but the facility to record one thing while watching another "live" show is absent.

Aye, there's the rub.

damashita was a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan while it was on. Now that BtVS has ended its run, she's watching Angel and Charmed, but hadn't followed either since inception. Both of these series have been on long enough that previous seasons are in syndication as well as still in production, so she's watching the current series and filling in the backstory from the reruns. It seems that there are at least three of each on daily. We record them all.

Personally, i'm not a Buffyista in the least. Yeah, Alyson Hannigan is sorta cute, and the original movie was funny- especially Donald Sutherland, but the series never did anything for me. The other two do even less- i'm more of a History Channel/Discovery/Food Network sort with tendancies toward The West Wing, Alias, MI-5, and Trading Spaces. Occasionally there's overlap. It'd be really nice to be able to not have to make the call between the two.

Help meeeeeee! I'm drowning in neo-horror paranormal camp comic drama.

Comments

[hottoastermama.livejournal.com]

Uh, oh. I have Jonah quoting you. He's running around the room going:

"Help meeeeeeeee!"

Now Rachel is doing it too:

"Help meeeeeeeeee!"

Ug. Maybe I won't let her move out with me. ;D

[mholmesiv.livejournal.com]

Well, I have a cable splitter that I used to hook the tivo and VCR up seperately. That way if Tivo was taping something and I wanted to watch something else, I could do so. (My TV has multiple inputs)

Dunno if this trick could help you.

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

Doh! Don't know why i didn't think of that....