Meet the DVR

The old videotape player that flashed 12:00 and nobody knew how to program is going the way of the black-and-white TV. There are now many ways to record TV so it's there when you want to watch it. And the recording process can be more or less automatic. And so the Duo take a look at what's been called the personal video recorder or, more commonly, digital video recorder--the DVR. A basic DVR amounts to a big hard drive in a box--and software that records TV shows onto that hard drive and plays them back from it.

The DVR has much to recommend it to the average, overscheduled American household. There are all sorts of cool things about it. First off, you can watch what you want when you want it. Need to step away for a minute? Put the program on hold. Miss a line of dialogue? Jump back a couple of seconds. You can pause live television, which Angela, for one, finds kind of mind-bending.

And you can skip commercials, which is wonderful for people such as the impatient Steve--though the networks and advertisers really hate that, so it's not as simple as it should be. Now, this is digital, so you're not messing with tape or rewinding or accidentally recording over theDeadwoodseason finale. These recorders use TV schedules they get over the Net or from the cable provider. That means you don't have to know when a show is on. You just find the show in the list and tell the machine to record it--just once, every time, or maybe only premieres, no reruns. In effect, you can create your ownLaw #00026 Orderchannel, ready whenever you are.

But what if you need to record a lot of stuff? With a VCR, of course, you just toss a new tape in the deck. If your DVR fills up, on the other hand, you have to delete stuff to record more. If you don't delete, something may be deleted for you. And a DVR is a poor place to keep an archive, since sooner or later that hard drive is going to die. There are ways to cheat some units to free up additional space. You can sometimes choose which quality you want to use for recording--lower quality taking up less space. But when they say "good, better, best," it's more like "awful, so-so, pretty good." Low-quality settings can be almost unwatchable.

There are also DVD-based recorders, which may appeal to people who want to amass a collection of a favorite show, but those are generally much harder to use than the recorders that use hard drives. They also tend to have crude interfaces and terrible manuals. But there are a few machines that come with both a hard drive and a DVD recorder, so you can let the hard drive manage the recording and then copy stuff you like to DVD later, and a few of those have the TiVo interface built in.

TiVo? DVR? No worries; the alphabet soup's less than meets the eye, as the Duo explain in the next segment.